New Pictures, and a long post :)

So everyone keeps asking in what ways they can help me out over here. Let me start by saying THANK YOU so much for the offers, I appreciate it. Unfortunately I cannot receive care packages but flat mail is great. If you can send a CD with children's church or gospel songs on it, that is flat and would be great!!! The kids like to sing and we do have a CD player.

I cannot think of much else people can do for me - but if you want to help the children, the best way to do this is sponsoring a child outside of the orphanage. I am working currently to try and organize the sponsorship program better so I will post information on this soon.

As for helping the kids out with medicine for de-worming, this is really difficult to do because we don't know exactly the cost of the medicine and what everyone needs. I will certainly post that information when I have it.

Now onto more important stuff....Its been nearly a week since I have updated! After my weekend in Thika, I did not feel it was necessary to get back online for a few days so I waited until today. Thika was alright – crowded and dirty and overwhelming – but fun and nice to get away from the orphanage for a couple of days and nights. I was able to get some office supplies to help me organizing the microfinance binder, which I have almost completed. Tuesday, we went to the doctor to get all of the test results for the children – each of them has worms or amoebas in their stomach. It is likely from the fruit that we eat, we pick it right off of the trees. Some of them must go in for further testing, as they may have malaria or typhoid. I’m not sure how WWB plans to pay for the medicine to get rid of the worms (they will need to administer de-worming tablets every 3 or 6 months to all kids and staff, or else stop them eating fruit entirely).

Yesterday we went to Nairobi to visit the Children’s Garden Home, another orphanage outside of a slum in Nairobi. My old roommate, Stella, worked there for a week towards the middle of her stay and had such a wonderful time when she stayed so she encouraged us to visit to get an idea of what other orphanages are like. The Children’s Garden is a far cry from Watoto Wa Baraka. I am going to try to explain it as best as I can – I was not allowed to take pictures there so I want to write it all down.

We take a matatu from Pundamilia into Nairobi, where we meet Stella, and she shows us to a bus that will take us to the slum. The bus drives us through one of the wealthier areas of Nairobi, which is probably like middle-class America. There are nice apartments surrounded by massive stone walls covered in barbed wire. This is definitely still the developing world but the region is nice and I would be comfortable living there. But suddenly the scenery changes abruptly – the nice homes are gone and replaced immediately with small store-fronts made of sticks and corrugated metal roofing (basically, these are standard all over the rural areas where I am but they were less in Nairobi, except on the outskirts). The road becomes dirt and there is standing water in pools all over the place. We get off the bus and walk through the slum.

I want to add here – this was the business part of the slum and thus I did not see the residential area. However, I have to note that this slum did not seem as bad as one of the “nicer” townships in South Africa, where homes were made of pieces of plywood, one family into a box the size of an SUV. So while I would not say that this slum was a nice place, it was certainly nicer than slums in one of the most developed, if not the most, countries in Africa.

Okay, so back to today. We walk from the bus to the orphanage, which is actually right outside of the slum. The orphanage has a tall, 4-story building that houses dormitories for the 200 children that live there. The building is adequate, with limited electricity and no running water but many beds and rooms for the kids. Out back is a large field for soccer and basketball, some latrines, and a large hall where the kids do dancing and singing and recreational activities. They also have a dining hall where the children eat, and one cow to give milk to the small babies. Next to the rec hall, they have the school – the orphanage hires teachers and thus has its own school. This helps cut costs because they decided together to not require uniforms and they can also reuse the books easily.

The children range in age from babies (several months) to 16 or 17 years old. They have kids in primary school (standard 1 through 8) and kids in high school (four years, form 1 and form 2). The kids are plucked from the streets, where many have fled from physical and sexual abuse, or simply poverty. Some of the girls were prostitutes and many of them are HIV positive. When we arrived, there was a stark difference in the way the staff welcomed us to the orphanage. They explained that the kids were in desperate need of a mother and father figure, that many of them have heartbreaking stories to tell and that with time they would open up to us and embrace us with their stories. They emphasized several times that the children need guidance from adults desperately.

At WWB, the focus was more on the various chores and work we would be doing (rather than spending time with the children) and there was no mention of acting as a role model for the kids, but instead more as a friend to play with sometimes. To me, it seemed that at Children’s Garden, the staff and volunteers focused on the children – they organized sports teams, they competed in African dance and drumming, they emphasized the role we could play as mother or father to these children…they do not have volunteers working outside of the orphanage in field work, either. At WWB the emphasis was on how we help the orphanage and the Makuyu community – with the money we gave, the chores we participate in, the field work or outside work, etc. I think this is partially because it is a more rural community and thus the kids did not come from the streets. Now, the children at Watoto Wa Baraka have had hard lives – their parents have died of HIV or other diseases like typhoid – but their lives are so much easier than the kids who grow up on the streets. Street kids have had to grow up fast; they have seen things that the average person only sees on TV or in movies. So I understand the stronger focus on working with the children directly. However, the stark difference from WWB further cements some of the feelings WWB volunteers have (namely that we are more like a walking bank than someone who is really going to make a difference in the children’s lives). I say this not to criticize WWB but merely to highlight one of the significant reasons that WWB and many NGOs may face funding problems: they treat their donors and their lifeblood like moneybags and are less focused on doing good work than they are on raising money. WWB does do good work – they have helped many many kids and families in this area – so again, this is not to criticize but instead to simply note a huge difference.

While I am content to stay at WWB, I love the children and I am enjoying my time more and more each day, it is evident that the children at the Nairobi orphanage stand to benefit far more from donors money and from volunteers. If I ever choose to return to Kenya for something like this, I will work there instead of at WWB. I am even considering spending a week there towards the end of my stay.

My time in Kenya seems to be moving faster than I realized. Each day feels like a lifetime, but even so, I am suddenly to the 3-week mark and realize I only have 8 weeks left. I already feel like a local sometimes – when we saw mzungus in Thika this weekend, we pointed and gawked, haha. But of course I am mzungu and that fact immediately makes me an “other” in the eyes of Kenyans.

There are so many things here I already know I will miss – the children, of course, their sweet laughter and smiling faces, and their ignorance of the world around them – there is something spectacular about children who do not know television or Barbie or McDonalds, who do not know what they are “missing out on” so to speak. I’ll miss the long and often hilarious conversations with Eric about politics and religion and development and how he sees all of these things in such a different light than me. Our very simple desires – for people to be free and prosperous – mean very different things for each of us. But we both agree that we want people to be happy. I’ll miss the calm of the countryside early in the morning…even with the cows, pigs, roosters, and the sound of the children in the morning, it still feels so calm here when we wake up. Mornings are my favorite time here, when it is still chilly enough to see your breath and you sip on hot chai and watch the haze melt away over the countryside. This area is relatively flat, green and brown grasses and bushes cover the ground, and the earth is red…it is not beautiful in a traditional sense but the beauty overwhelms you in some way. It’s the people of Kenya against this backdrop – the women in their traditional wraps of beautiful bright colors, often carrying a baby or a massive bundle of grass or sticks on their backs – the precious babies who laugh and giggle no matter what language you speak – the children in their school uniforms, whose high pitched voices yell “How are YOU?” every time they see mzungus walking through the village – drunk men in Makuyu on Sunday afternoons who react wildly to seeing white girls bargain at the market – the constant smiling and waving and greeting that you receive (mzungu or not) from every person you pass – these are the scenes that create beauty in Kenya, that hide the shack homes, the barefoot children, the flies, the dust, and the smell of burning trash that pervades everything.

I realize this is a long post but I feel like I’m finally “getting it” and understanding that my purpose here may not be to create real change, but instead simply to absorb, to learn and to experience a different world. Only when I gain this understanding is it worthwhile to try and make changes happen for people.

Thanks for reading!