Day 12 Visiting more families......

23rd September 2010

Up early to make further preparations and discuss our plan for today. We are visiting a few more families it will take approximately 1 hr to get there a Matatu ride and a 30min walk. We are taking a large bag of baby clothes, some food, a bottle and some formula.

We arrive at the first family to find the 22yr old mother has returned to her 2 week yrd old baby. I was handed the baby, she was so tiny hadn't been fed much since she was born and looked quite malnourished. I feel the tears in my eyes start to flow as I watch this poor little innocent soul so peaceful in my arms. It is hard to hand her back as I know her life ahead is so grim.  We sit with the mother for a while trying to establish what had happened, why she dumped her baby and what he problem is between her and the father. We unfortunately were unable to establish the full story but we at least were able to bring clothes and explain and give her formula. She is greatful we came and we leave with the plan to check up on them in a couple of days.

The next family we visit is a single mother who has 4 children and is HIV positive. We don't have much time to spend here but we will come back tomorrow and take some notes and try to work out how we can help this family and what the best thing is to do. We are concerned for the baby who is being breast fed when the mother has HIV. We tell them we will come back tomorrow and work out a plan which will hopefully make a difference to these people's lives and the future of this baby.

Our last stop is the grandmother of 2 children who were staying in the orphanage. There mother has some time ago now and the children don't want to stay at the orphanage or go to school. We have come to establish why they don't want to come back because the grandmother is unable to care for them. Simon won't tell us why he doesn't want to come back to the orphanage. He is quite disobedient and while we are there I witness the grandmother beat him with a stick really hard, I feel my heart rate pick up and get ready to intervene but Simon runs away and cowers in the corner. I stand up, turn to Martha to translate and forcefully ask her to explain what her reason is for doing what she did. Martha asks her to explain and then explains to me Simon is running away from school, threw away his school books and giving her a hard time and she is too old to take anymore misbehaving from him. We decide to leave and work out tonight the best thing to do with these children we think maybe Simon needs to realise how good he has it at the orphanage and that a couple of weeks there he will decide to come back where he is fed, loved and cared for.

We say goodbye and head back to the orphanage, we need to make it back in time to say goodbye to Nate, an American volunteer who has been there for about 6 weeks and is leaving to go back home.
It's a sad time for everyone when a volunteer leaves, we have all formed a bond and become close.
Byeeeee Nate :-(

Day 11 In the kitchen....Master chef style :-)

Wednesday 22rd September 2010

Elise and I are up and ready for our kitchen duty day. Grace is the cook and she is excited to have us help. Basically all our morning consists of is soughting good beans from bad beans and there is massive buckets which takes us hours to sought. Then we help out with the lunch dishes and prepare the spinach for dinner that has been picked fresh from the garden. There are about 50 mouths to feed so you could imagine the size of the pot we are using. We prepare the beans to ensure we aren't eating any rocks or beans with wholes in them from insects. It's a long process but with an ipod handy can be quite medatative.

After lunch a few volunteers arrive back and tell us about a family they have visited today who have a 2 week yrd old baby that has been dumped by it's mother. They have no money and no milk to feed the baby and the impression they got is they don't really care if the child dies. The volunteers pay the farmer nearby to supply a weeks worth for milk for the baby so it can survive in hope the mother returns if not we will have to rescue the baby and bring her to the orphanage. We make plans to visit tomorrow and we travel to the nearest supermarket and buy formula to take there for the baby, just in case. We also get together a big bag of baby  clothes we have to take to them.

We hope the mother returns so we are able to chat to her and for that poor little baby.......

Looks like we have another long, emotional but rewarding day ahead of us :-)

Day 10 Getting down and dirty......

Ok..... so I woke up this morning thinking I would go to the garden for a relaxing day, connect with mother earth and water some plants...WRONG! Today end up being hard farming work, knee deep in mud, we fertilized the whole plantation, manually hoed the ground ready to plant more tomatoes and spinach. Then we planted the seeds and watered by hand. It may not sound like much but it has to be the only day where the sun was directly on us and about 30 degrees and we got really dirty......

After a hard 5hrs in the sun we come to Kenol for lunch and a cold drink with Kally, stock up on the luxury's....chocolate and chill out for the afternoon reading a book until the children come home from school. Then it's all go from there... it's love, play time and homework :-)