Gabriella performing the Elephant Dance
My typical day begins waking up at 5:30 to 5:45, getting dressed and then making my way to the Serengeti house in the dark to make breakfast. Breakfast consists of either Ugi which is a porridge type dish or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with a cup of milk (made from powdered milk) I alternate days with another volunteer, usually if you handle breakfast you dont do bathtime, however this is very fluid as I have found out lately. I wake the kids up and then start preparing breakfast. This gives the Mamas a chance to “sleep in”. All of the kids who go to school have to wear uniforms, so dressing in the morning is easy, getting them out of bed is quite another story. The boys are in one room and the girls in another and they each have their own bathroom. I have decided I need to have stock in a product called “Baby care” which is a Vaseline type substance they slather on their skin everyday to protect it from cracking. We go through cases of it! Everyone has to sit at the table and say prayer before they can eat. While they are eating I read off who has the morning chores from the schedule on the wall. Each child has a daily chore and they all do them without complaining, which I find amazing considering some of the chores. I then scoot everyone out of the house and all of the houses with school aged children gather at the office and we walk to school.
I then eat breakfast at 7:30 which consists of hard boiled eggs (already getting really old :) ), yogurt if we are lucky, bananas which seem to breed more and more fruit flies every day and dry white toast, which is more like crutons with jam. Honestly, all of the meals have been great, breakfast is the only one that leaves a little to be desired. I would kill for a glass of orange juice at this point! I then go to the office and work for a few hours until the kids come home from school. Lunch is at 12:30 then we have nap time and all of the adults nap too, we go back to work at 2:30 then at 4:15 I go to the house to prepare for bath time and the egg and bread snack they have every day at 4:30. As the older kids filter in from school, they go take a bath, slather on the baby care again and then sit down for egg and bread. It takes me forever to peel the eggs, but each kid gets a slice of homemade bread and a boiled egg with salt if they want it. A cup of water rounds out the snack. The mamas have these great propane stoves that NONE of them use except to boil water. Instead the cook on Jikos, which are steel pots they put charcoal in the center and then put a pot on top of it…all of which is outside on the porch. It is hysterical. All meals are cooked on these 2’ in diameter cookers on the porch. The kids do their chores and then have a movie until dinner at 6:30. After dinner it is time for a story then bedtime. The volunteers and staff have dinner at 7:30 and then I am usually ready to totally pass out by that time.
The little kids have preschool at the village and then seem to hang around our office until the big kids get home, so I try and play with them a lot as they keep coming in for a “ballie” or to help make paper airplanes. The current song that the preschoolers sing all of the time is “elephant, elephant” and it is hysterical. I am still not sure of all of the words to it, but they sure love to sing it.
The picture is of Gabriella doing the Elephant Dance!
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