Sunday...a day of lesisure? HA!

Typically, Sunday at the Rift Valley Children’s Village, is an off day for all of the volunteers. 99% of the volunteers take this opportunity to blow this popsicle stand for the day and most of them actually leave Saturday night to receive the full benefit of a day off. Currently I don’t have the funds to take this time off so I “choose” to stay here and spend my day off with the kids, reading in a leisurely manner on India’s veranda etc… Now don’t get me wrong, I am happier than I have been in years and love it here, however being around 55 kids, 7 days a week, week after week, can wear on a poor 48 year old's body and soul. Trust me; I was grateful when I came down with strep throat and 102 degrees of fever last week as I had to stay in bed for the day. For everyone to get a true picture of my “leisurely” Sunday I will run through my day last Sunday.

6:30am wake up – We get to “sleep in” because it is not a school day. HELLO?!!! Sleep in?? 6:30am is not exactly my idea of an ideal wake up time. After I roll out of bed, I go wake up all of the kids in my house and then remembered I had promised to make them French Toast for breakfast. They had never heard of it before so I thought it would be fun while I still have access to a kitchen. First I gather the eggs from the pantry (apparently you don’t need to refrigerate eggs in TZ??) I then “make” the milk from powder where the instructions are in Swahili so I just keep adding powder and water till it looks like a cross between whole and skim milk. I then grate a cinnamon stick (never have done that before!), reach for the Blue Band (TZ’s version of margarine, which by the way they don’t refrigerate either) whip it all together and serve! It was a hit needless to say.

7:15am strip all of the beds, gather all backpacks, shoes and clothes and then dump them over the railing into the grass which is actually mud now due to it being the rainy season. This begins the washing of the clothes etc…which honestly takes hours in buckets of water outside. Each kid washes their sheets, clothes, shoes and backpacks. Once every two weeks they wash their blankets. It is amazing anything lasts very long as they scrub the hell of each article of clothing. No wonder I have holes in all of my clothes!

8:00am After everyone has their clothes/sheets in the buckets to soak, they change clothes and go to church in the Rec hall. I go up the hill to the office to check in with everyone. There is a flurry of activity with Mamas wanting to sign forms and get money for the days off, drivers wanting money for shopping, sick kids everywhere needing to be looked at and the Minister who needs his weekly “donation” for the Sunday service. After an hour and a half in the office, I walk back home to rest and relax for a while. As I slowly approach the house, I start to smell something awful, the closer I get the stronger it gets. In fact it is an overwhelming stench of discusting proportions a cross between rotten meat and carrion. At this point I cover my nose and mouth with my shirt and rush in the house. The kids are doing their chores with their hands over their mouths. I keep screaming “What is it, what is that horrible smell??!!” The cook/housekeeper is nowhere in sight, but as I enter the kitchen, I start dry heaving, the stench is so bad.

Dare I look in the pot on the stove that is boiling? Of course I do and it is apparent that we are having goat stew for dinner. (I use the term “we” loosely as I am not about to eat goat stew) The skin of the goat is still on this nasty ass meat boiling in water not to mention it is ROTTEN! I scream out the door for Catherine (the cook) barely able to catch my breath, the kids at this point are all gagging literally. Catherine runs up the stairs and I tell her to take this nasty meat and throw it away, and I mean AWAY. Over the hill and over the fence. Nowhere near this house. She starts gagging at this point, so I have a feeling she understands my point. Not sure how the meat got in the pot without her noticing the horrible stench, but clearly when you boil rotten meat, it festers and really becomes disgusting.

I then volunteered to cook dinner for the kids. I decided to make something easy like spaghetti and meatballs with red sauce and garlic bread. HA! I have made red sauce from “scratch” before, but I realized that my definition of from scratch and the TZ way of scratch is two totally different things.

I went to the garden and picked a ton of tomatoes, fresh basil and then proceeded to chop up the tomatoes for the sauce. Finally got the sauce on the stove after an hour of slicing and dicing. I started to make breadcrumbs from scratch, so I thought I would toast the bread. Riziki a wonderful 13 year old girl in the house had been helping me and she offered to light the oven. About 10 minutes later I opened up the over and it wasn’t hot, so Catherine came over to light the stove and as she is striking the match she says “ Oh, the gas has been on already” Just as I scream NO! DON’T STRIKE THAT MATCH!!! She does and WHOOOOMMMP! This massive fireball blew out of the oven. Ahhhhhhhhh! It was over in a second, I am asking Riziki and Catherine are they Ok? Are they hurt? Riziki just was standing there with her hand over her mouth in shock. Catherine’s response was “Oh my lord” Luckily everyone was fine, a few lost eyebrows, but not much else. The rest of dinner was pretty uneventful, took forever to cook, but tasted great and the kids loved it.

When the day was over, I hadn’t read a page, nor had I taken a nap, but I had a great day! A few minor catastrophes, nothing major and we all made it through, however relaxing is just about the last adjective I would use to describe it…but fun and fulfilling....definitely!

Passing the time....Tanzanian Style!

The children at the Rift Valley Children’s Village do not have a lot of toys and never watch TV, so what do they do with their spare time? Play! They come up with very ingenious ways to use natural materials and make games up. One of the games they play that is similar to one I played is a kid is hopscotch, they draw in the dirt and use a rock for the marker, but they play all of the way through by kicking the stone with their foot. Hard to explain, easy to play :)

The other game is a modified Jacks type game, they dig a little whole in the ground and place pebbles in the whole, they then throw up another stone and take stones out of the whole as fast as they can before the stone they threw falls down. Again….hard to explain, but very creative. The girls will play this game for hours literally on the weekends when there isn’t any school.

Soccer of course is the most popular boys sport and they play it with gusto. They even have drills before each “game” I have put a few pictures of them practicing, which can be very cute.

Smiling Children :)

I am asked over and over “Are the kids really as happy as they appear?” Believe it or not, these children are very, very happy. They are also incredibly stoic and very rarely cry even when seriously hurt. The only children you ever hear cry are the toddlers who just arrived at the village in January and they are also 2 and 3 years old and tend to cry when someone takes a toy or if they fall down.

The other children really laugh and play a lot. I feel that they are so grateful to have such a wonderful life after coming from such traumatic backgrounds that everyday is a good day. We have a couple of 13 year olds who are starting to show teenage behavior, but even then if you say to them “Why are you pouting, come on give me a smile” they usually will crack up.

Most of the children are very tough and very resilient. The boys’ soccer team had a game in Oldeani a few weeks ago and they walked there which is a two hour walk, played the game which was about 2 hours then walked home. Most of them had forgotten to bring their water bottles and it was hot as all get out, but I didn’t hear one complaint, whine or protest from one child out of 40. It was amazing! I do not know of any children in the US who would have made the two hour walk without complaining, much less play a soccer game and then walk back another two hours in the dark.

So…the answer is YES, these kids actually do love to smile and they do smile a lot! I am so grateful to be part of an organization that nurtures and takes care of the children so well that they are happy most if not all of the time and even if they become upset it never lasts very long. I personally have laughed and smiled more in the last three months than I have in years, it is totally contagious and I love it!

So here are some pictures of the happy kids at the Rift Valley Children's Village...not posed, just having a great time!

Safari at lake Manyara

I actually went on Safari last weekend to Lake Manyara which is about 45 minutes from Karatu, which is about 45 mins from the children's village. The lake is a soda lake and has been dry up until this past month when the long rains have now helped fill it up. The lesson I learned from this safari is that sometimes you DEFINITELY get what you pay for....

Three of the volunteers and myself wanted to save money and so instead of hiring a safari company to take us to Lake Manyara we decided to hire Freddy, a driver from around here who said he was a guide. HA! Well, he was cheap and we did make it home alive and that is about all I can say on a positive note.

I had my first clue that there might be an issue when we stopped in Umtuwambu to shop and had to have the truck jumped so we could go to lunch. We were shopping at the local Masai market, which was very cool by the way...side note...I found a great necklace that I wanted but it was 35,000 shillings, the guy who owned the little store/whole in the wall, liked my socks so I told him I would give him my socks and 15,000 shillings for the necklace and he took it! NOW that is a deal! I pulled off my dirty anklets, gave him the 15,000 shillings and got a gift, (pronounced jift) of a coke on top of it. What a bargain.

Anyway, Freddie asked me to borrow 22,000 shillings to get the car fixed and we could deduct it from his fee...so I am fine, give him the money and we move on. He came to pick us up at the hotel the next morning, and we are off for our safari. The first three stops we made in the park to look at the baboons, elephants and cape buffalo, we had to pop the clutch to get the car started i.e. roll down the hill or push! After seeing the cape buffalo I advised Freddy to PLEASE not stop the car again as I didnt want to get stuck with Cape Buffalo all around. So...he proceeds to the Hippo pond where the car dies with the river to the left of us and the dense bush to the right of the road. We are on this little narrow strip of road and Freddy is trying to turn the car over and I can tell the battery is totally dying so I advised him to stop, lets push and pop the clutch again. I am in the front seat and Freddy with mild alarm says get out of the car...I notice smoke wafting out from under the truck and then next it starts pouring out from under the hood. I yelled at the girls to get out of the truck! I open my door to a huge Acacia bush go to the left and I have massive thorns in my body, to the right i could blow up. Mean time, Freddy is now standing on the hood of the car jumping up and down trying to get the hood unlatched. I made a dash through the acacia thorns got the girls out of the car and am screaming at Freddy asking where an emergency number is....(as he is jumping) he says we no need number I have a radio! I said if the freaking car blows up, the RADIO wont work...HELLO. Oh, Pole (sorry) he says, no emergency number.

The girls meanwhile have their backs together in a triangle watching their section for wild animals as Freddy and I are pouring water on the fire in the truck. We put the fire out, however I am not really sure the car is safe, however figure it is safer than being eaten by a hippo or charged by a cape buffalo. At this point the girls started screaming because they heard a low growl, which luckily turned out to be another car :) They gave us a push and we were off.

I told Freddy he was DEAD if he stopped the engine again.

We had a wonderful day, saw lots of elephants and then stopped to look at a huge herd with several babies. At one point we are literally surrounded by elephants. I am a little wary having been charged by a mother elephant in Kenya 25 years ago, so I am looking in all directions. Freddy however, has opened the door, propped his leg on the window and is texting someone, totally unaware of any danger. Unbelievable.

I am watching the Matriarch of the bunch as she is about 8 feet from our car and giving us the evil eye, meanwhile, Taylor is in the back of the truck watching a mom and baby walk towards our car. The next thing I know taylor is inside the car in a panicked voice saying "should she be stomping her feet like that??" I look back and the mama is giving us the initial fake charge warning and is literally 2 feet from our tailgate. I, once again, screamed at Freddy to get his ass moving....NOW!!!! As the mama elephant is charging towards us we leave her in a semi cloud of dust. I could go on and on, but those are two of the highlights, other than the massive bruises I have on the side of my body from hitting the top hatch while driving and standing up everything turned out well and we are alive.

Moral to the story is that SOMETIMES it is better to pay a little more when your life is on the line :)