Hi...\Overwhelmed with daily activities, it never stops lurching in high gear from one huge project to the next, but before a big hi and thanks for your emails, love to hear from you, Lindsey's movie shoot, the wonderful babies and all that snow stacked without dreams of removal, massive fires cooking Queen and Bathurst, Obama and Clinton neck to neck in a race of gender and colour, Mexican and Chilean holidays in the sun, successful surgeries and even something about the Leafs! So far away, so completely impossible to comprehend..renting the River House, the Art Retreat, wow!
But first, we are so busy, every single day, leaping from Masai villages, to schools, to HIV AIDS workhshops, with orphanage hospital checkups, to land surveying and purchase agreements! to a NEW ORPHANAGE! all my U.S. money stolen/ jail, release, Sierra's new diet of chipsies and Fanta and plain without sugar donuts, and on to this morning's safari with 30 kids....
Sierra and Seanna have taken Mto Wa Mbu with a storm! Especially Sierra! lots of white visitors racing briefly in big safari trucks sitting in the back seats without stopping, through dust and colour and everyday confusion across our little town, but each one much older and certainly not 7 years old with flowing dark hair, white skin fastly tanning and working everyday at the orphanage - a leaping, dancing girl with spirit, exhuberance, singing songs in English and Swahili! teaching hopscotch, art with paint, felt, tissue and skipping ropes that sing - dancing merrily, a veritable open, happy, and friendly Snow White - MAMBO, JAMBO to everyone they meet, she and her mom as they saunder through town, a child attached to each hand, girls on each side, arms interlocked and crossed at the back like they have known each other forever. A never-ending smattering of hello, goodbye, thank you! how are you and they are on their way. Everyone wants to touch this girl, her arms,her hair especially, the older women calling from plastic chairs and stools selling bananas and rice along the road, or the clusters of young boys who call themselves business men, hawking handfuls of bracelets, necklaces made from bone, beads,string, calling CANADA from every corner with more verve than even before! All day, everyday, without stopping.
This Girl. She doesn't eat eggs: boiled or omletted. Or the little rice buns called kitumbua we eat every morning; or the bitter spinich like greens next to rice and beans at lunch, dinner, or little hard-to-chew pieces of beef, goat, or chicken roasted and served on a big platter shared around the table; she doesn't like plantain or chai or chipsies mai-eye, a sort of fast food omlette made with precooked french fries mixed with scrambled eggs. No. She likes chipsies plain with bottles of Fanta, a cup of porriage Seanna brews every morning, a slice of stale donut smeared with Canada-brought peanut butter the only thing for protein - but only for 2 weeks, this feast of sugar and carb. No harm done.
Seanna is astonished by how quickly thing are accomplished here, and so am I. As always, Charles from ICA Tanzania is in the middle of those miracles. I wrote of little Martha, HIV positive oozing hands and feet, sores open, running nose, sick and sitting on Seanna's lap on Sunday - her first visit to the ORPHanage. We spoke to Charles that very night over ugali, a corn like creme-of-wheat staple which you role up into a ball in your right hand, make an indentation with your thumb into a spoon and scoop into vegetables or meat and sauce to be popped into your mouth....
The very next day, Monday, someone took her to the hospital for medication.
Tuesday an ICA home care worker visited the orphanage, two kids now positive under her care, not just for today, but for good: for regular monitoring, hospital visits, medication, for checking blood levels - all of this was done in two days.
On day three, Wednesday, we loaded 16 little kids into the back of Charles' truck at 8:30am, each one with a sample of pee and poo collected and labelled and stashed carefully into a clear plastic bag the likes of which Juliette and the two staff magically produced earlier, by lining the kids up as they rose sleepily from their beds and lead, one by one each to the toilet hole at the back of the orphanage. It was an astounding and stunning feat, the poo collected on paper and carefully spooned into a small cardboard matchbox, each child, one by one till you count to 16! I can't imagine how they did this. A match box, we asked? to which the doctor said, we use what we have, and it is all we have - once again a solution for every problem lacking, to what we take for granted back home.
Jammed with hair flying freely my girls illegally in Canada and squished in amongst the 16 others we arrive in fifteen minutes to the Government Free hospital for full out check-ups for every one of these kids - and all of this organized in the space of a day, this is how it is done here. As Seanna said it would have been three months waiting for appointments for five kids, let alone 16. Three hours later, with Sierra outside playing JUDICA SAYS (Judica the orphange director) we were out of there, with two testing mild malaria,a handful of pills and we are on our way...
Selela, a village of Masai set deep into the dry grassy turf of rolling hills and green brown valleys flanked on both sides by the massive hard and jagged rock of the Great Rift mountains...Selela, if i ever had another child i would call her this, its weekly market in full swing with hundreds of Masai women, children, old men and young haughty bedecked warriors sitting, lolling, loafing and playing, selling bananas, lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, everything and anything on the ground - beaded necklaces and bracelets strung up on large wooden panels, callabah gourds tanned and brightly polished decorated in strings of leather, beads and used as jugs to hold freshly milked cow or goat milk mixed with blood, drained from the throat of a cow with a sharp knife or bow and arrow in the right place, and once taken, clamped tight to heal. Seanna in the middle of a swarm of women, one removing the small silver earing from the pierce in her lobe, and then again unattaching a much larger and beaded in white, yellow, red, blue from the stretched hole from the huge hole in her own ear, measuring a good deal wider than that of a loonie, toonie back home. A hootenany of women, laughing, exclaiming and watching with wonder wrapped in purple and blue sheets as Seanna attaches her new earing onto her own ear, and for that matter an array of beaded necklaces around her neck - bartering, bantering, laughting widely and collecting a very large circle moving in and surrounding her.
We tuck into a restaurant of cow dung mixed with terra coloured earth, ash and stone; Masai warriors with spears roasting goat leg on a stick in the dark served on a small wooden table sliced into small pieces and shared.
Masai Girls Education fund....we've chosen to sponsor 6 girls safely ensconced and hiding out in secondary school, having run away from their families and predetermined marriages with much older men- their fees mounting and up until now, unpaid. Last week, in the Masai village of Engaruka two hours away, an active volcano erupting angrily from the bowels of the Oldonyo Lengoi mountain, the mountain of God, every five minutes and just two mountain tops away from the village, the community staging nightime ceremonies every week in an attemp for the Gods to make it stop. We choose another two girls - one who had been in school for six months but who had to leave due to lack of funds, and the second, a girl who had finished successfully one year and who, at her graduation of that year passed a note to a village elder concealing information than her father was planning marriage upon her return over the holiday for the price of 100 cows- a dowry which would curtail forever her education. In this note she beseached him to allow her refuge in the school over the following month holiday until school begins again.
After the goat, we are taken off main roads across tuffs of scrub and dry valleys to meet the family of another girl we are told needs financial help. She is at school, we learn, and are greeted by a sister cooking something over an open fire in her boma and looking after three tiny children of her own sitting outside in the dirt - a young girl herself barely out of her teens. Her own mother has passed; the father a farmer, poor, uneducated but one who values education for his daughter; the four sons out into the hills with a stick herding cows belonging to wealthier Masai; her two sisters gathering firewood for sale at the market. The stories wherever we go are similar and real and help is needed for these girls to continue schooling, to learn, to better themselves and eventually their community - to make changes they acknowledge which will eventually change some of the customs of the Masai community. It is an ongoing discussion, but these changes, or altercations, or shifts in cultural practice are needed in a society wrought with customs which ultimately may, likely, in the end, destroy them.
WE head out to the school to meet the sister of that girl, who is standing for a photograph with two others who ICA sponsors already: one will be a teacher; another a tv announcer, and my girl wants to be a doctor, who intends upon coming back after university and medical degree, and to work strongly with her own people.
Sponsorship - thanks to the many people who have donated and trusted me with money to bring back to Tanzania over the months I was in Canada between March and December adds up to a commitment towards 15 Masai girls beginning or furthering their education in Secondary School this year. Secondary school is for five years, the first year being the most expensive. The government funds Primary School for kids aged 7 up to about 14, but not secondary. The first year of Secondary will cost approximately $385. US funds. which will pay for bed, desk, uniforms, medical, transportation, food, books, etc...the following four years will be about $200 per year per child. By sponsoring these children, we have committed ourselves to keeping up the donation of funds until they reach high school or university level; and after that we hope to continue funding until their education is finished. It is a great goal, and commitment and as i see it, one of the concrete ways this country can move towards bettering the lives of its people.
Between the Masai girls education fund sponsorship, and the sponsoring of 16 little kids at the Home Comfort Orphanage in Mto Wa Mbu - some currently in primary school- the rest still in the orphanage...all the way through to university or beyond..it is a wonderful project, concrete and doable, and one of which i am certain i will discuss at great lengths to everyone and anyone who will listen! Beware!!
The Orphange NEW BUILDING PROJECT. Last week we met with two women from Australia, missionaries from Rotary, who are working in nearby Arusha, who visited our little orphange, one of whom cried upon viewing first-hand the facilities, the needs, the three-to-a-bed, the lack of facility, electricity - no classrooms, no proper kitchen, sink, fridge, toilet facilities, no playing area, no garden. We need desperately to expand, to find land, to build our own new orphanage - we must!
She collects the Pastor Neiman, and several other people, trustees from their international charitable group called Sinai...and brings them to Mto Wa mbu on Friday for a big meeting with our director Judika, the assitant director Juliette, another two volunteers, Charles for local advice and I. We take them around the Orpahange, the children all lined up at little desks and wearing royal blue sweaters sing their little welcoming song entitled WE ARE HAPPY. WE have two plots of land to show them, both out of town, both around an hectacre and a half and on flat land, but one is confused with ownership with poor drainage; we unanimously settle on the second one situated next to the Secondary school about two kil from the govt hospital and an easy half hour trot to the local primary school.
WE seek out the owner who wants 8 million Tanzanian shillings for this plot - a total of $8,000. U.S. Doable. We settle into lunch chairs inside a grove of banana trees at the back of Mi Casa restaurant on the third street away from the middle of town, and launch into the details of a major group decision: to form a partnership agreement between the orphanage directors and the Sinai group, and to begin the legal transference of land ownership to the ORPHANAGE.
WE have done it!
Pastor Neiman who is responsible for decisions for the Sinai group has given his approval; the Orphanage is ecstatic! we all raise a toast, shake hands and it is done!! The beginning, only the beginning, the hard work of raising the land money has begun this week; but in the months to come, the designing of the new buildings, with two classroom, separate dormitories to sleep 60 kids, dining areas inside and out, reception, offices, storage, kitchen and proper indoor toilet and shower facilities, if i have told you all this before, please skip over and forgive, i am just very happy!!
All of this will cost between about 50 to 80,000 US.
From this vantage point, doesn't seem like a lot, but maybe, coming home, it will be, but with all of us working on it , you never know!!
and what else!
Taking four big boys, age 8 to 12 swimming at the campground pool, with Sierra who can swim, they can't. They take a scary time to put their face even in the water to blow bubbles, but in a short time, five hours later, they are jumping and diving in, faces under and swimming!! I am standing in the pool arms outstretched to prevent them from leaping into the deep end...they love it so!! PIGGA PIGGa I shout, KICK!! and they do.
And today, in a big rented bus, 30 little kids trundling up the steep stairs, settling in, excited, we head out only a few miles away to the Lake Manyara National Park...for our very own safari!! Juliette our director and a teacher we brought along had never been on safari - the animals a short half hour away from the orphanage - with only 10 kids with great memories of last year's outing, the rest have never seen a giraffe, elephant, gizelle, zebra....any of it, all of it....
Sierra too, and Seanna....and tomorrow...off to stay in the Masai boma, for an overnight!! Chief brought his first wife in by bus yesterday for a ritual meeting of my girls, laden with beaded gifts and an invitation to his very large and royal chief's boma for a ceremony, -a roasted lambs leg as we are becoming used to goat, with a gulp of unpasteurized cows milk, mixed with blood which i have decided is not likely going to happen. Sierra is to choose her very own goat from his tribe, to be marked by branding with fire her initial in its ear and to be hers forever - a lady goat to have babies, to join the mother and baby boy goat given to me in honour last year by the Chief. She is needless to say very excited!!
The following i sort of dread. Sleeping overnight all night long in the dung hut called the boma, on top of a ledge of mud and stone covered in cow hide, together the three of us, in the dark, sharing with baby goats inside and small calves, a fire glowing in the middle, and, this part I shudder, with maybe tics, lice and bed bugs, i dont' know...I am bringing my yoga mat, a sheet, blanket and a can of Raid....
\In the morning, he has arranged a ceremony of sorts, with women, children, and arrogant warriors, Morani they are called, to sing and dance, and in the case of the Morani in full dress to jump high. Oh. My. Gawd!! with more later....
Is anyone reading this still?
Too long, four hours and the pictures not even ready to insert. Seanna and Sierra have gone swimming, have come back, written to Ted, and are expecting me for dinner right now in a small restaurant about a mile away...
The robbery...nasty, ongoing and my fault too for leaving hidden in my room the money in a small black pouch underneath pants and t-shirts on the bottom shelf of a little cabinet, for giving the two cleaners my key and being gone all day.....both were arrested and put for four days separately into tiny wooden jail cages - without bed, without toilet, a pot in the corner a dark mud room, locked tight. Both were let out together because I couldn't deal with it. Otherwise court, a few months in jail, arrest, interrogation, torture. all of it.
WE knew who did it. She was sacked. The other, a young, quiet and shy boy stayed on, with me apologizing, being so nice and feeling terrible for it all.
A week later we discover, he is a rich man this boy who cleans for my guest house, a new tv new radio blaster, new bed, cabinet and shoes. The doctor who owns my house, collected the stuff with receipts rehires the girl falsely accused who returns defiantly and angrily, the boy vanishes and the sorry plot continues.............
Hours later...goodnight!!!
