Kilimanjaro Airport: Seanna and Sierra arrived Saturday night! Incredible to see them, excited, wound up after two days travelling, Toronto to Amsterdam - 8 hours, a bit of a wait and on to Kili for another 8 hours. Charles driving, with me, his wife Grace and baby David and S and S and all the bags stuffed into the back of the truck, Arusha town overnight at the AM hotel, breakfast and a good hike around the huge bus terminal - a wild and gleeful cacophany of sound, colour, smells, big hot smelly rubber tires, busses dressed up to look like circus caravans, 'I LOVE JESUS!', 'GOD IS HERE!' stark and slashed in big letters across the front, sides, back, simba, giraffe, elephant, stipes, polka dots erupting JAMBO!! Habare! and little Sierra aged 7 learning MOMBO! and POA! How's it going? Good! and very cool and way faster than her language-challenged but still trying very hard, pole pole slowly grand mama and we are on our way, past the huge white Tribunal headquarters for the 12 year or so long Rwanda Trials wrapping up, past the great rows of yellow flowering trees, slum stall after stall selling furniture being made, their first glimpse of women wrapped in exhuberant colour balancing pots, buckets, huge bags, boxes on their heads, babies strapped onto backs, cooking cobbed corn over little fires juiced by wood, keroscene, oil, husky men in never been washed, dusty and oversized western shirts and pants pushing huge wooden carts like wheel barrels carrying sofas, lumber, wood, anything and everything, with cars and trucks and buses and bikes swerving and honking moving fast in and out with walking and running people moving alone and in groups along avenues flanked with footward - boot after boot lined up in a row one after the other with its mate precariously balanced atop, a fake leather pyramid of shoeware without feet, second hand from America, Europe, Asia, heels, toes, hiking, running, jogging and walking, beside hardware, tall and wide portable walls standing upright with wheels pushed along laden heavily with everything a traveller may or may not want, trashy, flashlights, hair rollers, sox, t-shirts, towels, bags of chips, chewing gum, boiled eggs, kitumbua little rice buns fried like golden greasy muffins...my mind is racing....

The first day i have been able to get at this blog...each day I am sitting in this chair in the brand new internet cafe owned by Jusef who is often not here and therefore with a big unwanted sign outside saying in English CLOSED. I am spending my days writing the text for the brand new orphanage website, hours and hours everyday when Jusef is not gone to Arusha to deal with politicians and beurocrats who he says are harassing him because of his new successful business.

I am photographing the kids and interviewing the director about each child, the stories heartbreaking each one of them, frightening and terrifying little backgrounds of immense loss, abuse, hunger, physical destruction, hopes and little lives destroyed by HIV AIDS, mental illness, poverty - no women's rights; no children's rights and surely, no one caring. Hundreds of stories in this little town by itself, and multiplied by a million times over across Africa and all over the planet, but for me a wee microcasm (sp! oh dear! trying out many versions, but no spell check) of life...small fables. The mother tested positive, the father irate and enraged, he who is positive himself, he who brings in the disease, he who won't get tested and he whom moves on from one to another. The children standing by watching his rage as he hacks off her hands around the wrists both of them, bleeding, crying, wailing in silence - with no one to help. Helpless and Hopeless. Those two. The father running away. Brothers and sisters shouting to uncles, aunties, neighbours, friends, anyone to help - mama rushing to the hospital, little ones rushing to somewhere, no mama no papa, scared and alone with homes destroyed, gone. Or maybe wrapped up in a blanket and left in a church doorway, the pastor taking her in and giving her his name, and some years later, beautiful little she arrives at this Orphanage alone.

Stories, like these, one after the next. Pictures, instant photographs of bright, smiling faces, huge grinning eyes laughing because we are taking picture, because someone cares, because someone is holding, hugging, ruffling in their fingers their short twisty hair, running a warm hand down their back scratching, holding little fingers - laughing, watching, needing, singing, jumping, playing just like one huge family of pain all hugging together and trying to forget.

My God it is indescribable.

The woman, another Lynn, from Australia with a Mission working in Arusha crying barely able to speak, telling her pastor of what she saw in this little orphanage in Mto Wa Mbu, blurting out in gulps, 22 children swarming little ones no whining or wailing, dressed in well-washed rags with holes and tears, pushed in and cramped side by side along long benches inside one hot and small classroom made of cement.

We meet in Arusha, eating good Indian food over a round table of five people to plan a new Orphanage. Land, buildings, budgets, contract coordinators, timelines, fundraising among sag, paneer, nam, chicken, herbs and basmati which costs what one child eats at the Orphanage for one year and we move along.

You can't change your life, everything of the way you live. You can't change the way the world works, the way the world is. You don't stop eating good food, wine, beer, you wear nice clothes that you launder and change everyday, you get your hair cut, or curled or coloured and you stay in a nice place with hot and cold running water, with your own real toilet and not a smelly round hole in the ground swarmed with mosquitoes, infecting flies.
I took Elia to the pool in the campground where the safari tourists stay, to the washroom for him to change into his bathing suit - shorts of sorts, thread bare over a pair of grey underwear; when he finished he called me back in, and with a split second gesture of should he throw the jeans he's been wearing and the t shirt he is clutching into his arms into the toilet -a place of water, a place where maybe they get washed? Or not?

He'd never seen a toilet before.

The Elia story: His mother and father died of HIV AIDS. His brother and sister were taken away by an uncle who couldn't take three, he was the little one who stayed with the grandfather, no grandmother, no employment, no means to raise a little boy...his personal two-sided one page history tucked amongst the others in the blue three ringed binder in the office understates, in a few lines, 'lived in difficult conditions' only. One can only imagine what this means, beatings, whippings, hunger, survival, until he somehow reaches the Orphanage at age 6, the oldest at that time - a strong and sturdy little leader boy who never cries.

Land here. WE are on the lookout for new land. A plot. A new Orphanage. WE are excited by a plot a few over from the orphange, great location near the school and hospital, large and open without a building. Seemingly, a miracle until the sage begins. The owner. Large, pushy, mean. The pressure to buy, now! this very week at the latest! The cost swoops from 21 million ($21,000 US money)down another 5 million, and all in a couple of days, we are elated. I take Charles over and a woman calls him from her car. Are you buying that land? she wonders, and if you are, don't!! The guy selling it, this bully, doesn't own it! A woman does, whose husband left it to her, but this guy rearranged the papers with the underhand passing of shillings to the village council, broke it up into plots and sold it as his own. Court feud, fighting, squalling, stalemate. She has the papers; he has the trussed up deeds; he will sell; she won't, ever, so we move on.
To another plot without drainage, swampy and now filled with garbage to suck moisture, stinky, smelly, polluted and no.
Another piece out of town, three miles from school and hospital.
And this one,
To be continued...........

Sierra taking the Orphanage by storm Sunday afternoon....and every day since. 35 little kids entranced, she looks like SNOW WHITE with winter white skin and long silky hair snarled and twisted, but dark and flowing....running to and fro, with six kids on each finger, the boys holding back watching in wonder. She takes over with big pieces of chalk on her own, racing outside and drawing a hopscotch on the cement porch walkway, throws the stone and hops, a troop holding their breath and then a cheer! Everyone clamoring to try. Covered in children, sitting on the scrubby grass under a tree, the boys climbing the branches high and showing off, calling 'head and shoulders, knees and toes', English, a way of communication, she has learned the Swahili words, she leads a song.
I am simply blown away!
I don't know this girl of mine.
We lie in bed; i read her stories. We draw pictures, we plan tomorrow's class.
Seanna, her mom and the best mom a girl could ever have, my BINTI WANGU..my daughter, beaming, proud, a history of teaching kids with Regent Park's very poor and deprived, politically correctly called and labelled 'disenfranchized' in that newly renovated section of town...fresh off 16 years of directing ART HEART- these stories in Africa not a stranger, known well to her. She digs in, this family of mine, both of them, every afternoon at 2 oclock sharp and laden with art supplies, glue, felt, sizzors, gold paint in little plastic tubes to squeeze out above stuck on eyes, noses, mouths, for wiggly hair- they made puppets yesterday to near hysteria and glee.

Sierra lying up high on the freshly carpentered brand new bunk bed in the girl's dorm, lined up on her tummy with seven little girls laughting....two brand new and just delivered bunk beds in each room, totaling six beds for 9 kids freshly labelled and named, and for the big girls at least for the first time in two years - a bed of ones own.

Seanna sitting outside on the cement runway in the sweltering afternoon sun covered in children with the one little HIV AIDS positive child ensconsed deeply and forever welded onside and inside and onto her lap, the lesions on her arms, legs, mean with more than a few open ....we cover them with bandages marking her with stigma as she holds herself back from the other children- nose running and a little feverish, yet content in Seanna's careful arms.

Later we ask Charles, what to do about this girl? How easily can HIV AIDS transmit? Through saliva? through a running nose? Through food, water? Through leaking liasions? None of that. Not at all, except with the liaisons, IF and only IF another person with open and bleeding wounds, cuts, sores rubs up against her, and by nature she is staying away. Not with food, not with water, not with even sharing the same cup. But with toothbrushes, yes, if there is a sore in the mouth, an open cut; each child here with their own cup, toothbrush, towel in their own cubbyhole shelf.

The next day she is taken to the hospital, her white blood count is still high, a test called CR 4....they administer ARVs, anti retroviral drugs only when the CR4 blood count dives low, but this girl is not there yet. They give her medicine and she is sent home.

My organization here, ICA works with HIV AIDS in adults, children, testing, teaching, educating, counselling, seemingly the only group in the area active and making a huge difference. Charles just called while i am writing, assigning and driving a home care worker to the orphanage to take over the responsibility of monitoring this girl.....her very own nurse to watch over her, to take her to the hospital and most importantly, to teach the staff and the kids about HIV AIDS, hygenene, prevention.
Each day is different.
We move along.
Got to run...back soon! and whomever is out there, thanks for reading!!

Oh!! and ps....this first picture is of Timothy who is 7, the same age as Sierra who is in Grade 2 in Canada. Timothy can't reach his hand up and all the way over his head to touch the tip of his ear with his fingers, a test given to childfren all over Africa to test age and enrollment for school. Timothy therefore is prevented once again from beginning school this year....

and the second picture...

Beautiful inside and out, Juliette
the assistant director sitting outside the Orphanage every afternoon as the children who can touch their ears come home from school, checking exercise books and homework, exclaiming on marks, and giving great encouragement.