Update!! Jambo!! a great week....in Mto Wa Mbu...and today in Mwanza, a beautiful town built up on hills circling around the massive Lake Victoria on the west side of Tanzania - the second largest fresh water body in the world. I am hot, soaking hot, but happy at an internet waiting for Matt, Charles, Lauren and Rose to fly in from Kilimanjaro - flying in happy, dazed and exhausted last night. Me, i took a local bus all the way across the wild and rugged terrain of Tanzania bumping along from Arusha to have an adventure, leaving yesterday at 7am, on what they said would be a 10 hour ride, which turned into 15 hours on the slowest local bus anyone has ever ridden. Miles and miles of African villages, mud huts held together by sticks cow dung, busy markets filled with bananas, cooking oil, bright plastic kitchen attire, hardware, socks, bright coloured cotton and satin dresses hooked onto wire hangers and squeezed into small top frames expanding into huge voluptuous hips, swinging and sache-ing next to plumbing poles and women stooped bent in half stirring pots of freshly made ugali over open fires. Pulled in with wild lightening and thunder, mvua sana, much rainfall, me, tired and very cranky by 10:30 last night. Rasta...a friend of Dula, who regales me all the way from Arusha with stories of Rasta beliefs, meets us at the bus station. Goodbye to Colliette my good German friend who spends two months every October in Mto Wa Mbu, awesome, working by herself traveling into four primary schools gathering lists of children desperately needing uniforms, shoes, sweaters. She hits the local markets with Dula, her Rasta translator, to buy clothing for 200 kids in the area with money she raises back home all year. She visits Majengo laden with 120 single bedsheets and 70 pairs of Masai shoes made by a shoemaker in the corner stall of the Masai market, the money a gift from a German company interested in working with someone who uses his hands. Masai shoes are made from rubber pieces cut with a small sharp knife, away from old tires. Everywhere she takes pictures of children with the new sheets and masai shoes, to take home, a record of what a few Euros can do here in Mto Wa Mbu...

Last week a government inspector makes a surprise visit to Majengo, a program social workers are performing all over the country to all children's homes. For 7 hours she questioned our staff, and me: what do we do when a guardian shows up abusing a child? how many beds do we have for 77 children? are our kitchens clean? do we have fire escapes and extinguishers? what education do our staff have? what are we doing to help them? On and on with questions..and a visit around the orphanage, through our three houses, which just last week painted clean and fresh, across the grounds past outdoor toilets and showers, to the big open dining room area with the cement floor and high thatched roof, electricity now, with four tables lined with happy healthy children squeezed along benches eating a sort of beef stew, greens, and rice, a banana on the side. All is well.
On that day i interviewed Zack who came recommended by the private English medium school down the road. He stays with his sister next door at the Catholic Mission, from Kenya, having just completed his teacher's certificate to teach English. I am ecstatic. It is perfect. We have been trying to find a good full time English teacher to help our kids and staff learn English, since we started. Hopefully, Zack is the answer. He comes the next day to work with our staff and teachers setting up a schedule and began the monumental task of teaching everyone English by January 2012. Every day, 8 hours a day!
Visited the director Anna and her principal Mr. Thomas at the nearby private English medium school, where all primary classes are taught totally in English. The kids there can speak well after only a few months in class. We set out an idea where we hope to enrol all 51 primary kids into Anna's school, this January. It has to do with loaning her money to finish the building of three new classrooms, and for this, getting a year free for our children, and two more at half price. Matt comes today, we shall talk it over, he will visit Anna and her school and we will decide. For me it is a great idea. I have loaned money here, through my People Living with HIV AIDS program, where, after one year, all four HIV AIDS groups of 80 people, almost all women, paid me back interest free, in full - but in shillings, not dollars. USD can't be transferred back from shillings except at an exhorbitant (sp) rate, up to 25%. So how do i get my money back in dollars? Almost impossible. But if we can funnel the shillings back into great programs for our children, it will cut costs on the USD sent over each month in accordance with our budget.
Win win on every side.
Promised Charles i would paint animals, fruit, graffiti, children on the walls on the outside of the office, with the kids...but with great trepidation. He has the walls left white for this endeavour, but the day i showed up someone had painted them brown...ack! what to do? We had all the kids draw animals, buses, airplanes, birds, and children on paper, which with a highlight marker, two of the older boys and I drew huge on the walls, on day one. Then, with a lot of help from enthusiastic and impatient kids, painted those images white again - all 77 kids swarming me and the freshly painted images and coming away slathered in white oil paint indelibly stuck onto fingers, faces and hair. I am dreading the next day's job of colour.

I am trying to think of a way where only two boys brighten up the images with colour, but how to do that with all these kids, curious, enthusiastic, desperately wanting to paint! I give up and mix colours into lots of small plastic containers, hand out sponge brushes, and watch them go at it. Mimi, mimi. Me me...!!! ME! they are all shouting, stampeding, the colours, the brushes falling on the dusty ground, a mess! I am drawing as fast as I can now, leaves coming up from the bottom of the office up and onto brightly coloured animals, everything dripping wet with paint, with kids vying for pots of green, blue, brown, orange and red, splashing and splattering it, they make them come alive.

Hamisi, the night security guard at my hostel who has been painting the walls on the inside of our main house all week, appears with a can of black paint and finishes off the job by painting the ledge along the bottom, covering up the splatters and drips.

It looks incredible!! All painted entirely by the kids. A great day. I walked home well after dark alongside the long main road, past vast expanse of rice fields blackened by the night sky, sprinkling with stars, so dark you can see nothing but for the flash of bicycles coming into view just in time to jump aside safely.

I visit the children at the nearby Pambazuko children's home along the way last week, passing Colliette taking Tabia, the mama of those children to the market to pick up needed kitchen supplies, they wave, as i head over to their house. The kids racing out to meet me, one of the joys of each time i visit Africa, these kids I have known now for 5 years...coming from the very first orphanage i volunteered with back then, so long ago. I know them well, especially Elia, Sifuni, Jackson, Ruth, Zack, Justin, Melania and Fabiola...my daughter Seanna and Sierra coming to Africa two times laden with art supplies teaching these children. They are loved and blessed. Tabia and her husband Elias are their mama and baba, with my Swedish friends Kerstin and Berndt now in charge of supporting the 14 kids here at Pambazuko. It is truly a lovely small family, and a good example of how children coming from many tribes, orphaned mostly by HIV AIDS, can come together in one small house and become brothers and sisters together, with a mama and baba. We hope someday soon, at Majengo to emulate this example there, with the 77 children we look after, creating a new facility encompassing a number of small houses, each with up to 14 kids, overseen by a mama and baba, if our dreams can come true.
I set up my computer and roll back to 2006, when i first met those kids waving outside the rickety orphanage along the safari route, Home Comfort. Photos, hundreds of them, of us on safari with those kids, painting with them, drawing, and my teaching them how to swim at the nearby tourist campsite swimming pool, every Saturday afternoon for two years, until they raised the prices, and rules encouraging 'whites only', where we no longer go. Watching the photos, the kids crowding around the computer, entranced. Memories of images of them spanning the last five years, beginning as little kids, and now healthy, strong, and tall.

Today begins my final week in Africa...with Matt coming with Rose and Lauren, with Charles flying in from Kili to Mwanza, where we visit an orphanage set up by Jamie and our team back at home, to learn and see what they have done to make their children's home a success. Then back to Arusha tomorrow, to visit three more, and on to Mto Wa Mbu...a week set up of budget review, visits to Majengo with big staff meetings, time with the children and Doris, our ICA director, meetings with government officials and visiting possible plots for our new facility. Always a whirwind when Matt arrives, I look forward to his laughter and jokes, his enthusiasm, his positive energies and good sense. Catch up next week!
Have a great one....!! Lynn