First Day in the Village

We woke up around 7:45 today to begin getting ready for the day. Our normal house Mama, Upendo, is currently sick and needed to go to the hospital today, so it was up to us to make our own breakfast. Everyone was coming over to our place at 9 to get started with our tour of the NGO. After eating toast and boiled eggs and drinking chai, we were ready to begin the day. We started off our tour by going to the school building that is currently under construction with no funds for it. When the funds are there, it will be completed and it will function as a school building. One room with be the nursery for children 8 months-18 months. The next room will be for 18 months to 3 years, and the last room will serve as a kindergarten. They hope to place 30 kids in that kindergarten classroom as well as 30 in the other kindergarten classroom. We then continued on to the current Montessori Kindergarten classroom, where I will be working! All the kids were so interested in us and I really enjoyed being there. I can’t wait to start tomorrow. They have a lot of good material for the kids to work with, but are currently in desperate need for more science and culture material. Outside the classroom, there is a playground that is in honor of the first young girl that died at the NGO. At the age of only 11, this young girl had lost both of her parents to HIV. She realized that from time to time, she herself was getting sick. She wasn’t living in a good situation. She was living with a step grandmother who wasn’t really helpful to her. So this young girl took it upon herself to walk 15 kilometers from her house all the way to the NGO to ask for help. She was only 11, but spoke like she was an adult. She told of her parents passing of HIV and how she was sick from time to time and she thought she needed to be tested for HIV so she could know if she had it. She did indeed have it and Jenny said that she became the most stigmatized child she has ever known with HIV. No one wanted to touch her and no kids wanted to play with her. She wasn’t getting the treatment she needed at her grandmothers house, and one time when Jenny went out there she came out crying and begging for her to take her because she had no friends left and no one would play with her. So the girl ended up coming to live at the NGO, where she met for the first time other kids that were living with HIV. For a while, she was doing well, but one weekend when Jenny and Geoff went out of town, the girl was beginning to get sick. When they came back, she was immobile in bed. They rushed her to the hospital and it was found that she had a CB4 count of only 2. Normal people have a CB4 count of 1,500-2,000. She was very sick. She did end up getting better and was even walking around again. However, with an immune system that low, she got sick again and ended up passing away. They built a playground in honor of her and have plans to expand the playground. Listening to the story definitely made me tear up. 11 year olds are still little kids and I can’t imagine an 11 year old having to go through that and being as strong as she was. It was definitely a touching story.

            Afterwards, we continued on to the sewing school. The sewing school is where kids go who have had to drop out of school for some reason or another. They are gifted a sewing machine upon arrival at the school and upon completion of the course, they get to keep it so that they can start their own business. Along with learning in the sewing school, the kids also take English classes so that they will be able to sell their products. Some of the things that they are able to make are just amazing. They are really talented individuals.

            We then continued our tour to the children’s village. We went to the baby house where there were 3 babies at the time. There was one baby who was maybe around 6 months old, another around maybe 3 months, and another baby just 6 weeks old. I’m not sure if those are the only babies living there right now, but we were told they are expected to get 7 more babies within the next couple of days, 2 of them being infant twins. All of the babies at this house have no mother. Some of the babies lost their mothers due to HIV or during childbirth. One baby even lost its mother because when the mother gave birth (at a hospital) they forgot to deliver the placenta and the mother ended up dying from an infection. It was really sad to see all these babies and know they have no mother. However, seeing the way the house mamas interact with and care for the babies definitely helped. You can tell that they care a lot for the babies. The way the children’s village works is each house tends to house different age children for the most part. Each house also has a house mama. The house belongs to her and she is encouraged to treat it like her own house. So you will often see different flowers or crops growing in front of all the children’s village houses. The house mamas stay consistent so that the kids get a sense of family.

            We also went to see the cow, it’s calf, and the garden. The cow just had a baby around Valentines Day. Ironically, it has a heart shape on its head as well so it is named Valentino.  It was really cute and a lot smaller than I was expecting. The garden was also really beautiful and a lot bigger than you would think it would be looking down on it. We ended our tour with lunch at Jenny and Geoff’s house where we went over the behavioral contract and things like that. After lunch, we returned to our house where I took a little nap. We had Tanzanian style burritos for dinner, which consisted of chapatti, tomatoes, avocado, onion, refried beans and cheese. They were very good.

After dinner, Justin, Amari, and Paulo came by to go over our schedules with us. Originally, we were supposed to work from 7:30-3:30 everyday. However, we still have to have Swahili class, our research methods class, and all the coursework for our other classes on top of that. Our professors gave us a large workload to do while here, so we were beginning to get a little overwhelmed. They ended up changing our day to working from only 7:30-12ish everyday. We will then return to our house for lunch and then after lunch we will have Swahili, research methods, or just study time from 1-4. After 4, we are free to do whatever we want which is nice. Some of this time will probably be spent on homework I’m sure, but this will give us more time to really enjoy our experience here. I’m sure maybe I will spend some of that time over at the baby house! All of those little babies are just so cute.

Some of the babies at the baby housing drinking uji (porridge)

The new baby cow, Valentino