Happiness and Other Things

As the teachers' strike is still continuing, I spent most of today at St. Steven's, a local orphanage that some of the other volunteers are helping at permenantly. There were 9 volunteers there and 16 children, which was really lovely as we were able to give them individual attention and properly make friends with the children, which is more difficult to do in the schools where there are classes of 60+.

It's absolutely amazing how children with such awful backgrounds and stories, and living in such an appalling place, can be SO happy and so wonderful to spend time with. The orphanage is set down a little dust track, piled high on both sides with rubbish of all varieties, all emitting horrible smells, and down the middle of the road trickles a horrible mud brown stream of some unidentified liquid. There are no rubbish collections in Kenya. In the orphanage they have no clean water as it's all stored in a big, dirty stone well that they all bath and then drink out of, and no kitchen, only a small fire and a few saucepans. The children all sleep two to a bunk (so four children in one set of bunk beds), which have no real mattresses, just thin blankets.

That said, as soon as you walk in the wooden-plank gate, the kids come running towards you smiling and laughing and wanting to hold your hand and play with your hair and it's rare that you see them looking sad. I spent the morning drawing pictures for them to colour in and sellotape onto the wall, and playing stuck-in-the-mud with them, and then we attempted the ambitious task of taking 16 small children out for lunch.

We all piled into one matatu (bear in mind that these are designed for about 12 passengers and we had 9 volunteers + 16 children on our laps) and took them to Summit, the club we went to on Saturday night that's also open during the day, serving food in a big garden. Having ordered every child sausages and chips we played some running around games and skipping with them until this arrived. Watching their reaction to the food was horrible as all the food for the volunteers arrived before theirs (despite having specifically requested theirs to come first) and you could see that they were terrified that they weren't going to be fed and would just have to watch us eat. When their's did arrive they ate the sausages at the speed of light in disbelief at having been given meat and each finished an enormous plate of chips plus anything we didn't want.

They are the sweetest people ever and it's terrible thinking of what they've been through and how their lives are likely to turn out (some are HIV positive and so may have no options whatsoever). They are so innocent too; I could safely give them my camera or rucksack to play with and know that they would have fun with it but return it happily when they felt they'd had enough. To have been through what they have and still be completely uncorrupted is unbelievable.