oh africa
Oh africa.
Your children continue to win me over. Time & time again I spin around with some beautiful black darling & I embrace being here. Yeh I ache for the comfort of home ever so much but my place for now is here.
We’ve spent more time this month at the ‘House of Joy’ orphanage & many a meal with the 7 kids that call this place home. I love to watch the eldest boy ‘Prince’ handing them each their silver bowls to solomly receive their helpings. One behind another they walk to their table outside the squeaky swing doors. And this is where you get to see a peak of these kids being kids. Swapping tomatoes for extra beans, trading eggs for more banana … kicking & playing under the table. Shalom, a cheeky six year old opens his mouth full of rice & pineapple to poke his tongue out at Anita who swiftly takes this opportunity to pinch his sliver of mango. As per custom these African beauties eat with their hands rendering food just about everywhere. But if I didn’t love them enough already, Blandine plants a squishy pineapple & egg kiss on my cheek & my heart melts just a little more.
Not that you can see them from the road but hundreds of hidden little villages surround where we live in Noepe. Recently some of our water team and our health care team went for a looooong hike around a bunch of the villages to ask them about their issues with getting water and storing water. An African proverb speaks about how water is life and you would never withold water from anyone. The problem this brings is that during the rainy season there is plenty of water (not stored to be free from diseases mind you) but come the dry season (which we are currently in) they have none. This means some walk for hours every day or in the case of one wonderfully kind man who has been lame for many years, pays 1000 cf. per day to get water. We spent some time with his little family and were able to leave several bottles of water ….knowing this isn't a long term solution but hoping to better help in the next coming weeks. Two of the french speaking girls on our team have been working in the school on base teaching english which the kids adore. Well …. they adore their new teachers, I’m not sure how much they adore the learning as any chance to shoot out of their brick classroom & play soccer with us they happily take.
For this last week in January we squished into a bus and headed north & up the mountain into a village - Agou, just a few hours away. We had one more week of lectures to do to complete the lecture phase of this school so we moved into our peaceful treehouse. To our delight it was cool & breezy away from the city ….to our dismay the mosquitos up there turned out to be more vicious landing three of our team sick with malaria. All are on the mend now.
Sometimes …. Well always in life wherever you are, you just have to have a little joy & light. Hard questions & big problems will still be there in the morning. So we have picnics on rooftops, covered in dirt & mosquito spray, we’ve make flasks of mint tea & giggle until the early hours of the morning about our jungle curls & permanently black & grubby feet. There were moot moot mugs in Agou that bite you & leave you covered in red spots making us all look like we are covered in the chicken pox, so we drank cold glass bottles of fizzy drink & counted our spots.
With only five short weeks left that I’m sure will fly by my prayer -& yours for me, if your into praying - is that I don’t become apathetic & consumed with thoughts of home, since I feel like I’ve been traveling for ages. We are headed even further north at the end of this week until the middle of the month. Not looking forward to the 10 hour bus ride but I’m still looking forward to more people, more work and more light.
We may not get back on the internet before we leave to head back to Kona Hawaii for debrief, and for all your Aussie kids wondering when I am finally home it’ll be towards the end of March. I’ll have lots more stories for you all then I’m sure.
so lovely to read... even twice.
ReplyDeletegood luck.