Tuesday 14 August 2012

Orphanage and Movie Night

Today we went to the orphanage nearby for the first time. It was about a 5 minute walk to get there and it was a shocking 5 minutes. Our compound is in a pretty nice area with other nice, fenced in compounds around it. In just that 5 minute walk, a lot changed. It went from houses with fences to houses made of mud or scrap tin. There was garbage everywhere and kids scrounging through that garbage, looking for anything salvageable. It was so terrible, and the conditions were unimaginable. The Rebby Junior School was sitting right in the midst of this. It is a school for orphans, or children with one parent or 2 parents that can’t support them. The children get educated there for free and spend most of their days there. Some of the kids sleep there, but the kids who can go back to their parents. The school has walls made of mud and sticks. There is no windows and very little air movement within the area, so it was very hot. The kids were so happy though! They were adorable and very happy to see us. We were there for about 3 hours and they did skits and sang songs for us. They also did some group dances with us and we showed them some dances for them to do with us, like the chicken dance, YMCA, hockey pockey and the Macarena. It was a lot of fun. I think their favorite part of the morning was taking pictures though. They love to get their picture taken and then they stole our camera’s and were taking pictures with them.


Joel, the guy from the UK who was here 2 weeks before us, is doing a 6 week program here. After visiting the orphanage the first time, he decided to set up a website asking for donations to help rebuild the orphanage with actual cement walls and floors. It didn’t take him long to raise the money (it only took about $1000) and to purchase supplies. Work will start sometime this week and we will probably all be helping at some point. It is really inspiring that he did all of this mostly by himself and it will make such a difference to these kids.


I haven’t really wrote in here yet how thankful to God I am that I was born in the US, but I think about that every single day, especially today. We are so blessed that we don’t have to live like this, that even our poor live 100 times better than this (I will admit, this is an assumption as I have not really visited many slums in the States). This orphanage was a Christian orphanage too, and just to hear them singing songs of praise to God was really amazing. These kids aren’t angry about what they don’t have, just happy about what they do. It just really puts things in perspective for me. We complain so much about things that just really don’t matter in the scheme of things. We don’t have to worry day by day if we will have enough food or if we will have any sort of roof over our heads or if we will die from some very curable disease because we don’t have enough money to pay for medication. I know that I will still find myself complaining about someone putting pickles on my McDonald’s burger when I get home, but I have a feeling I will be thinking twice before I actually get upset about things not going my way.

One thing that I haven’t mentioned about Kenya is the fact that everyone here loves Obama. Everyone who hears we are from the US says something about Obama and how much they love him and how he is from Kenya. The hospital that we work at, Coast Province General, even claims that they have Obama’s birth certificate. They don’t know enough about our laws to realize that this is a bad thing, not a good thing. They think that all Americans must automatically love Obama too, which is funny to us since that is not the case.

After the morning of dancing and singing, some of the kids walked back with us to the compound for the swimming lessons. I didn’t actually help with these, except for from the sidelines, but it was really funny to watch. Most of them could swim a little, but they had a hard time doing the back floats or other things. They mostly just wanted to swim in the pool with us I think. After this, I went to take a nap because I was exhausted from the heat and dancing of the morning.

I’m getting really excited for the safari this weekend. We will leave early Thursday morning, spend the night in Nairobi, 2 half days and one whole day on the safari, another night in Nairobi and back to the compound by Monday night. Before Mia left, she told us a lot about the safari and it sounds so amazing to see. They saw all of the big 5 except for the Rhinos and they saw lions multiple times. She also saw these animals really close up. I’m excited to bring home pictures of this! Yes, videos too hopefully.

Tonight we went to the movie theater. It was absolutely amazing how different the theater is than the rest of Mombasa. It was easily the nicest and biggest theater I’ve ever been to. We all forgot that we were even in Kenya for those couple hours. We went to see The Dark Night Rises. I had already seen this movie, but it was just as good the second time. The only strange thing about the theater is that before every movie, they ask everyone to stand up as they play the Kenyan national anthem. It seems so random to me! Anyways, all in all it was a good experience and a good break from this life where we are constantly thinking about how different things are here. It was a very American experience with pop and popcorn and a good movie. Well tomorrow, we go back to the hospital. I’m hoping to get to watch some surgeries.

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