Right now it’s 8:00 on a Monday evening. The mosque is calling people to worship, while my roommates and I are writing and reading by candle light as the power has failed us, once again. (I am also eating some funky tasting cookies I made out of maize flour.) I thought that after a while I would feel somehow comforted by the mosque calling that goes on five times a day, but no. I find it irritatingly flat in pitch and it sounds more like moaning most of the time than something that should inspire people to pray.
The road to Amani is increasingly treacherous in the rainy season and everyday I feel a ridiculous sense of pride when I make it to and from work without making a butt imprint on the ground. The other day this ancient truck carrying a mountain of hay flipped over right in front of Amani’s gates. (These trucks are always driving along this road because we are out in the country). The ridiculous part is the driver popped his head out the window with no noticeable expression of surprise, like this had happened 100 times. Kind of like a “here we go again” face. All I could think about was how I would be screaming.
There have been some serious shida (problems) at Amani these past few weeks and it’s a little stressful to be around. It all started when two weeks ago three teenage kids (who live at Amani) stole 500,000 shillings. This is probably around $470 dollars U.S., maybe a little less. But in simpler terms, this adds up to about five months pay for an average Tanzanian. Shida, sana. The three kids that did it ended up steeling from the storekeeper at Amani who is in charge of purchasing general items (foods, clothes) each week. A lot of the older kids hang out down there helping to lift food items or just talking to the two men that manage incoming shipments. Rather than trying to deal with the theft internally, it was decided that the three boys should be sent to juvenile detention/jail in town for three days. Now jail anywhere can be a nightmare, but without trying to sound to judgmental, this is Africa. I’ve read reports about street kids periodically getting rounded up and thrown in jail because the police find them to be “pests”. Without going into detail, they are frequently beaten or made to due manual labor or do things like carry giant stones on their heads. This is a country where stoning and hanging are still practiced in some regions. The strange thing is, now the teenage kids are back but aren’t allowed to be in class so they’re really doing a whole lot of nothin’. They also haven’t been able to recover all the stolen money, so it’s somewhat of a mystery what happened to it. I heard today that one of the main masterminds took 30,000 shillings to his uncle, who denied it. He must be a real gem of a guy. There’s also been some speculation that this same kid spread the wealth so to speak. Then last week, a teenage boy named Damiano disappeared. He went out for a run on a Monday afternoon and never came back. Finally last Friday he made an appearance after the social workers found him in town on the street. He had some nice new clothes with him, so the staff is guessing that he sold his new running shoes (a gift from Amani) for some personal items. Last week, 3,000 shillings were stolen from my wallet, because I let a kid into the playroom to listen to music and didn’t realize he was one of the kids who stole the money.
On top of this headache, I have noticed one funky stench coming from the preschool age kids. Their hygiene problems have become way more noticeable. I can tell they are not washing their hands after they go to the toilet because I can smell their urine on them and this one little boy’s clothes smell like rotten meat. The boys’ bathroom smells incredibly foul as well. So I’m going to have to suggest some kind of solution so the little ones don’t all get sick. Really I’m hoping the nurse will talk to them about cleanliness, but I think the root of the problem lies in the fact that there are too many kids and not enough staff to be sufficiently looking out for four/five/six year old kids. (PS on Friday I am assigned to clean the girls bathroom; awesome).
In the art room lately I’ve been doing more crafty projects with the kids. I found a lot of foam letter/animal/shape stickers which are hot items for the younger ones, so we’ve been making signs with their names and drawing backgrounds for where the animals live. Another volunteer and I started a picture wall about a month ago of the kids filled with candid photos, so I’ve been periodically printing photos and adding them on. A lot of the kids are growing up there so it’s nice to have some mementos and a feeling of belonging. The keyboard was finally fixed this week so I taught a class on reading music to the older kids. I also brought my computer and played all different types of music for them from around the world. They seemed to like it but they’re kind of an intimidating group and it hurt my brain to try and teach with such foreign vocabulary.
With all of this in mind, sometimes I feel like I’m doing a disservice to the kids. I don’t really quite know how to balance being in their lives. I’ve grown really attached to many of them, and seeing their faces is the highlight of my workday. At the same time, I know that in a matter of months I have to go back to the U.S. and it hurts to know that I won’t be here to watch them grow up or to be a part of their lives. It’s actually pretty distressing. I don’t want to leave them behind. Maybe what I think of as a fear of them getting too attached to me is actually just a realization of how attached I’ve become to them.
Sometimes it’s difficult to think about how unfair the world is, and always will be. Many of these kids come from slum areas around Tanzania where they had little to eat or were beaten by their parents, while others have traveled for hours on a bus to Moshi looking for a better life. I think about myself at 8 or 9 or 10 years old and how much fear and desperation I would have to feel to be motivated to flee. There’s a little boy named Baracka who’s around 8 years old. I met him on the street in Arusha and he is such a handsome little guy. His face is like a little panther and he has the longest most beautiful eyelashes. Before he came to Amani his parents made him work a job where he had to do hard physical labor, and when he asked them if he could go to school, he was beaten. The boy who asked to live with me, Augustino, lived in a slum with an abusive father and eventually left at 7 years old with his brother, living off collecting and selling scrap metal for a year. He has lived at Amani for half his life. Zulfa, a four year-old girl at Amani, is a little firecracker (although it may have been a definite mistake to introduce her to balloons- she makes them squeal and fly around the room). She has the brightest personality and is filled with so much love, but only last year, she and her two siblings lived on the street with their mother who was both abusive and an alcoholic. Not to say that the parents are always the problem (I think that’s a real cop-out), and not to stay Amani is perfect- there are definite problems, but I’m happy to know these kids, be a part of their lives if only for a temporary period, and see all that they have to offer the world.
