Little Moments

Time is flying by for us here at Malayaka House. Yesterday was the first time that I thought about the next couple months and felt like I didn’t have enough time left to do everything I want, both with the kids and in East Africa. But I guess another 2.5 months is a long time.

Lately I’ve been posting about the big highlights here - usually pizza nights, field trips, and updates about school/education – but in the past few weeks I’ve been noticing the little moments more. The individual time with kids or the moments when they really enjoy learning or when we discover another aspect of their maturity. So instead of the big things I’m going to share a bunch of the little things, because, as the saying goes, they’re actually the big things in the end.

Less than a half mile up the hill in Entebbe Town, there are people who make French fries (chips), grilled chicken, sausages, and a delicious treat called a rolex. It’s not a fancy watch, but a chapati with 2 fried eggs rolled inside (the name comes from a shortening of the description – rolled eggs). It costs about 60 cents for chips or a rolex, and about $1.20 for chicken. Evan and I would occasionally walk to town at night to get a cheap meal, so a few weeks ago we decided to start taking the older kids with us. We take just one or two a week, and it’s been really cool to talk to them individually when they have our undivided attention. We usually talk about what they want to do when they grow up, or we ask them about their life before Malayaka House, or we share more about ourselves and our lives back home. Each and every one of the kids is so incredible in their own way,

On a similar note, during the afternoons we try to take a couple of the young kids around town with us when we do errands. Because there are 35 kids here, and because there are always aunties and/or volunteers at the house to watch them, the kids don’t go out to do errands like a typical kid would. So if we’re going to buy airtime and internet or pick up some groceries or pay the bills, we often take a couple kids with us. The kids enjoy the attention and, for us, it’s always more entertaining with a couple of them around. A few weeks ago we took Ishmat and Elijah out with us and Ishmat didn’t stop talking the entire time. There are few things funnier than a 4 year olds’ commentary on life.

Something else we’ve been doing quite frequently lately is going to the doctor. For the first month that we were here no one got sick, but with the changing seasons it seems to be a different story. We’ve had ear infections, rashes, malaria, infected wounds, and pneumonia, all in the last month. It wasn’t until probably my 5^th time at the doctor that an obvious observation crossed my mind – I was a care taker for 35 children. I looked around the waiting room and wondered what the other parents and kids thought of me, Evan and Fran - besides the fact that we’re crazy for having 3 people take 1 child to the doctor. But, in our defense, since you never know who will be around at any given time, it helps to have multiple people hear what the doctor has to say and understand what medicine is being prescribed.

On a daily basis I spend at least a little bit of time thinking about the overwhelming task of giving these kids a better education. The most important and most intimidating issue is teaching a bunch of the kids how to read. But lately I’ve challenged myself to take baby steps each day instead of trying to think of a way to solve all the problems at once. So I created some word searches and an educational jeopardy game, Evan made flash cards with letter and word sounds, we made a multiplication chart, Marta photocopied a bunch of activities from the lesson books we have at the house… and now we’re putting them all to use. We’ve realized that the older girls really enjoy doing simple spelling and literacy tasks that we originally thought would be boring. So in the evenings and on the weekends now they sometimes come and ask if they can play these “games.”

With the young kids we’ve been using the letter tiles from our Bananagrams game and letting them spell words or unscramble words that we’ve mixed up. None of them do any sort of creative learning in school, so anything that deviates from just copying information into book seems really exciting and holds their attention. We also started today with weekly spelling lists for P. 1, 2, and 3. So it seems like very small steps, but I’ve really been enjoying it lately. It’s always nice to see the smile on a kid’s face when they complete a task or spell a word correctly or recognize a word that just looked like random letters before. And it’s nice to see many of them enjoy educational activities and beg us to do more with them, even after being in school for 10 hours and doing homework for another 1 or 2 at home.

So these little learning moments, the trips to the doctor, the evening walks to town, the spontaneous games at home, the afternoons with just a few kids at the park or the botanical garden, the conversations with the aunties, the business meetings with the girls… they’re all part of our days here and, in the end, they’re the most meaningful experiences.

Speaking of business, the last thing I wanted to mention is that I shipped 7.5 kilos (16.5 lbs) of bags, aprons, and necklaces home to Norton. We wanted to see how much it costs and how quickly it arrives, in order to determine how practical it would be in the future to export our crafts. My mom should get the package at the end of next week and, once she does, she’ll be selling them for us. So if you’re interested, contact her and support Malayaka House! Thank you!

Highlights and Pictures

Sorry for the infrequent posting, but here are some highlights from the last week:

- Last Thursday the kids didn’t have school because it was International Women’s Day, so we had an afternoon of sports and games. We piled 42 children, aunties, and uncles into our 15 passenger van and drove across town to a hotel where some friends of ours live. There’s a group of Spanish guys who work for SwiftAir, an airline that is contracted by the UN, and they live in Entebbe temporarily and fly groups of UN employees and local military men around East and Central Africa. The UN rents an entire small hotel for them and they have a big yard, so they offered to host our sports day. We had wheelbarrow and potato sack races, a few different relay races, a volleyball game, and several rounds of tug o’ war. Everyone had a good time.

- Also last Thursday, our pizza business hosted its biggest night yet. We had 33 guests and served a total of 30 pizzas. Our profit for the night was 2/3 of what we made in the entire month of February, plus the girls made $45 in tips. They’ve recently added a couple appetizers to the menu and they’ve improved both the pizza and the sauce by playing around with a variety of spices. Evan and I got lucky with the timing of our stay here because it’s been a lot of fun to see this business grow and evolve over the last 9 weeks.

- We went to Entebbe Junior School on Sunday and met with all of the children’s teachers (that’s 17 different teachers for 13 different classrooms). We got to see their latest exams and get an idea for how their scores compare to their peers. Some teachers gave us great personal feedback about each student and the whole afternoon was really helpful. Some of our kids are doing great, but many need to work more on reading. We have at least one kid in grades 1-5 that struggle with reading, and you can see how that effects every their English, Social Studies, and Science exams. Hopefully we’ll be able to help at home because, unfortunately, the structure and curriculum here makes it too easy to sneak by without learning to read.

And here are some pictures…

Evan taught Didas how he's shaves his beard last week and then let him do the rest - it made for some cute pictures.

This is Johnny during our sack race last week. He’s another one of the 6 year old triplets, but the three of them are so distinctly different. Almost every day he comes up to me, quietly gets my attention, and says “story?” He doesn’t have the longest attention span, but he loves listening to you read. Although this hobby might suggest otherwise, Johnny doesn’t know how to read. Every day with his homework we’re working on letters and sounds, but it’s a struggle. He’s so sweet though and very well-behaved.

This is Isabella – she’s 4 years old and she’s William’s twin. She’s one of the biggest trouble-makers in the house and often will do exactly the opposite of what you ask. But, recently I’ve discovered another side to her. She really loves to do schoolwork and she’s motivated to learn. She’s in the middle class of the nursery and every Friday she has to write letters, match pictures, and color inside the lines for homework. She loves doing her worksheet each week and she gets excited every time she writes a letter correctly.

This is Shakira, the youngest of the girls that came to Malayaka House last year. In case you missed it in a previous entry, there are 10 girls that came here at the end of 2010 from Mercy Home, an awful orphanage that has since been shut down. Shakira’s documented age is 6, but I think she might be closer to 8. Each grade at Entebbe Junior has two classes and they’re divided by academic ability, and Shakira’s our only first grader in the more advanced class. She does really well in school and usually finishes her homework first. She’s also one of the most athletic kids here – we taught her how to throw an American football and how to hit a baseball, and she does them both better than anyone else.

This is Auntie Flo. She’s the oldest and certainly the wisest of the aunties. She is in her early forties and she has two teenagers of her own. She goes to the market on Tuesdays and Saturdays to buy all of the fruits and vegetables that the house needs. To give you an idea of how much food is needed to feed 45 people, she spends $260 each week on fruits and vegetables. That’s on top of monthly deliveries of rice, beans, nuts, millet for porridge, etc; weekly deliveries of meat; and daily deliveries of eggs and milk. Back to Auntie Flo though, she’s incredible and it seems like she can do absolutely anything. I took this picture one afternoon when Evan and Fran were cutting a dead tree down so we could use it for firewood in the pizza oven. They were going at it for a while before Flo noticed and took the axe away from them. Once she showed them the proper technique they tried to take the axe back, but she didn’t quit until she’d finished the job.

The Ugandan Life

Now that we’ve been here for over 7 weeks I wanted to write a little bit about Uganda in general and hopefully paint a picture of what it’s like to live here. I’ve been writing things down for the last couple weeks so my thoughts are fairly random, but hopefully all interesting.

- The president of Uganda is Museveni and he’s been in office for 26 years now. He was originally very well-liked, but obviously it isn’t good if anyone is in power for this long. His government is very corrupt and the aid money that flows into Uganda from other countries rarely makes it down to the actual people in need. He has 5 houses, one of which is here in Entebbe, and Uncle Tony says it’s worth $75 million USD. The question we’ve been asking people lately is what happens when Museveni dies, but I don’t think anyone really knows the answer to that.

- Uganda is full of weird smells. Anna tells us that even after 2 years she still isn’t used to it yet. I can’t really pinpoint what all of the smells are, but the most common is the smell of burning trash. There’s a very poor waste removal system here, so people are constantly burning their trash. A few months ago Robert found a reliable garbage company, so for 30,000 shillings ($12.50) a month we get our garbage picked up twice a week. Evan always finds garbage pickup to be amusing because the truck is just a pick-up with cardboard tucked around the edge to make the walls of the bed a little higher. As you can imagine, this is pretty ineffective and there’s always garbage falling out onto the road. I feel like waste removal is something that’s overlooked as a priority in developing countries, but all the litter is detrimental to the environment and it must contaminate the ground water as well.

- Almost every day the power goes out at least once, lasting anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours, sometimes more. Depending on who we ask, we’re given a different answer about why this happens. Some people say that it’s a punishment for the parts of the country that didn’t vote for Museveni in last year’s election; some say that the electric company used to import power from neighboring countries to cover all their paying customers in Uganda, but last year they just stopped paying them so we’re short on electricity; and others say that Uganda is actually exporting electricity to neighboring countries to make some extra money, but there isn’t enough to go around so ours gets shut off. Who knows what the truth is, but thankfully we have a generator here at the house. It’s extremely loud, but it helps keep everyone safe and makes life a lot easier.

- Occasionally the water stops working, but this doesn’t happen often. However, a few weeks ago we went 5 days without running water. On day 3 the aunties filled the van with clothes and Tony brought them to do laundry in the lake. The laundry room was overflowing at that point because each kid has 2 sets of clothes that get washed daily (school uniform and play clothes), plus the bed sheets of the 3 or 4 kids that often wet the bed at night. Tony also brought big barrels of water to the house each day, but luckily the running water came back just before everyone hit their breaking point. I take for granted the fact that I can clean my hands, flush the toilet, wash dishes, and shower anytime I want at home.

- Another thing that’s different between here and home is the amount of human contact you have each day. At home when I pay my bills online and use a self-checkout counter at the grocery store. I drive my own car to do all my errands and can print documents at my house. In Uganda almost everything I need is a half mile up the road in the Entebbe Town, and everything else is just another mile further around the state house in Kitoro . We go to town and wait in line to pay our electric, water, and phone bills. We go to town for our groceries and to print any documents or pictures that we need. We talk to the people at each of these stores and say hello to others along the way. When we go somewhere that’s too far to walk, or if it’s dark out, we take a boda boda (motorcycle taxi) or a matatu (taxi van). In both cases you have to talk to the driver and negotiate a price. Negotiating prices is also necessary at markets, whether it’s for food or for African crafts, so there’s much more conversation between customers and merchants.

- The last thing I’ll mention about Uganda is that white people are called ‘mzungus.’ Every day when we’re walking around town, countless children and many adults yell “mzungu mzungu!” at us. At first I didn’t mind and we would always wave to them and smile, but now it’s getting old. I found a shirt at a market in Kampala a couple weeks ago that said “My name is not mzungu… I don’t have any money and I don’t have any chocolate.” I think it sums things up nicely, because most people here think that all white people can we can afford to give them money for school fees or food or candy. I don’t think people are using the term mzungu in a derogatory way, but the kids at Malayaka House never call us mzungus and they often look at other people funny when they do. Recently though, Evan told a couple of our kids that no one calls us mzungu in America and they asked, “then what do they call you?” When we’re walking around town we often think about what would happen if we saw a black person in the U.S. and just pointed and yelled “black person, black person!” Definitely not acceptable at home, but here it’s normal.

So, all things considered, I’m enjoying my life here very much. There are days when I miss home – both Norton and St. Mike’s – but there are things I really love here. I like that I don’t ever think about the weather because it’s always beautiful, with the occasional thunderstorm. I like that I spend the majority of my time outside every day. I’m now ok with the fact that I’m perpetually dirty all the time because of the dust, mud, and outdoor lifestyle. I like that I can walk everywhere, though I do miss driving. And, of course, I’m falling in love with the kids. There are times when we wonder if we’re really helping anyone by being here, and there are days when we feel like we’re not being very productive, but I think that’s the same with any service experience. We can see that we’ve made a positive impact on the businesses and I think we’re teaching the girls some skills along the way. We just added February to our profits chart and each business has a balance far above what we projected. The pizza business is approaching one million shillings (over $400) and the girls hosted a perfect dinner for 19 people last Tuesday. I’ve also realized that we’re helping the young kids just by giving them more individual attention, taking them out around town, and checking their homework each night. I think they enjoy having us here, and we certainly enjoy hanging out with them, so I look forward to seeing how our relationships evolve from here.