Day 8
I woke up early. It was still dark. I don’t know how anyone could sleep through the loud prayer (muslim I think) blaring through the speakers throughout the city. As I look out the windows, it is now starting to get light out and I see a lot of people walking down the road. The women have scarves over the heads. I’m assuming they are muslim, but I’m not sure because many ethiopian women wear them regardless of religion, and I believe the orthodox Christians wear them as well.
Our side of the street is very nice, but across the street is dirt, trash, metal shelters and sheep. I am going to get situated and get a shower, so that we can meet Hailey and Yemomu at 8am to begin walking to church. At 4pm we are supposed to meet Tom and Sally and another guy for dinner. After that we are to meet with the team of 30 from America who will be distributing shoes for the next 2 days. We are going to be orienting them to the process. Hopefully between church and dinner, we will have time to visit an orphanage. I really wish Brian would want to adopt a baby from here. Or I wish I wouldn’t want to as much as I do.
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We arrived at church a little late, but still in time to participate in some of the worship music. It was enjoyable and cool to see Ethiopians worshipping in English. Later when we were walking back from church we walked past a church worshiping in Amharic and it was awesome! You could hear the singing down the road and it was beckoning to come in. I peeked in through the gates and I can’t describe how awesome it was to hear the powerful singing to God in another language at such a volume. I can’t even imagine being inside enveloped in that. I’m hoping that next Sunday we will be able to attend at least the Amharic worship service. But anyways, the service was good. It was about having faith and knowing that God is faithful.
The group of us (Brian, Nick, Kelly, Haily, Yemamu and I had lunch at our guesthouse restaurant and then took several taxis to get to the orphanage. Our goal was to assess the building layout and incorporate the large first floor room into a playroom. We thought we could make bookshelves and buy baskets to put on the shelves. This could be a place where the kids could have books and toys. We also discussed creating soft floor pads, a rug, and/or some beanbag chairs.
As we were trying to envision the space, one of the workers said that there was already a “playroom” upstairs. We asked them to show it to us. We walked upstairs, through the toddler room, through 2 infant rooms (which smelled horrible) and were shown the “playroom” which was a balcony off of the infant room. Not only was there not a single toy, but the floor is concrete and the metal railing looked less than safe. Not to mention that there were no kids at all using this playroom. On the positive side, the fresh air out there is amazing; there is a breeze; and the view of the trees and the street is very refreshing compared to the cramped infant room filled with cribs, odors and crying babies.
While our initial goal was to focus on the playroom situation, we could not ignore the major needs occurring inside the infant room. Almost all of the babies were crying. It reeked of diarrhea. The vast majority of the kids were wet. Their bottles were next to them as they were lying on their backs. Some were feeding themselves, some were unable to do so. I walked around talking to several babies as they lied in their cribs. Oftentimes that simple interaction helps to calm them down.
I picked up one baby who was coughing, and I thought that getting her upright might help with her coughing. I held her in my left arm while using my right hand to interact with kids in their cribs. They would pull themselves into a standing position to be closer to us as we stood next to their cribs. One little one grasped my hand and just kept shaking it. Over and over again. I wished I could hold two babies at the same time, but I’m not strong enough. My left arm was getting tired and I tried to put the little girl back in her crib, but each time I did she began to wail.
Her little crib mate was tiny. She looked like a newborn, but I could tell she was older by the way she was smiling at me and she had a couple of teeth. She was very malnourished.
I picked up another little one. I thought he was a boy. I was getting too overwhelmed in the baby room, so I took him outside onto the balcony “playroom.” It felt wonderful to be outside and I imagine he liked the change. I brought his bottle so that I could feed him while we were out there. After awhile he started making some babbling noises which made me feel like he was a real baby, opposed to one of a bunch of orphan babies, if that makes sense at all. (side note: over the next few days I had regular interaction with this little sweetie. Turns out “he” is a she. I asked if she was available for adoption, as I was falling in love, however, she is in the process of being adopted by an Ethiopian woman who lives in America. So her future is good! In fact, I later found out that the majority of the infants here are also in the process of being adopted. If you are an Ethiopian resident, it only costs 200 dollars to adopt. Much easier than the 25,000 plus dollars it costs us Americans!)
The playroom is still a major goal of ours, but we now realize that we really need to focus on some basic essentials including: diaper changing, sheet changing, cleaning faces and noses, feeding kids upright etc. It is very overwhelming and seems like it might be an almost hopeless situation. Kelly did all of this training when she was here in 2009 and now there is a whole new group of caregivers who seem to either not know anything or have a lack of motivation. Maybe they are just overwhelmed too. (side note: we went back often after that and the caregivers appeared much more motivated. We think that since this was a weekend, there was even less staff than usual.)
Tom picked us up at the orphanage and dropped off some of the donation stuff that we brought over from the states. The most needed thing that we have are awesome waterproof reusable diapers. That will be the first thing that we try to implement tomorrow.
Tom drove us to the Ethiopian guesthouse to meet the owners for dinner. We were served pizza, French fries and really delicious strawberry smoothies. We toured the guesthomes and met some local boys on the street who enjoyed practicing their English with us. These kids are so smart. Several of them speak three languages. They asked me how many languages I speak… After that we were served coffee as we discussed the shoe distribution with the 30 team members of Visiting Orphans.
