Friday October 31, 2008

Friday October 31, 2008

On breakfast duty for PB & J's so that meant arrival at Tarangire House at 6:15. Being the nice mother that I am, Jack hasn't come with me yet. He needs his sleep and I figure since he's playing sometimes more than 2 hours of soccer a day, he deserves it!

Today, I was much more organized with the preschoolers (Usufu, Vicente, Edina, Rehema, Boaz, Joshua and Vicent). I had each of them write their numbers from 1-10, then the alphabet, then I wrote on each paper about 15 math problems. Each time they were done, and it was correct, they got a sticker. Motivation! And on the back of the paper I had them copy, MY NAME IS..and TODAY IS OCTOBER 31, 2008.

That took a while and they were actually focused. Yeah! Molly was feeling better so was in there with us, and I am sure that's why they were better. We are still too new. Anyway, after their work, we made some butterflies on black craft paper with glued on squares of assorted colors of tissue paper. A huge hit as far as we were concerned - they were focused and listening. We ended with Story time and Molly reading to them. This was much better than the other mornings.

After Ugi, Molly came with us for a walk with Usufu, Rehema and Vicente (the others go to afternoon kindergarten until 3:30). She took us to Indiaís old place - the first house she had around here with her first children. It was through a part of the coffee plantation and it was just beautiful. In fact all of the land around is, including the Children's Village, are all on the Kiran Coffee Plantation. And most of the people living here all work on picking the coffee beans. You can see just rows and rows of plants.

Anyway, back to India's old place. It was an old brick main building with several other buildings (one of which was the old volunteer house - more on that later) and the most beautiful trees and gardens. WOW! It was even more remote than where we are now - on top of a hill with nothing around but coffee and even a couple fruit bearing trees (none of which I know the name of yet).

I am not sure how many children lived up there with her, but when it was too many, she bought this new land and built the village. It's really amazing. An office building, a volunteer house that can sleep 4, a rec hall, another vol house that sleeps 2, 3 children's houses (Tarangire, Serengeti and Manyara), India's house where she has 6 children, the container,  and a couple other buildings for staff. There are more staff employed here than children.

It does take a village.

We have a staff here just at the volunteer house, Elias does all our cooking and two Mamas do all the house cleaning and laundry. Everything takes time. Boiling and purifying water, all food is made from scratch, and the house is swept and mopped everyday - including the bathroom. The laundry, by the way, is washed outside in a series of 4 buckets and then hung out to dry on the most elaborate hanging system - that can also be covered with a huge tarp because the clothes must hang out to dry even in the rainy season.

The children's houses have a boy's room, a girl's room, a boy's bathroom, a girl's bathroom, a Mama's room, a volunteer bedroom and a volunteer bathroom. You walk into the center which is the kitchen, then a huge long table where the children sit for meals and a living room area behind that for hanging out, playing on the floor, reading or watching movies. The layout was very well thought out! And all the furniture is also made right here in the Childrenís Village. Each house also has a little covered porch area on both sides. To the right and left of the front door you will find shelving for all their shoes and hooks for all their rain jackets. The best mud rooms Iíve ever seen. And then each house has two huge sinks on the porch too. 

You just can't believe how well organized everything is here.

And I can't wait to be able to upload photos. The files are just too big (even though I have saved them to the lowest possible resolution - they just can't be uploaded. So that means, if you are reading this - you might want to look back again after I am back to see all the photos that correspond with each entry.

While I am on the subject of photos - I have already taken tons. Does that surprise you? I have been downloading them daily as I fear if I waited until I returned with 2,000 photos it would be too overwhelming.

Jack spent the afternoon playing soccer while I played around with the little ones. I also made a sign for the girl's room at Tarangire that I surprised them with. I put their names on it (Fatuma, Coletha, Marietha and Nuruana) and in big bold letters wrote , NO BOYS ALLOWED!. This is what they wanted.

Back on toast & egg duty as well as dinner duty. And finally time for dinner for us. Jessie had set the table and put an orange glass Fanta bottle and a mini paper back decorated with pumpkins and candy inside at our places. We had all forgotten it was Halloween until then.

What a great way to end the day!

Note: we are also planning 3 day safaris- one next Tuesday to Tarangire, and the other two the following week to Manyara and Ngorogoro Crater. We can't wait!!