Charles is back!! and running full tilt..it's great...hugely busy, where to begin? Wednesday, early, helped get ready five little kids for testing for hiv aids...the huge suitcase shoved into the corner of the girl's dorm, pulled open and stuffed with clothes of all sizes, new, old, clean dirty, it will be great when those cupboards arrive, one for each kid - easily my white faced need to organize, sort out, and label; and on to clean shoes, faces, ears, eyes and we are on our way, Norbert from Austia, a volunteer and i, each with someone's little fingers woven into our own, with the last pulling along at the end, walking that long mile slowly, poly poly, back into town....and what an adventure!!

These kids never get out, ever. They aren't old enough for school, which means they can't yet touch their ear - the official test for school enrolement: where they reach one hand up high to the sky, then with bent elbow, reach over their big heads, and with their straining little fingers because everyone wants to go to school, they try to touch the top of the opposite ear...!! When they can touch, they can go to school!

Hugely Enchanted by the highway street scene, cars, trucks, buses, the man lying underneath his big old truck fixing a tire in the middle of the road, women selling bananas all lined up in a row sitting on upturned plastic buckets wrapped in gay coloured calico prints pulled tight around their bodies, on their heads, laughing, talking, nursing their babies...music pouring out loudly from shops, everyone saying JAMBO!! to them, to us, everyone, great excitement, they didn't stop talking chattering like early morning birds, to us, to each other, to everyone on the street...and on to the restaurant for a treat of breakfast before the testing - a little rice muffin bun called KITUMBUA, and a hot cup of chai for them to dip ....these little mites sitting up on big people's red plastic chairs at a proper adult's restaurant table..ten little eyes locked and entranced with the tv perched high high over their heads - another first for many, without electricity at the orphanage.

We make our way slowly down the long muddy lane off the main drag to the ICA office, Elizabeth the nurse, and Sabina our social worker, ready.. Norbert took the job of entertaining with art supplies all over the floor in the front room, while i took each kid back in to the back blood room, one at a time - pulling them up carefully on my knee with Elizabeth explaining what she was going to do with that needle...me, with one arm around the child to hold her, him, up tight close to me, the other with a chocolate cookie in my hand stuffing it into its scared little mouth,fending off tears, an elastic band gets tied around the tiny little arm, the vein found and the deed done....we did wonderfully, ten kids that day, only two cried and kicked and squirmed so hard, one shouting out that we were trying to cut off her arms! we couldn't take their blood...but all 8 came out this first time negatively, which is incredible considering that most had parents who passed from aids...

Balloons, more chocolate cookies, and the long walk home...

Today five came down with malaria....had to take them to the hospital for testing, varying degrees of it to be sure, medication, and on the mend...Tomorrow we take the last five in for aids testing, the older kids, the ones who go to school during the day...Elia, my little guy one of them...15 out of 35 who live at the orpanage full time with not one living person in the world to look after them..the day-kids come in around 7am, and leave each night some twelve hours later, this group needing parents permission for testing....so until this is done, we are finished with this project with our live-in kids...

Charles never stops - yesterday, packed up my video camera in an old gym bag wrapped in a towel, jumped into the truck and headed out for Engaruka....the furthest Masai village away from Mto wa mbu...an hour of flying across dusty dirt bumpy roads, with big stones, cows, goats, young Masai with sticks leading them off in lines toward a far away watering hole, the only one for miles and miles where you see hundreds of livestock all with their heads in a bit of water, drinking together....

Morning under a grove of trees with this village's Education committe... 7 girls ready for school but without funds....much talk about how the selection is done - the girl applies, and her name is put up on a public board for everyone to argue as to whether she comes from a family able to pay the fees or not....much discussion, then the list is widdled down...in many cases the girls run away from home to the safety of school once their family reads the board...parents begging the elected officials to bring them back and once done, they are whipped, beaten and forced into marriage with older men - perspective husbands who have been promised from birth....we visited a school this week and interviewed six girls who had all run away from home and were allowed to start school, without money, funds, uniforms, books, bed, anything...desperate to learn, and desperate to avoid the perils of matrimonial harmony waiting for them at home..

How in earth to make choices, between this girl, or that girl..? Impossible for me..but i rely on Charles to make sure the girls are indeed needy, from families without cows, goats, donkeys, and surely not the daughters of govt officials or ward counselors...

The Chief treated us to a goat leg for lunch....the best part of the goat, he said, somewhere up on its shoulder, for the chief, but way too fatty for my liking, roasted inside the Masai Hotel, a wood and cow dung hut with a high ceiling and a few windows, spacious enough for three medicine men inside brewing a highly potent medicinal soup in huge metal pots over a charing fire, roasting goat legs with ten or so Masai men hanging around waiting for lunch....the shelf under the window heavily laden down with slippery raw pieces of goat meat covered in flies. In this house. Men only. Masai women are never ever allowed to even SEE the meat being roasted let alone eaten by Masai moran warriors...but visitors with chief are allowed....and took pictures too, hope they come through.

Rambled and shook half an hour over hill and dale and tundra to visit two masai families who claim they want their girls to go to school, but who can't afford the costs...the father collects firewood for a living to sell at the market; the mother makes bead necklaces....their daughter did six months in form one, very bright, but had to be pulled out because of funds....i met her, took pictures of she and her family, in bright pink outside their hut, you can see....and on to the next family, eaking out their lives in a muddly grove of dung huts deep into the jungle, raining now, goats and cows belonging to others and being looked after by this family as income running around, little kids, half naked in rags, flies everywhere - took some great film covering, i think, but hand held, warned by everyone not to do this, so we shall see the outcome when i get home, shaking, jerking and hopefully useable...couldn't have better subjects, so no excuses!
In town....
The little boy crying on his face in the dirt hanging on to his brother's leg, the older brother a rope in his hand attached to a cardboard carton at the end - a toy for the wee one and now in the possession of the brother...i reach down to help the litle one up, he takes one look at the MZUNGU (me, white lady!), and screams even more!
Three dolled up women I see sitting everyday, all day on plastic chairs outside the shop selling Masai blankets, of every colour, stripe, weight, pattern....they shout and say jambo as i pass, fully made up, hair done, beautifully dressed, selling rice on the street...I met one in the hairdresser, oh yes i make it there every once in awhile for my hit of jet black, only colour in Africa..while one was sitting on the floor having fashionable red and brown fake hair sewed carefully and deeply into the skinny braids of her own hair, plastered and tied tightly into her scalp, piece by piece, one at a time...a style which stays in for months at a time....hair, fake hair, extensions, are very much in desire here...a showing of money i am told,big wealth....

A man on a bike carrying an entire bush, or full branches of a tree making his way from the banana grove to someones new house, the leaves to be woven carefully into wood sticks, rods, stones, mud dung...for walls, roofing...
and on it goes...
I so do love it here ...nothing is perfect but life is different and exhilerating, alive, full of colour, people, music, life! kids on the street, babies, wonderful fabric, and smells, you can actually SMELL things here...the food, not so wonderful, the freshly shat cow dung on the road after a hot sudden rain, steam pouring up from the pavement, that wet sultry balmy smell of summer.... love mostly what we are doing here, the people, meetings, projects, kids, the need, the actual real need, where you feel maybe just maybe that a little bit of something is actually making a difference, not a lot, and always never enough, but a little...

Norbert wrote his friends in Austia to please if they could, send a little money for us to buy beds for the orphanage, new shoes for the kids....an amazing story, his friends sent emails to their friends and on and on, like Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat Pray Love - in under a day he raised over two thousand dollars!

so i go now, and try to post those picures on this blog...
wish me luck!
anyone wanting to write, please do, to lynnconnell@sympatico.ca
and a few have asked for the ICA Canada address to send donations, greatly appreciated!
please send to:655 Queen Street East, Toronto. M4M 1G4...cheques made out to ICA Canada, with my name on them...Liz Donnery, the new exac. director of ICA Canada, congrats Liz!! will get them over to me right away....big thanks!! hugs, till the next time....
xLynn