Jedi

28 December, 2008

There are six house mothers to look after the 50 children. And just in case some of you think that is completely manageable there are three on during the day and three on at night. That means they are looking after just over 16 kids each. Washing, cooking, refereeing fights, mending scraped knees, etc. These women truly are saints.

On top of that they also look after me. I eat and drink the same as the kids so it's not a huge additional burden but I do get my food served with cutlery (well, a spoon) whereas the kids eat with their hands. You too would have them eating with their hands if you had to wash up 50 sets of cutlery after every meal. The only special attention I get is that they bring the food over to my room in the clinic. This is because if I'm not with the kids I'm generally here working.

All of the house mothers are friendly although some are friendly than others. Whilst they all generally understand English some of them are more difficult to understand when they speak as they don't seem to speak that much. There is one house mother that is high on the friendly scale but low on the understand-ability scale. She is the oldest and smallest. She is sort of hunched over a bit and reminds me a lot of Yoda, the Jedi Master from Star Wars. Obviously she doesn't have the green skin but she does have the gruff voice and speaks using the same grammar. Her real name is Grace which of course is much holier than Yoda but I prefer to refer to her as Yoda.

Yoda brought me breakfast this morning. Because it was Sunday we get breakfast. First she brings over a warm chapati with the friendly comment, "Warm the chapati did I" spoken in her gruff little voice. Then she comes over with a plate with eggs in it. I explain that I'm allergic to eggs and can't eat them. "Alergic you are. Eat the eggs shall I." is the reply. I'm sure she is pretty chuffed at getting two helpings of eggs. I don't expect an alternative and none is offered.

I then decide to take a serious crack at getting all the orphanage records digitised today. I see Moses on his way to church and get a heap of records from him. All of these consist of folder, predominantly blue, with all the paperwork relating to each child. When I say, "all", it sort of implies there is a lot. There isn't. Unfortunately records are very thin on the ground in Kenya. Less than 10% of the kids know when their birthday is, and when I ask the ones that I actually have a copy of a birth record for, they always get it wrong usually by a year or two and never know the month. I'm not sure if this is a Kenyan thing or an orphan thing. Regardless, the way I have designed the system, they need a birth date so I issue them all birth dates if they are unknown. Who says I can't play God!

Entering the records takes much longer than I expected. Information is spread all over the place and you wouldn't have thought it would have been that hard when each file on average contains only 5 pieces of paper. As I go through the records I need to make a few design changes to the system to account for things such as; an orphan who has a mother but the mother is mentally retarded; the same grandparent taking care of two orphaned grandchildren from different sets of parents; and a family with more than 10 kids (previously had allowed for 9 as the maximum).

Progress is hampered by the constant interruptions from the kids. If they come in, they want to go through the files as each file contains a photo. Even though they don't understand what I'm doing, they want their file to be processed next when they find it. I also repair several cars while this is going on.

Lunch is served which is rice, red beans and potatoes. They still haven't heeded my request to serve less food. I explain to Yoda that I can't possibly eat all of this but she insists, "Eat all you must. Grow big and strong." I think she believes I'm just a slightly larger version of one of her other charges.

After lunch and with the kids all in their Sunday clothes I decide to try and take a few more photos of them. It's hard to do as they insist on being about 4cm away from the camera. As I move back, they advance forward. They also insist on doing stupid poses, or having stupid expressions on their faces. I have to shoot off over a hundred photos before they get tired of the faces and poses. I then retreat a little, take advantage of the zoom lens and get about 3 or 4 really good shots. After a couple of hours playing with the kids, I head back to work.

At around 5pm, Yoda comes to my room. "Come with me you will. My house we go." I'm not sure what this really means but I start to follow her. "Camera you bring" she commands so I duck back in to get it. We then proceed out of the orphanage, across the old school and down past the coffee fields on the dirt road. One of the orphan girls, Anne, is with us wearing her AXA cap proudly. I silently congratulate myself on some brilliant product placement. After about 15 minutes of walking we turn off the road and down a long driveway. There are a couple of sheep tied up and they look at me nervously. We pass the sheep without incident and we finally come to Yoda's house. Like Moses' place it is made of corrugated iron. There is an outside cook house made of dark brown wood with smoke and charcoal stained walls. The planks for the walls have small gaps between them probably deliberately to vent out the smoke. Yoda shows me around her garden. She has bananas, maize, potatoes, a young sugar cane plant, several large avocado trees, two different types of beans, sukuma wiki (green spinach type of thing), a green passion-fruit (with yellow pulp), a pumpkin vine and several other edible plants that I don't recognise. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of order into the arrangement of the crops. The potatoes and beans are interspersed with the beans and maize. It is typical subsistence farming. Yoda is fortunate to have some very large fruit bearing avocado trees and she informs me that she sells them in the market when they ripen.

Having had an extensive tour outside, we venture inside the dwelling pursued by a small white cat. There seems to be a main living or entertaining room with two doors off it. These doors are bolted shut not due to security but because that is the cheapest way to keep a door closed. There doesn't seem to be any lights or electricity throughout the place and an old kerosene lantern sits on a bench against the wall. There are several couches in here with a coffee table. All the furniture items are covered with clothes reminiscent of tea doilies, no two alike. She beckons me to sit on the couch. I'm about to sit when I notice there is something moving under one of the covers. I suspect another cat or given the surrounds, a rat, but when I lift the cover see it is a 7 week old baby girl. She seems surprised and flicks away the cover while I take a seat at another couch first very carefully checking it for new born children.

Yoda tells me "Baby belong to the girl". The only other girl I've seen is the small orphan girl that came with us and she is only about 8 years old. Moments later an older girl comes in with a fairly ample bosom, and other telltale signs of someone having given birth 7 weeks ago. She is introduced as "The girl, of the girl and the baby". I later work out that this girl is Yoda's granddaughter and the infant her great-granddaughter. We shake hands, a very customary Kenyan tradition even for women, and she proceeds back out to the cookhouse. Meanwhile, Yoda makes me a cup of tea. In a large thermos she puts tea leaves, hot water, milk and about 5 tablespoons of sugar. She then pours this into chipped metal mugs and hands them too us whilst putting a bowl of sugar on the rocking coffee table. She is surprised that I don't take sugar with my tea. Apparently the 5 tablespoons she put in doesn't count. She gives herself another two generously heaped teaspoons of sugar and we drink our tea.

There is a long uncomfortable silence. Around the wall are cheesy signs about values or God that have been laminated with cling film. There is a calendar from 2006 and a few photos. She proudly points out a certificate that she got for being a house mother from a bishop. It is a photo copy on blue paper with her name written in with messy writing and several corrections to the spelling. She also shows me a photo of her husband, "Dead he is". Seeing a slight expression of interest on my face as I look at the photo, she rushes off behind one of the bolted doors to return moments later with a red photo album.

This really is a different world. The album is a cheap plastic one with a puffed up cushioned cover where each page folds out. A folded out page is supposed to contain four photos but many of the pages have other photos stuffed behind them. Several times a photos is in upside down but rather than correct it she turns the album around. Some of the photos have dates stamped on them going back into the early 70s. Each photo is generally something to do with the church. Either a death, a wedding, a baptism or a confirmation. I'm guessing that Yoda doesn't own a camera herself and this is the only time she actually gets photos. As we slowly go through each photo she points out which of the people are dead. It's most of them.

The mother of the baby comes back in and after a few words in Kikuyu Yoda goes out to the cookhouse. She comes back in with a big bowl of rice and another bowl containing what looks to be cabbage and a lentil type vegetable. Before I can protest she has dropped three plastic plates on the table and is serving out the food. As always she puts too much food on my plate - more so than the two other plates combined. I try to stop her but she says "Tonight no Ugali for you. Eat then bed you must." I think this is her telling me that this is the only meal for me tonight and I won't be getting fed back at the orphanage.

She plonks the plates in front of the mother, who begins breast feeding, Anne, and me, then instructs us to eat as she heads out of the room. We all silently eat. I try to eat as much as i can but half way through I"m full. Fortunately, Anne doesn't do much better. The cat is wandering around our legs meowing as we eat. The mother calls over the cat and take a spoon of her food and dumps it straight on the floor. The cat starts to eat it.

After more than 10 minutes, Yoda comes back in with arms full of dry washing. She drops it onto an empty chair then gets another plate. I assume this is for her, but she then puts it on the floor for the cat. I tell her I can't eat anymore as does Anne. I offer to take a photo of her and her great-granddaughter and she is delighted. Then she don's a green shawl (making her look even more like Yoda) and we head out of the house back towards the orphanage. All the while she is happily repeating things to herself in her gruff little voice.

When we hit the main road I tell her that she needn't walk us back and we will be okay. I thank her for dinner and she huddles off back down the road still chatting to herself. The sun is just starting to set as we enter the compound again. The watchman is there to greet us and hurries us inside. I chat with the kids for a bit, then I head back to the clinic to do some work then finally get some sleep.

This was a good day.