Jostling

26th December, 2008

After a fairly busy Christmas day I was determined to chill out on Boxing Day.

I got up at 6:30am as I now do every morning to open up the Clinic. I then went back to bed.

I surfaced again at 8:00 as two little faces were peering in my door. It was Manyara (my shadow) and Peter (his shadow). The two boys were so excited to see me in the morning. As soon as they saw I was awake they came in and proceeded to grab everything in the room and say "This?" to me. That is there way of asking how do you say this in English. When I say it they repeat it. This "game" goes on for about 30 mins.

I get up, get dressed and head outside to see who else is around. Most of the kids are playing in little groups amusing themselves with their Christmas presents from the day before.

Tomorrow I will be seeing Mike and Evelyn so I need to get cracking on the website. I head back into my room to start working on it. I get about 30 mins done before the kids come in again. I try to ignore them but it is no use. If I'm typing they lean right over and put their little heads between my fingers and the screen as they watch the cursor move or the letters appear. They are pretty good readers and often will read out what I'm typing.

This is not the most conducive environment for coding so I shoo them away and lock the door. I get about another 30 mins done when they are at my window. They are showing me the cars I gave them yesterday. Manyara has already broken his with his destructive curiosity. I see what the problem is so take it apart with my Leatherman and fix it. The four boys who are watching from the window are completely enthralled. Once the car is repaired, I ignore them for a bit and they go away.

Ten minutes later they are back with more broken cars. I spend the next 30 mins repairing the cars that I can. I'm just about to start working again when lunch is served. Today it is sukuma iki and ugali again. I guess the house mothers have never heard the saying that "variety is the spice of life". Then again, if you are having to cook 2 meals a day for 50 children you'd get pretty bored of trying to be creative.

After lunch I manage to get a couple of hours work done. The website is progressing well.

About 2:30pm, the kids are back asking me to come out and play with them. I give up working for the day and head over to their courtyard where most of them are playing.

They are spread out in little pockets. Several of the boys are building houses/garages for their cars. The quality of some of them are amazing especially with the scarcity of materials. I take a seat up near the swings where several of the girls are calling out to me. Last night the kids were chastised by the house mother for calling me mathango (meaning white man). She said that I was there uncle and should be treated with respect. Now they all call me uncle. Near the swings is a small tree. Peter and Manyara race up it. Peter is particularly dextrous leaping from limb to limb, sometimes holding on with just one hand as he swings his legs up to grab another branch. They are both going so high and so fast. At one point, Manyara somersaults down a branch but he just latches on to another and does a miraculous recovery. I was sure he was going to fall. Some of the other kids aren't as good at scaling trees so they ask me to lift them up to lower branches. I do so and this starts off a wave of kids asking to go next. Even Peter and Manyara come down and ask to be lifted up. It must have looked funny as I pick up kids and suspend them from all the different low hanging branches.

Of course, when Manyara and Peter are hanging they proceed to try and kick the shit out of each other. They are always jostling each other but as soon as someone else picks on one of them they gang up and can turn away even the biggest of the other kids. Their ability to send flying kicks at each other and to take them is incredible.

Three hours later they are being served dinner. I eat with them and after that, head back to my room to get some work done on the site. I spend about 6 hours working and go to bed after midnight.

This was a good day.