Year 27, Day 110 - Africa

A New Routine Learned

Well a pattern has begun to emerge.
This timeline essentially summarizes the entire 10 days we spent at the orphanage...

8:30am: Breakfast.
-Bread and butter for the white folk. Rice by hand for the Africans.
-Instant coffee and homemade fresh ginger tea. YUM.

9:00am: Wash dishes.
-Using plastic buckets, harsh soap, and old canvas rice bags as scrubbers.

Lucy is easily the hardest working 11y/o I've ever met.

9:30am: "Shower"

-We attempted to uphold some standard of personal cleanliness on a daily basis.
Allow me to share the hygienic options:
1) Re-apply deodorant, brush teeth, find the least-dusty clothes.
2) Soak feet in a bucket to dislodge dirt, plus option 1.
3) Sponge bath using wet-wipes, plus option 1.

Mama Mary E demonstrating Option 2: the foot soak.

or, if you wanted to get completely down with your bad-self, you could....

4) In teams, take turns washing each others hair using COld-AsseD well water poured over your head from a 5 gallon pail.
Shampoo.
Shiver to death.
Accept the fact that your relationship with your fellow shower-companion has escalated and changed forever.
5) Follow this with a solo-round where-in you stand in the 5 gallon pail and execute a private "shower". By this I mean you either dump water on yourself bit-by-bit using the water jug... or contort your body into unnatural positions in order to submerge your limbs piece-by-piece.

I didn't think mine and Nic's relationship could get much closer... and then this took it "to the next level".

10:00am: Begin preparing lunch.

-Start re-using every one of those dishes you just cleaned.
-Dada usually took care of this, using all fresh ingredients Rehema purchased at the markets.
-Meanwhile the kids play outside, but never leave the security of the compound.

Inside the walls of the compound,
these separated the orphanage from the other houses.

One of our neighbors houses.

10:30am: Options
-Option 1) Call Rehema's friend Teshee to drive us to town.
-Option 2) Play with the kids outside.
-Option 3) Help with various chores.

2:30pm: Mandatory-Sanity-Saving-Nap
-Break-time from the hordes of grubby/grabby yet wonderful children.
-Chug bottled water.
-Its the heat of the day and so even the children are quiet and inside.
-Take time to read, journal, and reflect upon how I'm not ready for motherhood.
-Feel grateful for how privileged my life has been.
-Allow myself to miss the comforts of Canada and *gasp* England.
-Feel grateful and proud that I am in Africa, seeing and doing.
-Feel grateful that my professional choice was not to become a childcare provider.

3:30pm: Lunch time.
*Please note the amount of time that has occurred since I was last fed.... adjustment much!?
This was the menu. Daily. It included and was limited to:
-Rice.
-Unknown meat chunks.
-Unknown meat sauce.
-The biggest and most bad-ass fresh avocados.
-Fresh bananas.
-Bottled water.

4:00pm: Wash dishes. Again.
-Battle hordes upon hordes of black flies to do so.

4:30pm: Begin preparing the evening meal.
-Reuse all the clean dishes.
-Participate in 18th century domestic hell.

Dada doing the laundry for all 14 kids and 4 adults.

5:00pm - 7:00pm: Play outside.
Games include, but are not limited to:

-Tag.....Courtney is always "it".
-Push the kids on the tire swing.
-Push the kids in the wheel-barrow.
-Brush the white-person hair.
-Fight over who gets to take pictures with the cameras.
-Pose endlessly for said cameras until one of the camera owners gets tired of monitoring the game.
-Fight to repeatedly touch any electronic device within eye-sight.

7:00pm: Singing on the front step.
-These kids can shake it! Seriously. Booty bouncing and singing all over the place!

7:30pm: Move indoors because its too dark outside. 

Games include, but are not limited to:
-Coloring books

-Practicing homework: numbers and abc's

-Dice

-Go Fish (or a version thereof, depending upon the age and English level of the participants....)

-"The Long Game" aka: War.

Quiet time coloring!

9:00pm: Suppertime.
-Please refer to the daily dinner menu in order to see the daily supper menu.
-Possibly insert tomato salad and mango's.
-We use utensils, they use hands. They hover around us at the end of the meals, ready to eat whatever we leave behind.

9:30pm: Bedtime!
We see the kids off to bed by tucking them into their bunk beds and setting up their mosquito nets.

9:40pm -10:30pm: Downtime.
-Every night this time period got smaller and smaller.... the first few nights we played crib and drank wine, but after a few days exhaustion kicked in and we started going to bed when the kids did.
-Brush teeth.
-Wet-nap off dust.
-Eat smuggled fruit
-Chug bottled water
-Tuck in mosquito net.
-ZZzzzz.....

Nic, tucking in her mosquito net which I'm sure was very comfortable due to the soft African breeze that inevitably blew threw the numerous holes in it. Safety first here in Malaria-land.

2:00am: Wake up
-Because, silly you, you chugged too much water before bed.
-Climb out of the mosquito net and find flashlight without waking others. Ha.
-Luckily the orphanage recently built washrooms, and so a run to the loo wasn't the end of the world.

5:30am: Wake up
-Plot the roosters death as he screams outside of your window.
-Mentally note that a closed window in Africa does not equal the sound-proof/weather-proof equivalent of a closed window in Canada.

Repeat.