Day 2.

The start of a Day at Hope and KIndness is far from your typical - everything requires significantly more effort, from cleaning teeth, to showering, and of course the loo! But I'm sure in a couple of days we'll be well adjusted and it's business as usual (no pun intended!).

Breakfast was porridge, which apparently was salty! I wouldn't know - I don't do porridge at the best of times, and settled for a couple of mini-bananas - very sweet - gorgeous! Then filled my water bottle up by syphoning from the large filter bottled and took my daily malarone. The toilets are something else - 3 in the block - girls, boys and staff. There are 2 wooden hatches, which slide out of the way depending on your intentions! Either latrine or a "long-drop". Let's leave it there shall we!

The main event of the day is Sunday worship in the church across the road. I reserve my visits to the church for weddings & funerals, however this I couldn't wait for and was really looking forward to seeing the community - church is the life-blood of the community where they all come together to worship, communicate, celebrate and most of all sing! However, this is like no church I've ever seen - a shack made out of corrugated iron, tied onto lengths of tree branches. Back home it would be condemned and not even used to house cattle. It was an incredible experience. At one stage we were asked to come to the front and introduce ourselves. We asked if they had any questions - they replied, could we sing to them :) The only song I know is "swing low, sweet chariot", but we agreed on "Amazing Grace"… if you could call it singing! We were all struggling for the words, but John did us proud and quickly spoke the line before we sang it. It was a very uplifting experience. I met Joseph, and his wife Vinnie; Joseph only has one arm - his neighbour in a drunken rage attacked Joseph and severed his arm. He still lives door to Joseph. We met one old man (forgot his name) who has cataracts - easy to treat, but there's no money to pay for it. We'd be meeting him again tomorrow at his house.

We came back to Hope And Kindness for Sunday school (boarders only) - the children were reading & reciting stories. We were then introduced to the children one-by-one, and the children repeated " hello ….." all in time together - very very cute :) Next it was time to blow up some balloons - many hadn't seen balloons before - it was mad - fantastic fun - but mad, mad in a very nice way :) And next it was the bucket of Halibro sweets I'd brought from Costco - now they went down very very well - and just enough to go round one each :)

Lunch was next - noodles, plain & simple, with the obligatory poring of tabasco :) In the afternoon we wanted to split into groups and visit the community, walk to see some of the people we'd met at church. I was with Tania & Helen. The first house was Martha's - it was "only a short walk" of 5kms. Martha, who has TB, 2 children, no husband, and also looks after her sisters child, doesn't own a house - she rents a "house" for $6 a month. We then went to see Anna-Mourice - she also didn't own a house as it fell down in the rain earlier this year. She too was renting for $6 per month, to put a roof over her 5 children. Next was Lucas' house, who wasn't there at the time. His house wasn't complete - it had only had it's first course of mud applied. It needed 2 more before the layer of cattle manure, which binds and makes the house more solid. However, nothing was happening as he could afford to finish it. A house costs $500 to build, plus land. We'll be building one tomorrow - Grace's house. You feel so helpless. We gave some money to help pay for some rent, although it's discouraged as you don't know where the money ends up - I know that doesn't sound right, but if it ends up in the hands of the men it could be spent on alcohol. You're better off giving it to the mothers, but really it should come through the church, and through Hope and Kindness.

Everywhere we went there were children - lots and lots and lots of children, all smiling children. We'd taken sweets out with us - the children beamed with huge smiles on seeing the sweets. We were out for around 3hours visiting as many as we could in the community - and the other 2 teams were doing the same. When we came back we all shared stories of the hardship we'd witnessed. Everyone had a story to tell - we were all quite emotional.

Dinner was with the children here at Hope and Kindness school - those that lodge here, that are permanent. There's currently 34 - 18 girls & 16 boys. Dinner was rice with gram-greens (like lentils), again with dashes and dashes of tabasco. I had a big portion - but it was insignificant compared to some of the children's - they were HUGE! and they didn't leave a grain of rice :)

Next it was back to the teachers office to discuss our working week ahead. We broke down the tasks in hand and divided them up between the group. Tomorrow was going to be a group day - morning with the children as it was their last day at school before they broke for holidays, and in the afternoon we were going to build Grace a house - Grace is homeless as it fell down in the rain. Up until a few years ago there wasn't a word for "maintenance" in the Swahili - commonly they'd just leave things to deteriorate. Everyone was excited about what lay ahead :)

Next it was to divide up all the clothes we'd brought over into sizes/age groups - we needed to arrange into piles for all 131 children - boarders and day scholars. The room looked like a hurricane had passed through! It was going to be a long night! But fortunately, thanks to Rachel's folding skills from her days at Gap & Jigsaw, we were done by 23:00. The room looked fantastic, and we were very pleased with ourselves - tomorrow was going to be a great day :)

We just had enough energy for a cup and a game of cards - yes, I won, of course ;) much to the annoyance of Tania :-> Oh and a game of mozzie frying, and John spider catching in the girls room - it was HUGE!

ps.. John mentioned one of the teachers, Josephine, walks 10 miles each way to school, with her 3 yr old son who also attends the school. Josephine is paid $3 per day.