Wed 4 June 2008 - Working in a Kigali Orphanage

Having returned to Kigali and our bicycle work in limbo, we tried to be resourceful and volunteer where we might be of service. Mary Jo, another resident of the guest house where we've been staying was going over to an orphanage associated with Mother Teresa's order of nuns to spend some time with the children. We decided to tag along to play with the kids. This particular orphanage supposedly is one of the better ones in Kigali, and one of the few that adopts out to international parents. About 120 kids are housed there, most of them abandoned by their parents and a smaller fraction orphaned by the death of parents with HIV/AIDS.

The first child we encountered immediately ran up to Elliot and hugged him, barely getting his arms around his legs, and then quickly ran off. We then headed down a long, poorly lit hallway (it was almost dark inside of the hall except for some weak yellow lighting, giving the feel of some sort of set from a horror film) to see the rooms where the different age groups lived. I feel like much of our visit displayed this contrast. First you would see a child who seemed so excited to see you, but then that smile would be tempered by a feeling that somehow these kids should have had it so much better than their current situation allowed.

We spent a fair amount of time playing with the special needs children, kicking around a soccer ball and playing with a couple of puppets that Mary Jo had brought with her. The orphanage also plays home to a number of elderly residents who sat around the perimeter of the court yard and seemed to enjoy our presence as well. They had a lot of direct interaction with the children and seemed to have a calming effect on some of the more difficult kids in the group.

After the larger group of 3 year olds finished with their snack time, we were pretty much immediately mobbed by about 30 of them who all wanted to be picked up. They had all been given balloons (not the greatest idea as I had to extract several pieces of popped balloon from various kids mouths), and they were running around in a chaotic path from one of us to another, in the hopes of being tossed up in the air or spun around. I tried to carefully select which kids would get a ride, as several of them had soiled themselves and the smell of urine clung to almost all of their clothing.

The visit was heart wrenching; There were so many children who seemed so happy and so vibrant, but you also realized that many were developmentally delayed and that it was impossible that they were all receiving the attention that they need at that age. In the same moment you imagined a worse situation that could have befallen them, and then everything that they were deprived living there. You leave a place like that thankful that they are fed, housed and dressed, but wishing that they could have more than those basic needs met.