Day 30 v2.0

Sigh. CANCEL emergency...for now.

I had a meeting with the founder of Dickson for an hour and a half today. Here's the gist of it. He is going to talk to the children and the house mother and he is going to give her another warning to the house mother (assuming the children don't tell him something horrific). It's really hard to wrap your head around I'm sure (it's hard for me and I've been here twice now) but what we consider child abuse is actually the norm here. I asked John about it last night and he said that when he was growing up, it was very unusual to go home from school without having been beaten by the teacher. Everyone got caned every day (as in beaten with a cane/switch/stick). Matheka says that because the house mother grew up in a children's home herself, one that was really physical with the children, she has some growing to do. He said that the children tend to exaggerate when together, that they could be referring to past incidences that have been addressed, etc. etc. I begged him to at least have a meeting with the children with me present so we can get to the root of this and he said he's going to do his best to see that it happens before I leave on Sunday.

Matheka is a pastor. He uprooted his family from (wife and two kids) from Holland so that he could build a church, a boys center and a children's home in the 3rd world, underdeveloped nation that he grew up in. I trust him and believe in him. I wouldn't have come back if I didn't. Although it was very hard (and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it), I have to trust him and believe he is doing and will do what's right. Further, he claims the house mother has dramatically improved the children's school work and English, so she is having some positive influence. I basically ignored her today and will continue to do so for the rest of the trip. I cannot look that woman in the eye knowing what she did. She had a warning in the past and to me once is one time too many when it comes to beating a child, but again, that's not the case here. If upon his investigating Matheka finds that the beatings were grossly excessive, he'll dismiss her, but if it's just the routine kind of beating, he's willing to give her one more warning. He was also telling me though that when he counsels married couples within his church that are dealing with physical abuse sometimes he'll tell a couple they need to separate and sometimes he'll suggest they work through it. Now, again, for me, there is no working through it. You do not beat your spouse. Here, if you do it once or twice in the heat of the moment and vow never to do it again, apparently it's ok. Again, 3rd world, different culture. Think mob justice, corrupt police, and starving little children on the streets. It's a different world here. That said, I don't see how I can forgive this woman. I have been forgiving of the other mothers for occasionally caning the children because I've chalked it up to culture, but this goes far above and beyond what I can forgive. The children have been pulled off the streets in the hopes of a future, not beatings. Matheka stressed to me that his intention is not to just give food and education to these children because if that were the case then his work is done and he'd go home. He wants to help rehabilitate these children. I believe him and thus will trust in his judgment, but I was honestly ready to slap her in the face today. I will reserve from threatening her until I meet with Matheka and the boys simultaneously and thus get the full story in front of Matheka, but if it's true (and I believe, at least mostly, that it is) then I will tell the house mother that when I return next year, if she's still there and I heard she laid so much as a finger on one of the children, that I'll grab a strap myself and beat the shit out of her. I was thinking about it last night and she's lucky I don't do it this time. What's she going to do? Hit me back? Call the police? They don't come when there are bodies on the road, you think they're going to come when a house mother says a mzungu beat her up?

Speaking of being mzungu, it's insulting how much deference we get here. Remember that I'M the foreigner, and yet I get more respect and trust than any Kenyan. I never have to check my bag before going into a store, I get let into places that Kenyans don't, and I'm the first to be helped (assuming someone comes to actually help). It's pretty sad. This nation is in a horrible state.

Matheka apologized to me profusely for being in this situation. He said he's mortified that I should even have to deal with this. He repeatedly talked about how much shame this nation has brought him, from mob justice to the violence this past year to the street kids. He wants to rebuild Kenya to what it was before he left and not see it go down the same road Rwanda has. During our meeting I found out from Matheka that one of the boys that was recently at Onesimus was the victim of mob justice. In order to hide the evidence, he swallowed the gold chain he stole. The mob cut him open to take it back. One of the volunteers at Onesimus purchased his casket for them.

Aliens are landing in Baltimore tomorrow.

So, as much as it pains me, I have to trust him to handle it.

While I was writing this Chris (Jurjanne's husband) called me to see what went down and he has made me feel a lot better too. He and Jurjanne are staunchly for getting rid of the house mother because they too have heard some things and would rather be safe than sorry. They get back Sunday so we'll be able to figure things out. I'm really so happy they're around.

Last night there were ants crawling around on the toilet seat. And there was a lizard in the kitchen this morning. And monkeys on the roof and in the garbage all day long.

I went to Dickson late because I had to get stuff done this morning. I went to 5 different photo shops to see about developing some pics for the kids. I has quoted everywhere from Ksh20 per picture to Ksh60 per picture. I got the last woman down to 20 by saying "How much to have a picture developed?" and she said "Ksh30" then I said "What if I do 50?" and she said "Ksh25" and then I said "What if I do 100?" and she said "Ksh20". I knew that the price was 20, but the only way to get her down was to bargain in increments. Had I started with 100, Ksh25 would have been the lowest she'd go. It's such a game here. I hate it. I had 100 pics on the CD that I took so obviously I was going to get 100 regardless, but knew if I bargained in chunks that I'd get a better deal. It took me 2 visits and 11 weeks total, but I think I've finally got the system down here.

I got to Dickson and the staff was having another massive meeting. This one was the regular weekly meeting whereas on Monday it was the meeting to catch the founders up on what's been going on while they were gone. Also, this meeting went long because of the accusations against the house mother. Ria and Matheka used the meeting as an opportunity to reinform and reprimand everyone. So again I was with the kids for 3 hours. Luckily one of the women from Onesimus has a friend visiting from Holland so that chick helped me out with the little ones. I've picked up on the teacher's habits and learned to really drag things out. Today I bought them potatoes at the kiosk by Dickson and the potatoes come 5 in a bag, so first I took them all the way to the other end of the route we normally walk, then made them collect 5 rocks to trade for the 5 potatoes in their bags and then after they ate the potatoes we practiced throwing those 5 rocks (and others) over the wire. So a 10 minute walk and munch fest turned into an hour outing.

Strangers here love to shake hands. I work in the slums of Mombasa. I have shaken more filthy hands than George W. Bush. It's a different kind of filth, but you get the point. I use so much hand sanitizer and wash my hands so much here that I'm going to have to wear my nighttime moisturizing gloves every day for at least a month when I get back.

Funnily enough, I realized today that there's something I really miss that I don't think any of us really think about. I miss Googling and Wikipedia. How many times a week do you Google something or use Wikipedia. It's a fast, cheap way to get answers. I have so many things I wonder throughout the day from how far my commute is to what the population of Kenya is to games to play with children to the story of mangoes. I would just randomly Google these throughout the day and have my answer within a few minutes (or, if not the full answer, at least a satisfactory one). Here, all those thoughts go ignored. I try to list them in my pad, but it takes so long to do a simple search that I've given up. So ya. Easy information is something that one misses after a while. I thought for sure I'd be consumed with my forced celibacy of the body that I forgot about the celibacy of my mind.

Because this has been such a long post, I'm going to put this last bit at the end so you can skip over it if you want. I'm reading "A Tale of Two Cities" right now and Charles Dickens is obviously a much better writer than me and he has these 3 passages that really spoke to me. They describe the conditions here in Mombasa so well that it's scary.

The first passage describes what would happen here. I've seen it happen, albeit not with wine.

"A large cask of wine had been dropped and broke in the street...All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had damned it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing, the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish."

The fact that they were licking up wine from the streets of London was not enough to stop these people and it would not stop the people of Mombasa.

"...Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere, Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomies in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil."

The starvation here is in your face at every corner. Begging kids, emaciated elderly, and families living in mud huts that are grilling a few ears of corn for all 7 of them.

Regarding what will happen to an accused:

"Ah!" returned the man, with relish; "he'll be drawn on a hurdle to be half hanged, and then he'll be taken down and sliced before his own face, and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on, and then his head will be chopped off, and he'll be cut into quarters. That's the sentence."
"If he's found guilty, you mean to say?" Jerry added, by way of proviso.
"Oh! they'll find him guilty" said the other. "Don't you be afraid of that."

This sums up mob justice and what happens if you escape the crowds and are then convicted by "the system". Mind you that in the system here you are guilty until proven innocent.

To end on a good note, Manu was in a cuddly mood this afternoon, so I just sat and held him while we had a "conversation" for like 10 minutes. It was pretty wild because I don't really understand what he says and I don't think he even knows what he's saying most of the time, but we had an exchange of English, Swahili, and gibberish for a solid 10 minutes. It was by far the highlight of my week.