Orphans

On Wednesday afternoon, I walked outside the school gates to get a soda at the bar and my phone rang, it was Simon explaining the latest problems with the carpenter and his varnish. As I was on the phone 2 children walked up and stood next to me. The older one, a very grubby girl greeted me with the respectful “Shikamoh” and waited. I got off the phone and asked them what they wanted in Swahili, the replied with something but I couldn’t understand any of it. I called Mary over (she attends the school’s bar) to translate for me, but her English is not great either. She said that they had come to the school for help because they are orphans and are hungry. I didn’t know what to do so I sat them down with a soda each and went to find someone who could help. I was told that I should send them away, give them nothing and not encourage them to come back otherwise we’d get hundreds of them the next day. It wasn’t going to be easy for me to do that.

I went back to the gate and asked one of the Tanzanian teachers in the bar (he was invited to dinner so was staying back with us all waiting) to come and translate a bit better. We discovered that they had no parents but lived with a sick grandmother in the next village. The 2 of them went to school in Moshono and had been begging for food since school finished at 11am, they had managed to get 2 bags of flour and sugar for their efforts even before getting to the school!

The girl said she was 10 and her name was Ruth and the boy was 8 and his name was Godlisten. We called on Gemma’s father in law to come as he is the chief of the village and he said he knew their father was killed late last year along with others in the family. We decided to drive them to their home to check out their story and assess if we could help… we being myself, Dan (another soft volunteer here) and Sebastion the Tanzanian teacher/translator plus Janet (another soft volunteer) with her car.

We found a small mudhouse with a grandmother too sick to stand and 3 other children, including a baby. After many questions we discovered that Ruth was 13 and in Class 4 with her younger sister who is 11 and the next 2 boys are in class 1 and 2… all siblings. The baby is from another mother, a friend or neighbour who died and they took him in. The father and aunts and uncles all died in a vehicle accident last year and the mother died from HIV before that. So, this poor grandmother has been left with 5 kids and no way to earn money!

Ruth is an amazing actress and very clever in her own little way, however is repeating class 4 this year and couldn’t answer a simple maths question from Sebastion. Dan and I will go back to visit and figure out how we can help them, even if we aren’t exactly meant to.