A Different Kind of Soccer Mom

I think I was made for this.

Baby Michael (or Maike, as his under-5 card calls him) has joined the long list of children who have captured my heart.  I can tell what he wants just by how he cries. He smiled at me for the first time yesterday morning. We were sitting in the living room, and he was joyfully refusing to even consider eating his bottle. Morning is his favorite time. The earliest rays of sun blasted through the fluttering curtains to dance across his face as he cooed and babbled on, and then he smiled at me.

Elias is my new star student, and if you’ve read any of last year’s blogs then you know how out of character that is for my former delinquent. He’s excelling and learning at a remarkable speed, and he really enjoys helping the others learn. Surprisingly enough, he is a pretty decent little teacher. He helps them through there workbook pages the same way that I help them—explaining the instructions and providing an example without giving them the answers. I’m impressed.

A few days ago, David and I ventured out the front door just as the sun was setting. Some of the neighbor kids were walking home in a group. One of them was carrying a large, flat, round tupperware lid. I asked if I could see it for a moment, then tossed it to him like a frisbee. That was all it took.

It was an outreach opportunity I have longed for, and I rejoice over the chance to love on the children whose faces are usually on the other side of the fence from me.  It’s a strange dynamic; the only difference between “our” kids at the orphanage and “those” kids on the street is location. Our kids’ parent(s) died, and that tragedy thrust them into fortune’s way. They have plentiful food, clothing, shelter, education, and anything else they need. That is quite often not the case for their village counterparts.

Now, once our daily work is done and if circumstances allow it, we meet those village kids of an evening on the tired dusty roads that winds around the orphanage. It puts us in a beautiful position for teaching and interacting with them. They quickly picked up on the rules—if you can’t play nice, then you can’t play. No pushing, shoving, name-calling, picking-on-the-younger-kids, or otherwise acting out. When someone falls down, the game stops as someone helps them up. Our names are David and Meghan, not “musungu.”

It’s quite a different experience to walk down the main road into the Boma now, because when children greet us, we actually know their names. Juliet, Mabel, James, and Kabuta live in the white house on the left. Albert, the kind-hearted ringleader and all-around big brother figure of the group, lives in the house on the corner. Several of the littlest children are grandchildren or grandnieces to one of the kitchen ladies from last year, Mercy. Maikeke was initially the bully of the group, but after a couple of days he simmered down. He always wears the same blue shirt. Matete looks like he was placed on a taffy stretcher—he has that lanky, growing-too-fast look that some teenage boys get, but his is back-shadowed by a likely history of protein deficiency and general malnutrition. Joseph has an impressively large ringworm across the back of his head. Rosa’s skirt was ripped across the front, but she sat in my lap and let me mend it for her. Marita is my favorite, though the JuJu (witchcraft) necklace nestled between her collar bones is a constant reminder of the very dark world these children live in. The list goes on and on. They are dirty and hungry and probably contagious, but I love them.

There are a million other stories I would love to share with you, but if I tried to write them all down then cyberspace would probably overload and just spontaneously combust, and we can’t have that. Just take a moment, close your eyes, breathe in deep, and imagine that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

I get to do that every day.

And when I open my eyes, I’m still there.