Orphanage

Today I went to the orphanage. I woke up at 645 and called a bunch of people. I have never had to/gotten so many calls in 5 minutes before in my life. In the end, it came down to 3 people. Alyssa, Eric, and me. At least not everyone flaked on me this time. We grabbed some lunch and met at the meeting spot at 8am. We didn't get moving til like 8:15 because they had to figure out how to arrange the people on the buses (we had 2 buses). We went through the city, then the scenery starting looking less urban, then it became really rural.. murky streams started appearing with stained houses and the roads starting becoming broken pavement. We finally got a bridge where the bus couldn't pass because it was too narrow/small/dangerous so we all got out and walked from there. I felt like I was in the middle of nowhere.

As we rounded the corner and entered the orphanage, we saw a dog that was really rabid. It was snarling like crazy and was quite scary I must say. I later found it that he belonged to the orphanage. The place turned out bigger than I expected. They had a big court area where one side was play structures and basketball courts while the other side had crops and geese and chickens. It was nicer than I expected, that's for sure. The first task we had to do was rearrange the chairs in the hall to create a stage and audience. So we did that and then starting bringing the kids down from the second floor. The kids all had these like "uniforms" on. It was similar to the forearm things that some people wear to avoid getting their clothes dirty, except this one was over their whole front body. The kid I picked up was kind of big so both me and Eric walked him down. His legs weren't working too well, they were wobbling and looked like they had barely any muscle control - as if they just got out of a coma or something. So we took awhile to go down the stairs and when we reached the bottom, the "father" of the orphanage just lifted the kids from under the armpits and placed him in a chair. Me and Eric just stood there looking baffled because we didn't know that they were crippled and couldn't walk. I guess because both of us was taking one arm, we didn't realize that it was actually the other person pushin the kid along and not the kid's legs at work at all. So after that whole fiasco, we got the rest of the kids down and then they started their program. It was basically a big talent show with the kids doing all sorts of things including dancing, singing, sign language + singing, magic tricks, story telling, cup tricks, yo-yo demonstrations, piano playing, etc. It was pretty cool. That took up the whole morning. We had lunch afterwards and then split up after lunch to start the volunteer work. The boys were outside and girls were inside. So Eric and I went to help King. We started by picking up misc. trash behind the building then moved on to cut and resize big branches into little tied-up piles for firewood. We did that for the rest of the afternoon. It was really hard work because the sun wasn't out. So the damp weather made the branches a lot harder to snap. To top it off, we had 2 blunt saws and 1 broken hatchet for the whole group of us (10). The hatchet was a piece of steel with a hole. Then the shaft was made from wood and just jammed into that hole -_-. We didn't even have a hammer. It was pretty sad. But then one of the guys went and got it secured with nails and stuff and it worked after that so that's good. it was a big job. We apparently got these branches by trimming the trees outside the gate so Eric had to stand on the wall, cut the trees, and hold on for dear life. It was definitely an experience to say the least. After cutting trees we took a long break and then went to interact with the children.

The children were in a room and there were volunteers playing with each one of them. Some of them couldn't really understand anything you were saying to them, one was literally having a conversation with his hand. He looked at his hand and talked to it and laughed periodically. It was crazy. A lot of them couldn't even talk and some didn't seem like they understood what people were saying to them.

It was sad. I was sad to see disabled orphans. It was really sad that I couldn't talk to them, or even really interact with them for that matter. I couldn't ask them about their life, I couldn't make any connections with them. I only sat there, stared at them tranced into their worlds, and wondered what is going to happen to these kids when the grow up. Who is going to adopt these kids? I found out that the kids get put into this "fair" when they're 18 and basically it's a fair where different factory reps come recruit these kids for simple labor tasks. That's a really sad life ahead of them and I was just so disappointed that I couldn't even listen to their stories.

On the other hand, I was really happy that even in a city where the standard of living isn't very high, there are good people in the world giving these kids a place to call home.