Strength

I've spent a lot of my weekend walking back and forth to the main road. Because of the rain, we've had very sporadic electricity so haven't been able to cook since Friday. A lot of the places in town (Mwanza) have generators so on days without electricity the best thing to do is (if you're a wimp like me) walk to the main road, catch the dalla-dalla in to town and grab a bite to eat and catch up on emails. My diet for the past couple of weeks has been almost completely rice and bread, so I'm hoping the 2 hours (minimum!) of walking I'm doing every day will help work off all the bad food.

On my walk into town today I ran into Sabina and her family coming home from church. Sabina looked really sweet in her best Sunday dress, and it was really nice to see that she does have a family looking after her. Last week we had a meeting with Fred (the director of Hisani) and he told us that many, if not most, of the community children that come for lessons everyday are also orphans, they have just been absorbed by the extended family or neighbors. Alot of the children that come everyday are clearly not very well looked after at home, they are often really dirty and sick.

Most of the children living at the orphanage were street children from Kagera (an area with the highest HIV prevalence rate in Tanazania). Although there alot of these children are also AIDS orphans, usually the reason the children are on the streets is because they are fleeing abusive living situations. A couple of the children at Hisani were found living on their own, sometimes for years, after their parents had died. One poor boy watched his parents die only to be taken in by his grandparents who also died. Before he came to the orphanage he lived by himself for over a year; neighbors dropped off food to keep him alive but he had no other contact with people. It is truly incredible that the children are as loving and hopeful as they are.