KARIBU (WELCOME) MARY'S MIND!

I’m now half way through my second week in Tanzania and I think I felt my mind rocking up a couple of days ago. The first way, I felt pretty dazed, tired, overwhelmed and a whole range of feelings of many extremes. The last few days have been much better. I no longer feel like a deer in headlights…. Though some days I still wake up and wonder where the hell I am, as I try to claw my way out of the mozzie net that goes around my bed! Will have to take a photo of that one! It’s a pretty weird feeling to try to reach for your alarm clock from the other side of a mozzie net. I know I could sleep with it on my bed but I can just see it catapulting across the room in the middle of the night as I turn in my sleep.

Anyhow, I digress! I’m now getting used to things here. I’ve only ventured outside the school three or four times in the last ten days and always with others. But right now, I want to focus on learning how it all works here and then over the next month I’ll work out the whole African thing. Besides, there are so many children and staff here, I feel like I’m still exposed to Africa, albeit a very sheltered one.

I did hear of a child today whose parents are so poor that he doesn’t get breakfast and rarely gets dinner as his parents don’t work and they just don’t have any money. I know that shouldn’t surprise me because it’s Africa but it still does – it breaks my heart. And yet it’s so common I will have to accept that I can’t try to rescue every child in that situation. All we can do here it try to educate people so that the future is different. But seeing little ones with swollen bellies, skinny legs, ragged shoes and growths on their heads or arms just devastates me. And yet they smile so brightly when you look at them, and holding your hand seems to make their day.

So I guess right now all I can do is be here, hopefully change something small by what I do in the school and improve the bigger picture. But DAMN I want to help them all!