Funding: +25 USD Cecilia Linde, +102 USD Susanna Wroblewski (hjälp mig göra något bra)
Funds thanks too David Sjölund and Fredrik Svedbrant
I cry as I am writing this. Tears have been coming off and on for the last hours since this event and visit of an orphanage in Kisumo, Kenya.
We are feeling great as we come from the nearby supermarket, rolling in through the gates to Mama Ngina Children's home. We feel proud, like we are heroes riding white Toyota stallions. But soon this fairytale will be switched out for the bitter harsh truth. This is a quite tough chapter. So if you don’t feel that you are up for it, just know that I cried and you’d probably be better off reading the more fun part in part 2.
We stop the nice cars. It's Mital, Robert and Vishal from Round Table Kisumo and Vishal’s family. The cars are loaded with food and some footballs, toothbrushes, soaps, washing powder and school supplies. We unload, meet the administrator Frances and put our names and a small comment in the guestbook. Then some of the 80 children come and we play some football. We still have a good feeling. The administrator shows us around. I count 4-6 people in the staff. Children are in the age range from 17 months to 18 years old. They go to school but have been abandoned or their parents were unable to take care of them. We see mostly young kids and children under the age of ten. Some kids are naked because they are beeing washed at the time. The other kids are dirty, with filthy, torn clothes. We see one red and white painted medical room which they have a nurse coming to and help out once every two weeks. The other rooms in the facility looks as they have been abandoned for years. Picture yourself the drug houses of the movie Trainspotting. It is inhumanly dirty, the smell of old sweat and pee hits us when we enter. This is not a game any more. I take a few pictures. Seeing "Have good dreams" scrabbled in red crayon on the wall. I look at the matresses, some look a bit worn but ok, others are just some old matress foam, with less than a third of the matress thickness left, totally fallen apart.
Still it is beeing used. By someone. Someone who live here. Someone who doesn’t have a family to go home to in the weekend. A real human beeing of flesh and blood, a child, who’s only little piece or scrap to call their own or home, is a worn down piece of what once was a matress. There are no bedsheets. Some beds only have a thin dirty cloth over the cold, thin, dark steelthreads that make the flat part of the bed. I walk out. I go past the others. Tears are falling down my chins.
--as I write this I cry so much again that me and Christian have a two hours long talk about what we have seen, what we do and how the world spins while this happens. --
This is no game. We are not heroes. I cry. This is real. Children have no real beds. This is not what I wanted to see. This is not the happiness. I feel like a stupid white man facing the brutal truth. So I cry and feel the hopelessness of what little we do.
We can only do so much. So we suck it in and we will go back and do something about this. We have chosen to come here and we can act now to do a little and at least give some kind of help.
We love what we do, and even though today was particulary tough, it feels good to act. So we will.
