May 16, 2011 & May 17

Jambo!

Today at the Boona Baana home we read books to the kids and helped them with their reading and then the kids taught us how to dance and after that we played some soccer (or football as they call it). I found out today that Beatrice, the home’s Mamma has only been with the Boona Baana kids for five years and that was a long time for a Mamma to stay, which makes me realize that the kids don’t have a whole lot of stability when it comes to parental figures. The kids are on their own for a lot of the time and take care of themselves for the most part. This was evident when a little neighbourhood girl was at the home for our book club one day and stubbed her toe and two seconds later one of the older girls, who is 13, from the home was comforting and rocking her as she cried. She already takes on a mothering role for the younger children. Although the situation in an orphanage creates more of an opportunity for this type of role formation, the family roles in Africa are different from those in Western countries. Children have a lot more responsibility in Africa including taking care of younger children and helping their parents with the maintenance of the house and income. It is very common to see children in their early teens or even younger, carrying babies and toddlers on their backs down the street. Generally, children in Canada and the United States have far less responsibility and are encouraged to remain dependent children for longer periods of time. I believe that responsibility at a younger age is ideal for living in a country such as Africa because there are a lot more daily tasks and obstacles to take into consideration in a day than there is in Western cultures. For example, water needs to be collected each day to do laundry, dishes, and to drink. Food needs to be gathered or bought frequently due to limited refrigeration and the infrequency of affordable and available childcare creates the need to depend on your own children to look after the younger ones. The down side is that the increased responsibility cuts into the amount of time kids have to just be kids, but these are some of the many factors that contribute to family roles in Africa and why children take on more responsibility at a young age than children in Western cultures.

Tues May 17, 2011 (Day 17)

Habari za asubuhi? Nsuri sana!

Today was the last day of Swahili lessons which is sad because they were fun, but I believe that I now have the foundation I need to be able to communicate better with locals and to be able to increase my vocabulary on my own and through conversations with others. Today we had planned to go to the KidzCare Orphanage and spend the night, but now we have to just go tomorrow for the day because there was no evacuation plan in place for the night time with a driver on site in case of emergencies. Instead I spent a lot of the day reading Pete Ondeng’s book “Africa Matters” and getting my blog set up. We also went into town today and on the way back we asked our cab driver, Iddy, if we could stop at his house to buy some rice from his wife. Iddy invited us in to see his house and it was really interesting and neat to see the inside of his house because it was basically just a plot of land with small concrete rooms situated randomly with an outside kitchen area in the middle. The doors to the rooms were curtains, the floors were dirt, and the walls of the rooms were fairly bare except for a picture of the president of Tanzania and a calendar (Iddy's into politics). I got another glimpse of family structure when Iddy explained that all the people in his home lived there permanently. Iddy lived with his wife, son, stepmother, nephew, sisters in law, and brothers (and possibly more). The size of the families in Africa are larger than in Canada and they all take care of each other by splitting the cost of rent, food, and other expenses. We talked with him a bit about the differences of family structure between Africa and Canada and explained that we have small families that live together and he just responded by saying “Well, it’s Africa!” which I thought summed it up pretty good! The rice we bought from his wife was only 5,000 shillings for about 3-4kg.