3 February 2010

It surprises me that it has taken me this long to write about the Mosque Man. Down the road from my house by the market we have a local mosque. It is actually quite cool because the imam broadcasts all his calls to prayer over loud speakers so the entire neighborhood can hear it. The problem is that the morning call to pray usually begins at about 4:30am! The stupid loud speaker wakes me up every morning. But that isn’t even the worst part; the prayer usually lasts until about 6:30am. Two whole hours of prayer that doesn’t even make sense to anyone here because it is in Arabic. The prayer also includes what I believe is singing but sounds more like moaning and grunting for about 30 minutes. I hope that everyone understands that I respect all religions and their right to practice, but after the first week of waking up every morning at 4:30 the situation becomes quite frustrating. Thus my housemates and I have started calling the imam “Mosque Man” whenever we discuss our lack of sleep. I suppose giving him a nickname may be a bit rude, but it is quite cathartic. It is better than our other discussions of how to solve the Mosque Man problem, which involve disconnecting the electricity to the mosque so he simply cannot broadcast it in the morning. One morning the power did actually go out during the prayer to my relief, but unfortunately came on again about 20 minutes later so the prayer continued. From what I understood about Islam and their five daily calls to pray, they are each supposed to last less than 10 minutes (but correct me if I am wrong it may be longer), so it makes me wonder how this short process is elongated into a two-hour session. I guess all I can really do is either hope to sleep through it or learn to live with it.

When spending time at the Baby Home simply observing the daily routine between the Mama and the children it is amazing to find how smoothly things actually run. Every minute of the children’s day is scheduled into a neat and repetitive routine, so that the staff know exactly what they are supposed to be doing. On a good day it doesn’t even seem like the volunteers are needed because the Baby Home makes sure to employ enough staff to complete all the necessary tasks, therefore volunteers are simply extra helpers. We seem to be more a form of entertainment and distraction than required help. Being at an orphanage that runs so well and has so much help sometimes makes me wonder if I am actually more needed somewhere else. Yesterday I was reminded why we are needed here. I was discussing the youngest babies, a set of twin Shalom and Charles, with Amy, who is the director of the Baby Home. Shalom (girl) and Charles are 3 months old now, but came to the Baby Home at 1 month. The twins’ family went to Social Welfare out of concern for the children because the mother had left home, leaving the babies with their old grandparents. The family is incredibly poor and was unable to buy proper baby food, so they had been feeding the babies whatever they had around at the time, mostly tea with a few odd bits of fish and potatoes! As you can imagine the babies were not doing well on such a diet. The grandparents were sent to the Baby Home, but Amy said she could not take any more babies because we already had 53 (which was 3 over their legal limit of 50). She went to the home with the family, bringing milk, bottles, and tablets to sanitize believing that she could simply teach the grandparents how to care for the twins properly. Upon seeing the home and the twins Amy realized that she had no choice, the babies would die if they did not come to the Baby Home. The house was filthy having no sanitation or running water, there wasn’t even a place clean enough to make a sterile bottle. The twins were in an even worse condition, at a month old each weighted about 2lbs (from what I heard they were a heartbreaking sight). Amy decided to take the babies home with her limit or not because they were not going to survive there much longer. Now they are doing much better. Shalom is quite a bit bigger than her brother, Charles, but they are both over 9lbs. Unfortunately the situation is still quite difficult with the family because the agreement with the family when the twins arrived was that they should go home when they reach 7lbs because we were at capacity. This issue of going home needs to be addressed within the next week, either the grandparents can take them home and try to care for the twins or they can relinquish their rights and make them available for adoption. Either way I hope they continue to be happy and health because they are truly beautiful and sweet babies, but I would rather they don’t leave the Baby Home. Every time I am on the early morning shift I sneak away into the Tiny Babies House for 9:30am so that I can give Shalom her bottle. I love feeding her because it gives me a break from the noise and chaos of the older children, and she always falls asleep in my arms right at the end of her bottle.

Hearing a story like Shalom and Charles reminds me how important it is to have a place like the Baby Home. There is one other orphanage in the area that accepts young babies, since the Baby Home was opened about 3 years ago they had not received any new babies. Now that we are at capacity they have started receiving babies again, and unfortunately are not doing very well. They have had 7 babies die in the last three months, and their justification is that they are too small (2lbs). But as seen with Shalom and Charles just because they are 2lbs doesn’t mean they are necessarily going to die. They need the proper love and care, and this is what the Baby Home provides. The volunteers make it possible because provide all of the funding with our rent and fundraisers. Amy also explained to me why she decided to open a Baby Home in Mwanza. A few years ago (before the Baby Home was opened) when a new baby’s mother died or couldn’t care for the child they simply lived at the hospital until they are 2 or 3 years old when they were old enough to go to an orphanage. The problem is that the hospital does not have any system at all. They children are often just forgot about. They stay in the nurses’ station or linen closet and get spare bits of food or milk whenever there is some. If they are really lucky when a new mother is in the hospital nursing her own baby she will also feed some of the other babies that are just lying around. It boggles my mind that it is possible to just put a child aside like that, but it happens all the time here. The Baby Home is a necessity for these children to survive, and as a volunteer I am helping make that possible. I guess because I see the effects of the Home on daily basis (50 happy and healthy kids) it is easy to forget what it would be like without it. To remind myself how we have helped these kids I simply look at the arrival pictures. It’s hard to believe that some of the fattest kids at the orphanage (Musa and Adamu) were so skinny when they arrived. I guess I am needed here.