Amani Children's Home

Since I have departed my adopted home land for 7 months of Tanzania, I guess it is a good time to explain why I was residing there for such an extended period of time.

While I travel, I am always on the look out for organizations that put money to good use.  When I was backpacking through Africa in 2004 I came across Amani Children's Home while spending a few days in Moshi.  It was a small rented house with one room set up as a classroom and another room crammed wall to wall with bunk beds where the children slept 2 – 3 per bed.  Outside was a makeshift kitchen with about 30 kids running barefoot around the grounds.  I spent some time talking to the young woman who was coordinating efforts at the time and she explained to me their situation, needs, and aspirations.  As a place that seemed very resourceful with what they had, they were still in dire need of more support.

After I returned State-side in 2005 I stayed in touch with Amani, spread the word about the organization, and raised a bit of money for them each year by rendering services I shouldn't mention on this blog because the government may be listening and I am sure I didn't do the taxes correctly.  As the years went by I always thought it would be great to get back there and spend some time volunteering and this was that opportunity. 

Returning in 2012, within the span of just 8 years they had raised enough money to buy an entirely new large plot of land which housed a large complex with four classrooms, library, cafeteria, staff offices, girl’s and boy’s dorm rooms, enough land for a soccer field, basketball court, and playground and was now home to just under 100 children.  It was extremely gratifying to see how well used the money they had raised through private donations was being used.  On top of that, all the kids looked happy.

So here is my bit on poverty in East Africa:

Street children are endemic in East Africa and especially Tanzania.  With an average daily income of $1.50 and a population of over 46 million, it is one of the poorest countries in the region.  Yes, things are cheaper and $1.50 can get you a bit of food but it won't put a roof over your families head, take care of medical expenses, put your children through school, etc...  Severe poverty along with a host of other issues, including losing parents to HIV or an abusive home especially at the hands of step-parents, leave many children with no choice but to turn to the streets and things aren't any easier there.  On the streets, they are sexually abused, beaten, and robbed by older groups of street kids.  The local community and police offer no helping hand seeing the children as thieves and nuisances and often turn to beating the children as well, sometimes severely.  

The least to say the government’s infrastructure for anything is severely lacking.  They have a hard time constructing a straight road much less taking care of children living on the streets or even wanting to.  Luckily NGO’s have moved in to try and alleviate some of the pain but it's like putting a band-aid on a massive leak however for the few kids who do get helped it can make a huge difference in their lives.  This is what Amani does.

Some of the boys pose for picture outside Amani with Kilimanjaro in the background.

I had two main job duties at Amani.  Since I speak the English good and had previously taught English in Japan, they thought I would make a good fit for English club teacher.  Since I had previously trained astronauts, they also thought I would work well with the special needs children. 

Knuckle sandwiches served with every meal.

Taking the reigns as the English club teacher was a new task to itself.  With no curriculum to go by, I could do whatever I could come up with for class.  As a tip for any international teachers, bingo is a solid go-to game in any part of the world especially when hungover.  The kids were surprisingly well behaved but as with any new teacher especially one who doesn’t have a firm grasp of Swahili, they will definitely see how much they can get away with.  At the beginning, I made a cheat sheet with useful Swahili phrases for the classroom which had varying degrees of success.  While one would climb on top of the table I would look at my notes to see how to say "Get down!".  When I looked up to say "Get down!", a different one would be going through the book cabinet, and when I looked down to say "Clothes the cabinet!" another one would be yelling out of the window.  When I looked down to say "Stop yelling!" another one would be.... and so on.  Luckily before I had my Swahili figured out, I did learn that they do understand being locked in the time out room or better yet being made to work with the maintenance guy shoveling rocks and that worked quite well as a deterrent.  If all else failed, luckily in Africa, headlocks are still an acceptable form of punishment especially when bingo got out of control.    

My other main responsibility was working in the special needs class.  We had a group of about ten kids who were either dyslexic, slow learners, or who had just never learned how to learn.  If you are in need of learning the virtue of patience, this is the place to be where productivity is based on months instead of days.  Sometimes it felt like a child was never going to learn how to even recognize the letter 'A' and then all of a sudden one day they were writing the ABC's.  This didn't happen often but when it did it was gratifying to say the least.  

Apart from the group in the special needs class we had two boys with severe mental disabilities.  One was Daudi who suffers from Autism along with a host of other disorders giving him a very unique personality.  He was left at Amani's front door many years ago and without anyway of communicating where he came from, Amani is his permanent home.  Daudi uses a set of vocalizations depending on his mood that ranged from low grunts to high pitch shrieks that echo through the halls.  It was always funny when tour groups came in on the weekends and to watch the looks on their faces when Daudi was making his noises that rang throughout the building.  Some of them would get that "I am kind of scared but don't want to show I am scared because I am at a children's home" look.  When I was giving the tours I would just tell them some children were being punished for doing poorly in the nuclear physics workshop and they would vaguely nod their heads in mild comprehension.

When working one-on-one with Daudi my main goal was just to keep him from taking his clothes off and not mixing up the different colors of silly putty.  That drives me crazy.  Whether he was throwing rocks at tour groups that came in on Saturdays or going naked down the slip-n-slide, everyone loved him.

Daudi working on some chalk art on the cafeteria floor.

On the other end of the spectrum was Lengai whose general attitude can best be summed up in the picture below:

Lengai was born on the streets to a mentally challenged and drug addicted mother who died shortly thereafter and had a childhood that is impossible to comprehend.  He had a love-hate relationship with a few of the staff and a hate-hate relationship with everyone else.  He kept everyone on their toes with severe mood swings not sure if he was going to give you a big bear hug, bite you, or completely ignore you.  He definitely had the stickiest fingers out of all the kids and had a great eye for taking exactly the thing you didn't want him to take.  As soon as he saw that you were onto him, and if you didn't grab his hands in time, whatever the item was went down the front of his pants and no matter how valuable it was to you, you didn't want it back after that.  My favorite was when he got his hands on a laptop and buried it outside to hide it so he could sell it later to buy some candy.  I would value a dirt covered laptop at around 1 pack of gummie bears, 3 blow pops, 5 pixie sticks, and 2 bottles of coke. 

Aside from those two roles, myself and the other four volunteers were also relegated the duties of organizing games and events especially during school holidays which usually amounted to controlled chaos.  That being said, for a home full of street children, they were no more scuffles than your average family household and myself being from a family of one, there were few.  We tried to give the kids as normal environment as possible walking the line between big brother and disciplined teacher.  Sometimes a kid would just come up under your arm to walk down the hall or come plop in your lap while sitting outside during lunch.

Of course, the kids had their own games they played but we introduced some of our childhood favorites  as well that included twister, slip-n-slide, and dodgeball.  Although the slip-n-slide was my favorite to participate in, dodgeball was my favorite to watch.  We converted one end of the cafeteria into a dodgeball court giving it pretty tight quarters to evade the ball in and laid out the rules of the game telling them not to intentionally aim for the head.  Inevitably this was their favorite target.  Without much room to move in, the kids would run back and forth against the back wall trying to avoid getting hit.  However, occasionally a ball would come flying across at super sonic velocity and squarely hit an unsuspecting victim on the head.  Since the victim was usually pressed against the back wall, his head would then ricochet off the solid concrete behind him sending the entire cafeteria into a laughing frenzy as he fell down to the ground holding both sides of his head.  We always gave the thrower two points for that.  The nurse was never too happy after an afternoon of dodgeball or slip-n-slide and we were told we couldn't play it again.  But we did.  It wasn't like I could get fired.

The boys trying to remember 'right' and 'left' in English.

Home-made giant slip-n-slide was a hot afternoon favorite.  Of course I joined in after I put the camera down.

Dodgeball or death-ball depending on which end of the throw you were on.

Amani also had other more organized extracurricular activities for the kids to partake in.  They scheduled soccer tournaments amongst the children who lived there as well as against outside schools.  Every once in a while, we would have a staff vs kids game.  Even with the referee on our side allowing us to use our size to push the kids around, they still usually beat us.  

The kids also loved acrobatics and had a great instructor who came a couple times of week to work with them for performances.  Whether he was there or not they always enjoyed practicing and putting on a show.  I tried to get them into tightrope walking and we set up a wire across a river giving them a safe place to fall when practicing however some staff stopped our efforts due to the crocodiles in the water below.  I thought it would just be a good deterrent to keep the kids on the wire. 

After my time at Amani was up and it was time to leave, it was difficult to say goodbye knowing that I would probably never see these kids again.  They don't have iPhones or laptops to stay in touch through e-mail or Facebook but if they learned half as much from me as I learned form them, I'll be satisfied.  I felt accomplished with the time I had spent there and knew it was time to get a move on some things were becoming a bit too normal:

1.  When a short Japanese man is teaching a group of young black children how to play basketball and you don't think that is odd.

2.  When a kid has been wearing a superhero outfit for the past week as his daily outfit because somehow he got into the costume chest and you don't give it a second glance.

3.  When kids are playing with their food and eating with their hands, instead of offering them a spoon, you wish that you could eat like that.

Along with all the great kids I got to spend tons of time with, I also made some long-lasting friends with the other staff and teachers.  I was invited to a huge Tanzanian wedding that was decorated like a mix between Rainbow Brite and Star Trek with as much hot beer as you could drink and as much goat as you could eat.

I got to tag along with some friends who went to a rally cross and since it was my first one, I wasn't sure of bystander etiquette but in Tanzania it seems that it was ok, if not encouraged, to interfere with the cars as they raced by.

It's not an everyday occurrence to get a Masai villager and rally car in the same shot.

Since this blog focuses on Amani, here is their link in case you would like to read more about what they do or help out in anyway:

Amani Children's Home: http://www.amanikids.org

Obviously, if you have any other questions you can always ask me also.

Hope everyone is doing well.

Peace out,
Jb

Food for Thought:  If you are in Africa eating dinner and you don't finish all your meal, what do you do if your mom says you need to finish it because there are starving kids in Africa?