Blessings Home for Disabled & Crisis NurseryJun 13, 2011
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| We began the morning by driving to the Bowler residence to drop off a van full of supplies for the Blessings Home for the Disabled, including numerous instructional toys, plastic pants, school supplies, medicine, etc. We could only pack about 25% of our donations to this charity in our van, as the rest will be picked up from Blantyre once we return. While there, we also picked up a variety of African quilts made by a women’s group in Lilongwe that we can sell for them in the States. Heidi and Jan then spent the morning at the Blessings Home playing various games with the children and interacting/assisting the teachers there with the daily curriculum. Jan & Chifundo (a teacher’s aide) also performed a puppet show about the story of Noah’s Ark-I can only hope it wasn’t as lame as the one we did in Uganda. The disabled home takes up to 30 kids per day from 8 am- 4 pm, ranging from the mildly to the profoundly disabled, and the progress they are making with these children is phenomenal considering the lack of steady funds. The business people we started 4 years ago are still selling doughnuts, vegetables and knitted goods and making a small profit at that! While the ladies were spending time at the Home, Rob, Greg & Francis were able to visit the Malawi Tobacco Auctions, which is held in a warehouse 3 football fields wide. This is done daily as local farmers bring hundreds of bales in the hopes of selling as much as possible to overseas importers. It is a tough life as very few are successful enough to support their families, due to the fact that tobacco represents 60% of Malawi’s total exports and competition is fierce. After that, we went to the Bank of Malawi to perform a simple cash withdrawal-a transaction that would take no more than 3 minutes in the U.S. took us 2.75 HOURS in Lilongwe. From now on, I will approach a visit to the bank as an experience that can encompass an entire morning or afternoon and will bring a good novel I can finish in that time. After a quick lunch, we spent the entire afternoon at the Crisis Nursery-it is the only place I’ve been to in my entire life that can produce a wave of smiles and tears simultaneously. All 4 of us were able to hold and feed the babies, spend time playing with some of the 1-2 year olds and learn about their individual amazing and in some cases, heartbreaking stories. We dropped off about 8 dozen diapers and a dozen small quilts made by the Hosanna Lutheran Quilters. Leaving the nursery was difficult, but our sense of purpose and accomplishment was magnified at the same time. Minutes after we returned to the guesthouse, we experienced our first really significant power outage from 6-8 pm. Needless to say, dinner was cancelled for the evening and we kept ourselves entertained by packing Rob’s 2 large suitcases by candlelight, playing “guess how many kilos” as we added and subtracted various curios like a big game of gin rummy. When the power finally came back on, we all watched a “B” movie called China Cry, where the audio was so muffled, it should have been in subtitles anyway, for 2.5 hours before retiring for the night. I can offer no explanation why we did this, other than we were too tired to get up off the livingroom furniture. |
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