Ohhh, where to start with the last week or so of my life? Lets start with the not so fun stuff - my fever started spiking again, after disappearing for a few days (silly me! Thinking Africa would let me off so easily!).I went to the hospital and they decided that the best course of action is to drown my body in hardcore antibiotics so that on the off chance that, despite everything, this is some kind of lingering bacterial infection, it will DIE. Thus, I have a beautiful hand accessory, seen below, which the kids seem to think is a portal to fun-land aka the most fun they've ever experienced. So THAT'S an adventure.
However, the moderate up-side of the twice-daily injections is that I've moved up to the house on the hospital property, which is beautiful and right next door to the orphanage, convenient for brief visits when I miss them after all of two hours. Seriously, I have a problem.
It's wonderful being so close to the kids, who can occasionally be distracted from my cannula for whole minutes by the newest additions to our orphanage family, five baby chicks - the black one is named Sylvester, the mama is Bugs, and the others are still too indistinct to name. The four dwarves? ANYWAY. It's an excellent bribe to keep the kids behaving, because they are PSYCHED about getting to come anywhere NEAR the vifaranga, since, obviously, they are kept at as far a distance as possible most of the time. Fences within fences.
Zawadi especially needs lots of distracting because at sixteen months she is (FINALLY!) teething. She has earned the nickname of Grumplestiltskin, until that horrible wailing noise goes away any time... well, all the time. This was the reaction to my heinous action of trying to get her to smile to show her teeth. I'm awful. Also she's apparently decided to condense all her milestones into one very busy month, since she's now fully crawling, not just wiggle-worming, and pulling up to standing - she even walks with hands to help her, although, like everything else in the world, that currently makes her cry.
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| I am Grumplestiltskin! Hear me ROAR! |
So yesterday, after finally taking a day to rest to attempt to recover from the hell that is this illness, I decided to check up on the orphanage quickly before heading down to the hospital for my daily injection. This is what I found.
Yeah. That's a tree that was previously leaning OVER the orphanage, and apparently one of the mamas observed it leaning and the ground cracking above the roots - it literally was minutes from crushing the entire main room of the orphanage with most of the kids inside - and they managed to shoo the kids to the other end of the building and get some workers to come and fell the tree in the OTHER direction, across the playground and completely obliterating the fence. The kids were freaked but excited, with the exception of poor Simoni who I found wandering the halls, pantsless, muttering to himself about the big tree and DANGEROUS and bad tree, where is the fence? Poor munchkin then tried and failed to put his pants on becuase he was so distracted and upset, and started crying because really, what else adds insult to injury like being unable to put on pants? So we cuddled and eventually went outside and touched the tree and verified that no one was hurt and the tree wasn't going to hurt him now.
Sigh. My poor little scraps. Still working on conceptualizing the whole "leaving" thing - pretty sure it just can't happen. We shall see.
PS: Pump is on its way from Dar es Salaam, pipes are installed, and we are at most a week away from GLORIOUS WATER! Woo hoo!
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