Struggling, self-indulgent, and sick.

So my malaria is ebbing, thankfully, and I'm moderately functional again. Lately things have been really rough - for various reasons. I'm thrilled to have gotten into LSE, and I am theoretically excited to go. I miss my family desperately, and am really looking forward to seeing them in five weeks. But every moment that I move closer to these things that I've worked for, I move farther away from my actual, on the ground work here. I have to sacrifice my day to day work, my connections with these kids, in the hope that this training will make me more capable in the long term. That makes sense, it's reasonable, but reasonable has absolutely nothing to do with how I feel right now. I am being shredded every day, when I walk on to the lawn and get tackled by a flock of kids screaming my name, when Zawadi cries and I'm the only one who can comfort her, when she giggles and says my name, when they tell me she calls for me when I'm not there. I. am. shredded.

We've been having managerial struggles - first getting the hospital to agree to weekly preventative care visits, which they did grudgingly and I strongly suspect they will stop after I leave. Some of the mamas... we've taking big steps with hygiene and nutrition, and then I will walk in in the evening and find eight kids eating from the same spoon, again, and kids begging for water and not getting it, an eight month old falling and hitting his head on concrete and being left to cry for fifteen minutes until the woman working can be bothered to get up and see why he's upset.

These problems are fixable, with money - with a few thousand dollars a year to hire a staff manager and another one or two thousand to hire more everyday staff, especially on the night shift. But I don't have it, and the idea of spending tens of thousands of dollars on graduate school, and living in London, and, I don't know, my life the way it was? just makes me nauseous. If I were staying in the US, at least I know I could register as a nonprofit and transform my metalwork business into a vehicle to fundraise for the orphanage, as I was planning to. Getting accepted when I wasn't expecting to has thrown a slight wrench in these plans. And now I sound like a whiny idiot, because of course it's a huge honor and why the hell did I apply if I didn't want to get in? But look.

This is the first time she had ever been inside a residential house. In her life. I don't want it to be the last.

 

Even if I spent my two years at LSE, happened to meet the love of my life, moved back to Tanzania and lived here for three years, got married and adopted her, Z would be school aged by the time she was finally mine, even in the EXTREMELY unlikely scenario laid out above. It's not about changing my work - it's about feeling like I'm sacrificing these kids' futures in exchange for the possibility that I could help some other kids more down the line. And rationality be damned, I'm not sure I can do that, and I'm not sure I have any other choice.