This orphanage is nothing like I thought it’d be. When I decided to go to an “orphanage”, I imagined large rooms filled with beds and kids dressed in rags and eating meager rationed meals. But it’s more like this:
We live in a large stone house with bars over every window and door (they were robbed a few times), and 7 bedrooms; the boys in one room, Donna and Josh have their own room, Deb and Dave have their own room, the babies are all in one room, the volunteer girls get their own room, and the girls get 2 different rooms, and each room has its own bathroom. The volunteer boys sleep in the other house. We eat meals in the huge kitchen at 2 plastic tables, one with chairs and the other with benches where the kids sit at. We use a dishwasher and wash the cooking dishes by hand, and we all have to eat every crumb on our plates—no wasting anything! If we don’t, we wrap it in cellophane and put it in the fridge to eat for the next meal. After every meal, Dave reads a Bible story, puts on a Bible story tape, or separates them into teams for Bible quizzing.
The food here is kinda decent. For breakfast we have a very cheap version of Cocoa Puffs called Choco Puffs that we eat at least every other morning (I’m getting sick of them now), pancakes, crepes about once a week (sooo good!), or eggs with peppers and onions. For lunch and dinner we have sandwiches, rice and beans about every day, spaghetti, salad, cooked veggies, and various disgusting concoctions made from the donated 32 bags of lentils.
The kids each have a pair of crocs that they wear around everywhere, and hand-me-down clothes that sometimes actually match, which they wear until they’re visibly dirty. We do use washers and dryers, but have to put in a full load. They have lots of games, puzzles, Kinex building toys, some stuffed animals, a few bikes, 5 bookshelves full of all kinds of books, a small TV in the sala (living room) and apparently someone donated a WII and some games (Mario!). They also have a large cabinet filled with movies and DVDs, which they’re digitalizing onto a hard drive so they can pick movies from a menu, as the physical movies are getting moldy.
The babies’ diapers aren’t to be changed unless they’ve pooped or are really full of pee, and wipes are only used on poop; yet they go through a thousand diapers a month! We put them down for two hour naps twice a day, which is my semi-quiet free time. During these hours, I do devotions and pray for an hour, shower, take a nap (not nearly as often as I’d like), get online, read, or help with meals. The bambinos each have a different colored bottle assigned to them, filled with this powdered milk called “replacer” mixed with water, which everyone drinks. They also each have an individual crib, which is nice. The Steukenbergs who ran the orphanage before Dave and Deb were very blessed to have quite a few churches that supported them. When they left two years ago to take care of Deb’s grandmother, leaving Deb and Dave (newly-weds of one year) to run the orphanage, the churches had new administration by then and decided to pull out to spend their money on other non-profit organizations, so there is less money now.
The internet here sucks, and we have an allowance of a certain number of bytes each day. I was not banking on this when I came. So, I only have a short amount of time to be online each day, never at a specific time, if I even DO get to get online. That’s why I’m typing this on my laptop, which I’ll hook up to the Ethernet cord and post on my blog when I’m finished.
Their yard is very nice; along with the exotic foliage, they have nice rocks to climb on, a jungle gym with slides and swings, a trampoline, an in-ground (but unheated) pool, and berry bushes that they like to stuff their faces from.
They have two dogs, Cheespa and Cody. Cheespa was “fixed” but apparently not well enough, as she gave birth to 4 puppies right before I came. She drowned one in the rain and ate it, and stopped taking care of the runt which died the day after we brought him inside. The runt was too adorable for words. He was black and fuzzy, with a head too big for his tiny body. We fed him replacer milk with a syringe, and put him in a plastic crate with some towels and a heating pad. He was smart, as he refused to pee in his sleeping area, so he kept escaping to go on the floor, and then crying for attention. He was an absolute attention whore of a puppy! We kept him in our room for a night so we could take care of him, and every time he got out to pee, he’d cry at the top of his tiny lungs to wake us up so he could crawl in our laps and nuzzle his head in our arms, as if we were his pseudo-mommies. We found him as cold as ice one morning, so we put him on the heating pad and covered him up with towels. He had a few syringes full of milk, but his little body had had enough. Josh buried him in the woods.
Cheespa 7 years old and has messed up hormones, which explains why she’s such a horrible mother. She walks around when her puppies cry for her, and rarely sits still for them to nurse. I understand she’s just a messed up dog, but I had no sympathy for her when I heard she might be put down because of her mange, until Dave called a friend who told him where to get medicine.
A black and white cat named Muffy resides here as well. She somehow got outside one evening and found a handsome looking Tabby cat; thus birthing the love of my life, Tack. I constantly cuddle the kitten, who is beside me now, and have at least 50 pictures of her. She is the cutest baby here; partly because she’s litter trained.
They recently bought two beef bulls which they’re going to raise and sell for a decent profit. Josh and Dave asked me to film them tackling and branding them, because they were just so proud of themselves. Before the bulls arrived, they had the kids split into 2 teams and build huts for them, which occupied their afternoons for a week. Deb and Dave are pretty good at finding fun projects to keep the kids of out trouble.
The boys’ room is downstairs, and at night an alarm is turned on so every time the door opens, it sounds so the entire house can hear them. They’ve had trouble with boys in the past, so they don’t take any chances.
The weather here sucks a lot. It’s a little warm in the mornings, cold at night, and ALWAYS rainy in the afternoons and evenings, if not all day. I wear jeans or long shorts, a t-shirt, and oftentimes a hoody because the house is colder than outside.
It is really nice here. It sounds like they’ve got more material possession than most of us, but their lifestyles certainly aren’t enviable. They each do quite a few chores every day, wear clothes that were passed down from someone else (I think they’re usually pretty cute, but they may not, and may sometimes end up with some that aren’t) and wear them until they’ve spilled something on them or played in the dirt (if you’re OCD, this might bother you), and if you’re not an enthusiastic Christian you may not like hearing about God at every meal, memorizing entire passages from the Bible, going to church twice a week, or getting told “that is not very Christian-like!” It’s not like they shove the religion down their throat to the point of vomiting; it’s very easy to see the Bible as just poetic words on how to live, and their parents’ expectations of a Christian as a lifestyle they only have to except for a few years until they’re free. Since there are so many kids, the adults can’t be patient with them, so discipline is tight. When they do something wrong, they immediately get reprimanded and possibly punished.
I like sharing a room with other people, and sleeping in the same full-sized bed with Tabby. Otherwise, I’d be lonely. I don’t like following a schedule or eating what I don’t like to avoid hunger pangs, and the babies give me headaches. But all things considered, I am comfortable here. I hope you guys are happy after reading what it’s like here. I hope I gave you a good enough description, even though I haven’t been in a writing mood.
See you in 4 weeks and 4 days! God bless!
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