Colored Pencils

Besides the first day where I visited the hospital, most of our days have been spent working with children in various parts of Kenya. So far we've been to 3 different places and will be visiting these areas every week: The Remand Center (a juvenile rehabilitation center), a school in Nyahera (a rural area of Kenya), and a school in Mambo Leo. In all of these areas, we shared a bible lesson plan and then afterwards, the children were given coloring sheets related to the lesson and colored pencils to fill the blank spaces.

The Remand Center

The Remand Center is a juvenile rehabilitation center. Most of the children in there have been placed there for things ranging from petty theft to assault and the range of the children's ages is extremely wide (~6-19 yrs old). This was the first place that we visited and so it was the first look at how impoverished the conditions could be. I saw some children with open wounds that definitely looked like they had not been cared for days. The idea of putting 6 year olds in the same area as 19 year olds seems crazy to me. Even in Korean school, where 7th graders whose Korean sucked were put in 3rd grade classes, there was a big bullying problem; I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like for a 6 yr old kid to be there.

Nyahera

To get to this school, we travelled ~1.5 hours out of Kisumu via "ma-ta-tu", a public minibus that drives maniacally (more details on forms of transportation in Kenya in a future post). The children in this program are sponsored by a woman in the UK who lost her son to an accident and has been supporting these orphans in his memory. All of these children have lost one or both of their parents to HIV/AIDS.

I was told by the program director (Mama Joski) that the program is split into 4 phases progressing from identifying the children in need, providing them food, promoting hygiene, and then providing support in the education of the children.

Mambo Leo

We were greeted in Mambo Leo by singing and dancing which was a welcome (and very cute) sight.

Again, here the teacher (Lillian, a volunteer with Christs's Hope) gave the lesson and then provided coloring sheets and the same colored pencils for the children to complete the exercise.

Hopefully Michael doesnt get mad for posting this picture up, I just thought it looked hilarious. (no fear though, he had full control of the kid) By the way, if you want to visit Michael's blog, it is at http://dekompress.blogspot.com/

I named this post colored pencils because a major part of what we did at these places (which will sound sort of dumb) is to sharpen the childrens' colored pencils. At the remand center, each child was given 1 colored pencil which they could exchange for another color by standing in a line. There were only 2 sharpeners (the small kind that you use by manually turning it between your fingers) for the 50 children and to maintain a degree of order, the volunteers stood infront while the children lined up to have their pencils sharpened. In reality, the lines were more like mobs of children, sticking their pencils up trying to get our attention while we furiously attempted to do a half-decent job of sharpening the pencil at hand. By the end of the day, one of the sharpeners had broken. At Nyahera, the situation was the same, except that we had only 1 sharpener, which was later lost before leaving, so that at Mambo Leo, we had to use razor blades to sharpen the pencils. Although pencil sharpening sounds so trivial, in many ways, this situation really embodied a lot of the thoughts I had around what I saw over the past few days.

I thought about how when I was going through school, everyone probably had their own pack of colored pencils - both at school and at home. In most cases, we had electric sharpeners or at least a decent one in the back of the classroom or maybe a small one of our own. These aren't laptops or even textbooks, but rather relatively inexpensive equipment that I took for granted. That even such inexpensive throwaway supplies were so rare demonstrated the hardship and disparity in opportunity that these children faced.

Beyond seeing this disparity firsthand (which is something that we already know), the more important thoughtoccured while standing in the middle of the crowd of children, trying to do my best to sharpen the pencils one at a time. Everytime I would finish sharpening one pencil, another pencil or 2 would shoot up infront of me. I wondered what if instead of sharpening pencils, I was providing food, money, clothing, medicine, or any other number of things. What if instead of 50 students, there was an entire family, village, city, or continent to help. And what if this situation wasn't some lesson that would end at the hour, but was a situation with no set end time, potentially lasting forever. This really simple, almost ridiculous situation, made me think of how overwhelming it is to try to help people - not only due to the sheer size of the problem but also due to uncertain means of accomplishing it.

As embarassing it is to admit, in NYC, I rarely gave money to homeless people because (1) there were so many that the situation seemed hopeless and (2) I was not convinced that my money would be used properly or would even benefit the recipient. In Africa, as in other areas that require support, there are so many complex problems and a multitude of other barriers/obstacles underlying those problems (ie: corruption), that addressing only the onstensible issue seems foolish. I began to wonder what it really means to truly help someone: do you address the issue at hand? do you go to the root of the problem? how do you even do that while respecting another culture and not imposing one's own? what can/should you even expect?

Maybe a solution to the colored pencil dilemma would have been to just give the children crayons instead.