I started writing this on Wednesday night, and never got around to finishing it until now!

Today was Wednesday, which means I was strictly forbidden from answering my phone or doing anything other than LSE work, because I have to go back and take exams in 3 months and I have a TON to do before then, and also because I think the mosquitoes here have been sucking out my brains along with my blood. Or maybe it's just being a mom? I adore my kids beyond all reason but they are SO. MUCH. WORK. I'm aware that this isn't news to anyone. I'm just so busy trying to stay far enough ahead that I don't fall flat on my face when Tanzania strikes - like, you know, this morning, SURPRISE! No water! - that nothing seems to stick in my head for more than a few minutes. So for instance tonight we have to find a way to wash Zawadi and Saimoni's school socks, which we have to rinse out every night because they only get one pair, with no running water. This could be interesting. I won't even mention the toilet situation except to say that not having running water makes squat toilets make a LOT more sense.

Now I understand why Pray is so obsessed with maji

Right. So. Schoolwork. I'm writing a policy paper about reforming adoption procedures in Tanzania, so you know, nothing I care about or anything. It's been fascinating to read all the papers around it, especially the ones with regressions trying to draw some type of systematic conclusions about factors that affect adoption and orphan care. I guess I am an LSE-er after all - just don't ask me what the hell a z-score is for another week, until I've had a chance to stuff it into my brain and hope it doesn't fall out again until after exams are over. Trying to do schoolwork from Tanzania makes me feel the same way I do when I've been speaking Swahili for 5 hours straight and it's getting late and I didn't sleep well the night before, and my brain just decides that it's full, will not process any more information, thank you and goodnight. I still love the content but I am so, so, so, SO done with formal schooling after this. I swear I will never voluntarily sit another exam again as long as I live, so help me Flying Spaghetti Monster. It's books for me from here on out.

Anyway, on my parents' extremely strict orders, I basically just worked on my policy paper today. I'm on a medicine for a recurrent parasite that has been bothering my stomach and head a lot, though, so I didn't get as much done as I would have liked. It really just seems unreasonable for me to sit the LSE exams, they patently were not designed to be studied for while dealing with parasites and water outages! But I need the damn degree, so I have to at least try. The LSE (and British) system is really ridiculous - you have "good fails" and "bad fails", anything above a 70 is considered a merit, above 80 is a distinction. So it's tough enough on your self esteem already when you've grown up in the US system with straight As (ok, straight Bs when I was bored, straight As when I put in effort). I still remember the trauma of my first C in middle school, and now I'm even supposed to consider getting a failing grade good, and a 90 essentially unattainable? Hmph. But whatever, as long as I get at least a "good fail" I will still graduate with my degree, and I legitimately could not care less about anything beyond that. At least that's what I keep telling myself, although that stupid inner perfectionist is trying really hard to disagree.

... That was as far as I got on Wednesday, before the little monsters came home and kept me busy for the rest of the afternoon. They're now napping, water and power are back on after 4 days of no water and 2 of extremely iffy electricity. THANK GOD, I was kind of losing my mind. But of course now, in typical life-in-Tanzania fashion, I have a recurrence of a parasite infection that, let's just say, is no fun at all. Last time I tried a much stronger medicine to try to get rid of it, but the side effects were too severe, so I had to stop before the course was complete. Luckily, a pharmacy in town had some alternative meds that might get rid of it, finally, without incapacitating me completely in the process. Ah, Tanzania. It's a really, really good thing you're so ridiculously good looking, because you are also a massive pain in the ass.

Photo my amazing cousin took on safari, 2013

Zanzibar 2013

Me and hubs pre-wedding, summer 2013 (Obviously the water had been out for a while then too, judging by my hair...)

My favorite number

Zi and Saimoni started school yesterday, at a local English Medium school called Amani (meaning Peace). In Tanzania, there are a few types of school: government school, which is very poor quality but free; English Medium schools that have both day and boarding students, and are taught in English, but are still usually not up to the standard of an average American public school; and International schools, which can cost many thousands of dollars per year, and are roughly equivalent to a fancy private school in the US.

We made the decision to put them both into English Medium school this year, with the goal of finding an affordable international school for next year. Amani has scored highest in the region on the national examinations for the last few years, and last year was just number 22 in the country. So, if they're going to be in an English Medium school, I'm glad it's this one. They also get to go to school with the pilot house kids, three of whom they've known for years and who they hang out with after school every day.

They were so adorable in their little uniforms I couldn't handle it! Especially tiny Zawadi with her backpack that is bigger than she is. It's easy to forget how tiny she is, because she has such a MASSIVE personality. But she is itty bitty. 

So yesterday morning was their first day, and I did pretty well getting them off to school, with Riz's help. I was at the bus stop early, even! This morning? I didn't do so great. We couldn't find Saimoni's sweater, which I could swear we got from the pilot house yesterday, then his backpack broke, and THEN Zawadi couldn't wear her school shoes so had to wear Saimoni's which were WAY too big. She has a blister on one ankle, so the shoes that normally fit fine were too painful. She got a bandaid and extra socks and off she went! We literally had to run for the bus, which was ridiculous enough without Zawadi clomping along in shoes that were WAY too big for her. 

Sigh. But they're learning, and thriving, even if I might not yet have done my son's fly in the picture above (I got there eventually!). 

Conversation with my daughter after her first day of school:

Me: Zawa, how was your day at school? What did you learn

Z: I learned numbers! 

Me: Oh really? What numbers did you learn, sweetheart? 

Z: Blue!

... Hmmm. She might need remedial number lessons. Well, at least they're thriving? 

We're also supposed to shave her head, which kills me, because she's been in an orphanage with a shaved head her whole life, and she LOVES her hair. So for now we're just sending her as she is and hoping nobody makes a fuss. I know rationally that her education is much more important than her hair, I do, really. But I will miss it a lot if it's gone! Plus she looks like an alien baby with no hair - one of her many nicknames from back in the day. 

I rest my case. Now if only the headmistress of Amani would see it like that!

Huffpo

I wrote this piece as a blog post that will (hopefully!) be going up on Huffington Post in a few days, thanks to my cousin Ben. 

Love is a funny thing. I fell in love with my daughter Zawadi the first moment I saw her, big head perched precariously on her shrunken little body, sitting with five other babies being fed in turn from the same spoon. She was my baby bird, delicate but could she ever squawk! Just over a year old at the time, she was not even crawling, unable to find the strength to push herself up – but that never stopped her. From day one, she would wiggle-worm her way across the floor to my lap, and nudge out whoever was sitting there, even if they were three times her size. As I got her treatment for the parasites that were preventing her from growing, her big personality began to shine through, and not just when she could muster up the energy. Now she is four, has been home with us for almost a year, is nicknamed “serotonin” for the joy she brings everyone she meets, giggling hysterically when she falls over, begging me to let her sleep in our bed.

 

It took a bit longer with my son. He didn't seek out attention from volunteers – he was almost three and still couldn't walk due to bad rickets from early malnutrition, before arriving at the orphanage. He was shy, sensitive, and withdrawn, but I soon noticed that whenever he thought no one was listening, he would sing to himself, tell stories, laugh. I took him to several doctors trying to get first a diagnosis and then treatment for his rickets, and his sweet and silly personality began to emerge. Saimoni is deeply good, he can't stand the idea of hurting or disappointing anyone, and to this day, he is constantly making up songs and stories. The main difference is that now they're in English and Swahili, and we can't get him to stop talking!

I was so lucky to be able to take these two home, adopt them, become their mom. But there are more than 30 other children we work with, and hundreds if not thousands more in need just within a few miles of us. All of our kids have no mother and most of them have no father, and the hard truth is that they will be in institutions for the rest of their lives. Tanzania has extremely strict and onerous adoption laws that make it impossible to adopt without spending from one to three years living on the ground, and with most local families already caring for at least one orphaned relative, there are nowhere near enough Tanzanians with the resources left over to take them in. Up until about 8 years ago, the orphanage we work with had to send children back to their village at age five, whether or not they had caretakers willing and able to take them. According to the head Mama, who has been doing this work for more than 25 years, at least a quarter of them were abused, neglected or dead within a year. Before now, the best they could hope for was to be sent to boarding school at five, going from orphanage to boarding school and leaving with no home base, no connection to their community, and no idea how to live in a family.

We're trying to change that, for these children, on the scale that we can. Our organization, founded in 2010 to support and partner with a local orphanage and improve the care the children receive, is ready to expand. We are currently running an online auction, with the aim of covering the cost of a 3.5 acre piece of land to create a children's village. There, the kids will live until their late teens in family-style homes with up to 10 children per house, consistent caretakers, attending high quality day school, in as close to a family environment as we can provide. This will allow us to take in many more orphaned children, including those with HIV and other health conditions, as well as expand our outreach program to keep children in families whenever possible.

I couldn't adopt every one of the orphanage kids. We can't provide even this type of environment for more than a fraction of the children in need in this country alone. But that doesn't mean we are powerless. Our organization's name, The Small Things, comes from a quote from Mother Teresa: “We ourselves know that we are just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less without that missing drop. We can do no great things, only small things with great love.” This is our small effort, our tiny contribution, but it is not small for these children. For Hope, Ebenezer, and Peace, who were all close to death on arrival at the orphanage and are now thriving due to our one-to-one care program for premature babies. For my son, who is now so athletic and confident that you would never guess he has only been walking for less than three years. For my daughter, who brings me joy every day, who nearly died from a combination of malnutrition due to parasites and pneumonia. For Isaak, Auntie, and Shalom, who lost their mother just five months ago at the birth of Hope, their youngest sister, and are now reunited in our care, with their doting father returning every weekend from his job, which keeps him away day and night, to visit them. For Lulu and Neema and Baracka and Miriam and Anna and Priscilla and Angel and all of the rest who depend on our small efforts, from people all around the world, to give them the future their mothers would have wanted for them.

Want to be one of the small things that makes a difference for these kids? Check out our “Spread the Love” online auction (www.tinyurl.com/tstauction), running through February 15^th, and get great deals on all kinds of items while helping us get land to create the children's village and build families for these amazing kids. Or you can develop a long term relationship with one child by sponsoring them through our website (www.thesmallthings.org). And remember, next time you are tempted to brush something off as being too small to make a difference, that there is no such thing.  

Getting Started

"They grow up too fast." "Blink and you'll miss it." "Enjoy every moment while they're little."

I've been watching that come true, painfully, over the last three years - every time I had to leave these beautiful babies, and I'd come back six months later to children utterly transformed, grown tall and strong and more gorgeous than I could have imagined. And now that I don't have to leave anymore, it feels like we have all the time in the world - like I don't have to write anything down because they'll stay with me forever now, and when you're watching the changes close up they blur and disappear. 

But that's not how it works - they've been home six weeks, and I've mostly just been trying to survive, lacking the time or energy to chronicle it. And already I can look back to a few months ago when I arrived and see how they've grown. Day by day I can hear their English vocabulary improving - day by day they say funny, adorable things as they figure out how this new language thing works. It's beautiful and incredible and I don't want to miss it just because I'm trying to keep my head above water. 

It's not all perfect. In 4 months I've gone from an engaged graduate student living in London to a married mom of two, with two kittens and a house, living in Tanzania, running a nonprofit basically single-handedly, and trying desperately to figure it all out as I go. I have made and will make mistakes, and probably lots of them. Hopefully some of those reading these posts will have advice, ideas, or even just sympathy - reaching a digital hand across an ocean or two. 

So here goes - trying to capture some of these moments with my brand new, crazy instafamily. And to share those moments with our amazing family and friends who are so ridiculously far away. Time to stop trying to do this all alone.

Quote of the day:

Me: "Why is the cat wet?"

Zi: "I spit on it!" 

Me: "WHAT? Don't spit!"

Zi: "On the cat?"

Pictures of the day

Zi and Saimoni when I first met them in October 2010. Saimoni was two and a half and still not walking because he had bad rickets, and Zi was one year but the size of a 6 month old, with bad worms and pretty manourished. They've come a long way!