Good Times with Good Kids

My two favorite kids of the day: the girl in front
and the boy in green in the back

     This Thursday, in a break from our usual routine, the boys and I went down the road to the orphanage school. Our cook, Helen, who is awesome, arranged everything so we could go down in the afternoon and just play with the kids. It was so much fun. The kids were so excited to see us. We visited all their classrooms and they sang for us and/or recited poems in each room. Afterward we went out into the yard to play. Someone had left a ton of toys at the house for the school so we got to be Santa Claus for a day. We had Frisbees, jump ropes, micro-kites, and a soccer ball. After distributing the new toys, we just got to play around and have fun.

We disturbed the 2-year-olds during naptime

     Somehow I ended up with the smallest kids and a Frisbee. While I’ll admit that there were times when I wanted to be running around and throwing the Frisbee hard like the boys were doing, the little tykes were so darn cute. I had to keep reminding myself to throw gently, especially after one girl got bonked in the face, but it was a lot of fun. One really interesting thing was just how much the kids wanted to touch me. It wasn’t necessarily that they waned physical touch, because they didn’t care too much if I was touching them back. They just wanted to rub my arms and hands, seemingly fascinated by how pale I was compared to them. During the assembly some kids even ran up to touch my legs when they thought I wasn't looking. For some reason the boys didn't experience this. I'm not sure if it was because I'm a girl or because I was with kids too small to realize that grabbing someone isn't entirely socially acceptable (though more so here than in the U.S.), but whatever it was, it was an experience. When it was time to go, we all wished that we could've had more time, and we're hoping to go back next week.

Some happy kids ready for new toys

Swahili Words of the Post

Toto -infant or child

dogo -small