Jambo!
My name is Rachael Lee and I am a junior nursing student at Northwestern College. Today is day eight in Tanzania. I can't believe that we got here exactly a week ago today. God has been doing amazing things through our team this past week. I can't wait to see what He has in store for us the next two weeks we are here.
Today was our first day at Tudor Village where Mama Lynn's orphanage is. It is beautiful here; words cannot begin to describe how pretty the country is. We have been told that when it is not cloudy you can see Mount Kilimanjaro, but we have not been able to see that yet. Our plans were shifted around for today so we ended up painting one of the houses and teaching some of the staff at the orphanage how to do CPR and some range of motion exercises.
To start out the day we got to go on a tour of the whole orphanage. There are six different buildings that the children stay in and they are separated by age and sex. There was not many children here this morning because the older ones were at school. The first house of little children that we went in to was the one that we painted. The children in there were all so cute and just jumped into our arms as we walked in. The next house was the house for children with disabilities. Many of them are here because they were abandoned as little children because of their disabilities. One little girl who is now 12 ran out to greet us when we came. She has physical and mental disabilities and cannot talk, but the way she smiled just melted my heart. This little girl was abandoned and locked in a cage because of her mental disabilities and her family was ashamed of her and did not want anyone to know. Every child here has a story. Most of them are so sad, but yet these children are constantly smiling and love everyone that they come into contact with even though some of their parents did not love them enough to keep them.
We started out painting by sanding the walls. This is something that was not familiar to any of us, but it was very helpful as that walls had a lot of dirt and some even had mold on them. After sanding them all down we started painting. This was not the most fun thing to do, but we all tried to stay positive. We were about half way through the painting and the children started coming home from school. As they showed up many of them came to the windows to talk to us. They were all so excited to see us, and this is when I decided that even though this work was very hard seeing the look on the children's face made it worth every hour of hard work.
Throughout the day we had teaching sessions for the Mamas that take care of the kids. There was a group that taught how to do some passive range of motion with the kids that lived in the house for children with disabilities because a lot of them cannot move on their own. I was in the group that taught them how to do CPR. It was a great experience teaching these women because they were all so eager to learn and we knew that they were all paying attention. We prepared this teaching before we came, but we ended up having to redo most of it because a lot of the words we use are not something that translates to what we are trying to say. It was so great to be able to not only leave an impact on the children but also leave an impact on the women who take care of the kids.
We have only been here for one week, and I cannot believe all that has already happened. I have loved every minute of being here, and I cannot wait for what is to come. We have a very busy week ahead of us, and I hope all of us are ready for it. Thank you for all of the prayers!
God bless you,
Rachael Lee
