Child Care Centers

I am back! We kept using internet at home and we used up all credit. It just likes phone cards.

We visited a local NGO named “Save Orphans Ministries" last week. Their office is located in a suburbs of Ncheu 2.5 hours drive form our place. We left home at 7 am. This NGO is taking care of local child care centers. The staff took us to 3 local feeding centers that day. We visited several centers before but most of the time the kids went home. The early bird was fully rewarded to see the children this time.
The centers are taking care of pre-school age children include orphans and kids HIV positive. My husband askes this question every visit, “How many orphans come in this center?” It made me surprised that the leader repeated that question directly to the kids in a local language. I didn’t know how he asked the kids but one boy stood up among the 60 kids. I understood he is the orphan. It was too pitiful for me to see. The leader told us there were more orphans in the group but I think they hesitated to tell us or they did not understand the question or they call their foster parent a (biological) parent. A good thing is orphans are taking care of locally. It means if the both parent past away, normally someone in the relative takes care of the child. The children come to the child center every day and eat, play, and learn. Even the family can not feed the kids enough, at least they can eat food at the center.
It was a feeding time! We observed how they eat food. The volunteer people prepared porridge on plates which has 2 spoons. The plates were served on the floor directly. Which is pretty normal and the kids came into the room and sat down. Now I understood why one plate had 2 spoons because 2 kids share one plate. I asked if the porridge contains some sugar. Yes, it does. The child slowly moved spoon to the mouth.
This day’s visits reminded me of my brother’s school. My brother and his wife run a preschool in Japan. The kids are exactly same ages. Here Malawi, the volunteer teachers, one center we visited just have 2 teachers take care of 80 kids and they showed me the teaching materials. I know both countries kids doing same things; learning numbers and alphabets. Nothing wrong with both places but they are the exact opposite. I saw a puzzle made of old card board cut in 3 peaces. All other materials were made of recycled staffs such as plastic bottles, potato sacks, rocks. etc. Wow! all staffs they use normally I throw away.........

“Life is not fair,” of course! But this was not my conclusion of that day.
Seeing children in a opposite situation aroused mixed feelings in me.