1. Babies Home: so we stopped working with the preschool, but we started volunteering with the babies. There are about 12 of them and they are seriously the cutest! I want to adopt one in a second! Especially Muwana, she is seriously the smiliest baby with the most gorgeous eyes ever! I mean, just take a look for yourself...
Makes me melt. I have so much fun playing with her and I think it's safe to say we have both grown attached to each other - I only want to play with her now and she cries whenever I put her down which results in her having to be in my lap constantly! I love it! Anyways, every morning we go from 8-11 and help bathe the babies, change them (which ends up being every 10 minutes about since they pee into washclothes which aren't very absorbent...also why I'm now doing my laundry a lot more often...), feed them, and play with them. There is one baby that has been super sick and is 6 months old, but looks like he's 2 months... see for yourself...
It breaks my heart. They feed him raw egg, probably in hopes to help him grow, but raw egg is never good so we have been trying to teach the "mothers" a thing or two about nutrition for babies. We are also looking into donations to get more colorful mats so the babies aren't playing on concrete and hurting themselves and possibly a boom box with nursery rhyme tapes. They just need more stimulation in general... Also, if anyone has old baby clothes/books/toys please let me know b/c they could use A LOT more of that stuff.2. Volunteering at the hospital: Some of us have been volunteering in different units of Mbale Regional Hospital. I personally have been volunteering in the maternity ward b/c well, I love babies. But I bet you all know that by now! They have us shadow the nurses, cut and prepare gauze, cut string for umbilical cord ties, make cotton balls, and clean. One time I was in the sterilization room cutting gauze and it was taking forever b/c the scissors were horrible and the nurse comes over and says "let me show you.. use this book and wrap around and then cut a lot at once... faster, yes?" however, it was the visitors book that I was wrapping the gauze around that was supposed to be sterile. It wasn't really adding up to me, but luckily I found out that they put it through the autoclave after! Phew! Anyways, in my shadowing of nurses, I have seen two births - literally witnessed babies coming out of mothers with my own eyes!!!! It was seriously insane and I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing, but it was incredible.... it was all I could see in my head for the next three days after it happened... I even brought a baby over to its mother after it got cleaned off! Only in Africa!
3. Sanitation outreach: this has been on hold for a while, because we've run into the issue of lots of schools not having the funds for soap b/c they don't think it is very important/them already knowing about how to wash their hands but not caring enough to do so. We have been racking our brains as to what to do next and for this next week we have decided to continue doing the outreach with schools that really need it, but we are going to teach a segment on clean water (many of them don't understand that you have to wash hands with cleaning running water and often kids wash their hands in one big basin that ends up full of dirty water) and we are going to get the teachers more involved so they are more dedicated. We also are going to grill the headmasters about the importance of hand washing and before we agree to teach any more classes about it, we will require the schools themselves to provide the soap for us to teach - that way we will know if they care enough to provide it for themselves in the future hopefully. Development work is hard, but we'll see what happens with this....
4. Crafts: we have learned how to make paper bead jewelry and we have set up seminars to teach it to mothers of disabled children from Prossy's organization and also women from the Namatala slum who sell alcohol for income and battle alcoholism. I am super excited for this! We also are working to set up an Etsy account with all of these women hopefully so they can sell internationally and have more of a market and we are setting this up with CURE hospital too, which is the hospital we learned how to make the beads from. Since they sell the jewelry for such a good cause, it would be nice to expand their market so that more babies here survive hydrocephalis and spina bifida. We will see how it goes!
Ok well that's all for now... thanks for reading. See you in 17 days! Did I hear that right??? Yikes!!!
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