A ri-di, a ri-di-di

A friend has been living in Dar for several months now, and told us that she has been visiting an orphanage on Saturdays, her respite from the city and work life. Joe and I went along with her this Saturday to visit the kids.

This orphanage is about an hour north of the city, in a plot of green land away from main roads. There are about 20 kids living there, aged 5 to 14. This orphanage is a home – a glittering example of a program that works – every child had shoes, clean, new clothes, bunk beds with stuffed animals and neatly strung ITN’s. The adults running it are caring, peaceful and calm souls that welcome visitors with open arms and treat the children as their own. The kids help out in meal preparation, and rarely fight with each other.

Hanging out with kids is always refreshing, a reminder that happiness and optimism persist despite adversity and many of their extremely difficult lives up to now. This visit was no exception – the children instantly showered us with hugs, and took us towards their outside field to start the games. It was great to start to get to know them individually - at one point I met Happy, a 9 year old girl with wisdom beyond her years and a kind face and smiley eyes. In a game I was observing, she would start giggling randomly and often, especially when she got out, and I instantly bonded with her.

After a couple hours of name games, slap dilliyoso (whose words I made up when I taught the game since I don’t remember the real words – must look those up for next time), dodgeball, trampolining, “Mr. Wolf,” and hop-skotch, the kids convened together to start performing for us. They lined up obediently in height order, tied African scarves to their waists, and began an elaborate hour of singing and dancing.

Dominick, the eldest, played the drums. Each of their unique and distinctive personalities sung out as they took on solos and duos together: the three of us “mzungus” (foreigners) sat, entertained and thoroughly impressed. They sang in Swahili and English (with cute little accents), and there was no need for other instruments besides the drum for beat. They then tried to teach us their moves – African dancing is definitely harder than it looks, as Kopal had warned me, as is drumming: ojala que hope is not lost and I can learn some decent beats from them this summer.

Afterwards they told us to perform for them, and the three of us looked from one to the other, searching hopelessly for an upbeat song that we knew all of the lyrics to. We tried a couple of choruses from Bon Jovi and Journey, deciding Lady Gaga or other pop songs were probably not the most appropriate. One failure of my education up to now is teaching me how to perform on the spot. Let me know if you have any suggestions of child appropriate English songs – we were thinking “You are my Sunshine” might be good for next week.

We tried to re-create the dance moves throughout the weekend following our visit (singing the “a ri-di, a ri-di-di” chant of theirs): one was similar to “the sprinkler,” and another looked a little bit like the can-can, but with more hip, but we need a few more lessons to get them down.

While the orphanage runs well, there are reminders that funding is always a problem – they had to get rid of security recently, something that costs under 100 USD a month. This is pretty troublesome since security is needed throughout Dar.