Walking without crawling first

Natalie, Joe and I visited the orphanage again on Saturday, this time with Mary, the founder. Mary is an incredibly energetic Irish woman, a mother of nine, with honest opinions on everything and a heart of gold. She and her American husband have lived all over the place, including in India for several years, and have been committed to Tanzania for the last ten.

She told us how they set up the orphanage, and how they’ve slowly expanded over the last several years. A vast chunk of their budget goes towards medical care for the children: one of the kids was in the hospital with malaria when we visited, a decently common occurrence.

Mary told us about the devastating situations in which they found some of the kids, and went on about each of their individual personalities. Six kids of the bunch, she told us, are HIV-positive; most are on ARV’s and all have regular check-ups. They’re now healthy and happy individuals, and you wouldn’t be able to tell which are which. Spending time with the kids this week was great – we had brought them markers, and had a drawing session where they wrote their name and drew a picture. One girl even scrawled down, “Malaria still sucks,” a phrase she slyly saw printed on Natalie’s shirt.

Mary later made a comment about Tanzania that stood out in my mind: driving here is terrible, mainly because many drivers are lacking a sense of the space around them. At least in India, she said, there’s a method to the madness and drivers have figured out how to coexist together: there are unsaid rules, so to speak. Here, however, instead of slowing down when they see a pedestrian or a car in front of them, a driver may speed up. “And babies don’t crawl first before walking – the two are distinctly related in my mind, no coincidence,” she told us.

She went on to explain that babies spend a good chunk of their infancy tied in cloth to a mother’s back, and then at some point they are expected to teeter-totter around by walking. But, they haven’t yet developed boundaries at that point, or a strong sense of space without crawling.