Day 5: St. Patience Basildon Center School

This morning I went to another orphanage/school, but it was no easy trek. We ended up getting a lot of rain last night, and of course the road to the village was a muddy mess. Our vans made it half way down the path but eventually got stuck and we had to walk the remainder of the way. There were random goats, cows, and children running all over! Once we finally reached the school house, which consisted of mud and random pieces of tin jumbled together, we were greeted with a Swahili welcome song sung by 100+ students. Again, they were so excited to hold our hands, and of course, they stole my heart!

Today we offered a hygiene clinic rather than doing examinations on each child. The two major areas we covered were hand washing and teeth brushing. We were able to provide each child and some of the adults with a toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap. When we asked the children how many didn’t previously have a toothbrush, roughly 80 of the 100 students said they did not – the remaining 20 said they used plain sticks to brush their teeth. Can you imagine?! Once again ring worm was a big problem at this orphanage, but that was the most visibly noticed ailment. The remainder of the time was spent learning some of the games they play with the little they have.

Tooth brush demonstration

Parents of some of the children.

After the orphanage, a couple of us went to an alligator farm near our compound. Fridays are “feeding” days so we couldn’t miss out on that! The feeding consisted of a man holding meat above 25-30 alligators - it was basically survival of the fittest. The alligators all climbed on top of each other to try and chomp on the meat…pretty neat! Then of course there was “Big Daddy.” It was an alligator that weighed over 850 kilograms and was over 5 meters long (1874 pounds and 16 ½ feet). I suppose you could say it was somewhat large! Also, when they say alligator farm – they aren’t kidding. There were hundreds of thousands of alligators of all sizes. We couldn’t figure out what they planned to do with all the gators until we looked at the menu. Besides that, I held a python. Yep. A python! I’ve been conquering fears left and right over here. We also held two baby alligators. J The rest of the night was just spent hanging out by the pool at the compound!