Last of my trip

This will be the last post from my recent Africa trip.  It is so hard to believe I've been home 5 1/2 weeks!  Most of these pics are from the last 3 or 4 days of our trip.  On Friday we went to visit an orphanage that was about an hour and a half from downtown in a really poor community.  The last 30 minutes we were driving on bumpy dirt roads.  I had asked our agency director - who used to live there for several years - for an orphanage I could take donations to.  I said I wanted to take it to one that didn't receive much aid and who's kids were non-adoptable.  She said this one that is maintained by locals and will not sale the donations (many of the orphanages that are in bad condition just sale the donations to buy food - who can really blame them since so many of the kids are half starved).  This orphanage is primarily a school for the some community, but there is also someone who stays with the orphaned children.  There is a room for the boys and one for the girls.  Usually there are around 20-25 kids that stay, but while we were there it happened to only 7.  

Here is one of the upper grade classes with their teacher

Little girl working on French grammar

There was a group from Italy that helped them dig a well which has been a huge help to the entire community.  There were people coming nonstop from around the area to get water the entire time we were there. 

The school/orphanage's courtyard

 Some friends gave us money so we bought a lot of food:  rice, beans, bananas, peanuts, canned tomatoes, canned sardines, and a few other things.  As I mentioned in my last post I LOVED shopping in the open food market. 



 

Some other friends donated a lot of extra stuff.  It's amazing how much we crammed into this suitcase: shoes, undies, soccer ball, kites, art supplies, a few clothes, blankets, hundreds of toothbrushes (thanks to my dentist!), and several other things.  A huge thank you to all who gave items or money!



 

We gave every kid in the school a toothbrush, but they moved the rest of the donations to sort and go through in the supply room.  As a thank you they brought us some yummy roasted peanuts (very different from ours) and refreshments.  Very generous of them!  

 

I would love to stay involved in the work here because they are really reaching out to the community.  There is a doctor that comes several days a week (all the way from the city) and also helps train the teachers and students.  Right now he is teaching them about healthy foods and how to garden.  Also when children are brought in they investigate to find family members who can take them in so they will not have to spend their entire life in an orphanage.  It sounds like they have lots of big plans for the place.

On Saturday we went to see the Bonobos reservation.  They are monkeys similar to the chimps, but are much nicer, vegetarians, and only live in the DRC.  It was about an hour and a half drive, but well worth it.

Here are the babies that have been rescued from poachers. 

 The babies nurse for about 4 years.  So the rescued babies stay separate from the other large groups so they can get bottle fed and loved on by one of their human mamas.  Once they no longer obey the "mama" it shows they are ready to join one of the other groups on the reserve.  Some of them are returned to the wild depending on how they pass a long series of tests.

One of three groups

 Here are two mamas that have been here a long time and have delivered their own babies.  The one on the left I think was around 5 months old and the one on the right was just a few days old.  It was interesting to hear that the females are dominant over the males.

 As I mentioned before we went to church with our translator.  It was about a 45 minute drive, but I'm so glad we went.  I talked more about the service in the bottom half of the post here.

Exiting through the gate after services

 When we came back from church we found this mess in the hallway and no power.  It was out with no one around for several hours...not something you would ever see in the states! 

 

So the plan on Sunday was to come back to the hotel after church.  We would eat and put A down for her nap while I took a shower and got ready.  Then when she woke up we would take a few nice pictures.  I brought my hair straightener all the way across the ocean just for this occasion and wouldn't you know that was the only day we didn't have power.  Not to mention it was the hottest day we had there.  (The seasons are opposite...during our winter they have their hot, humid summers.)  So no shower or hair fixing for me.  Which is fine because A still looked as beautiful as ever.



Wish I could share all the gorgeous pictures Melanie captured of her, but I'll have to wait till she gets home.



Front of our hotel.  The balcony we hung out at is above the entrance

Our room.  Behind us is a bathroom and separate open air room.  Most of the rooms had a larger bed, but we chose to stay in this one because it was right by the other APs staying their.

The view from the balcony.  This is where everyone hangs out.  Unfortunately they scalped most of the grass soon after we got their with a weed eater so it wasn't as green.

Grounds behind the hotel.  There were more mosquitos in the back so we didn't sit back there.

We spent all afternoon and evening on the balcony with the other APs since power was out.  Our room was a sauna, but the balcony had a nice breeze.  Thankfully the power was fixed and AC came back on about midnight.  I already talked about my last day, Monday, in the last post.  But here is the sweet picture of her with her foster mom about to go. 

Man do I miss that girl!  Heart breaking to be away from her and still have no idea when we will finally get to bring her home.  Please keep her in your prayers.  She got malaria soon after I left.  I don't know the details yet, but she has been to the hospital twice.  As of March 8th her malaria test was still positive.  Thankfully she is receiving good care and treatments, but hate not being able to do much else.

How was the trip?

I wrote this about two weeks ago, but just got around to uploading the pictures.  Thanks to Melanie Poteat for taking most of the pictures!  I was too busy snuggling with my cutie to take very many.  We would have loved to have taken more pictures of people and country, but you're not really allowed to take pictures.  Most pictures we have of the streets, countryside, etc., are taken from inside our moving car.

So back to the question everyone wants to know, but is so hard to answer.  It was an emotional trip.  Several months ago someone else told us there are third world countries, and then there is Africa.  I spent two months in Honduras and 2 weeks in India- two countries filled with a lot of poverty.  While DRC reminded me a lot of those countries (trash, crazy traffic, houses made of whatever scraps could be found, etc), the DRC was even harder to witness and experience.  I feel selfish even saying that because it's not my reality...I get to come home.  But it's true. 

There were so many homeless people on the streets.  Not far from our hotel was a homeless pregnant woman sleeping on the street.  Kids in tattered clothes and sometimes we saw small kids in nothing but underwear.  People would do whatever it took to make money.  One of the things that broke my heart was seeing a family sitting off the side of the road (on the way out of the city) hammering rocks till they were powder (children included).  I don't have a picture of them hammering it into powder, but here are a couple of them selling a bag of rocks they hammered to smaller sizes.

There isn't free public education therefore most of the children there do not go to school.

They will hopefully sell the powder (or small rocks) to a builder to make cement blocks.  They get the rocks from the Congo River. 

We saw a lot of people out there with hammers breaking off chunks to haul off.  There is an overwhelming amount of aid and work that needs done.  There is a reason most parents I've met that have adopted get involved in supporting programs over there.  It's almost impossible not to do something, but hard to know where to begin.

My heart also went out to the families stuck in country.  There were four American families at the hotel we were at who have been there 3-4 months with their spouse and most with bio kids back home.  We saw a tiny glimpse of the heartbreak they are experiencing.  So ready to get home to their families, but not wanting to send their children back into foster care or orphanage after months of being together.  When we were there one of the guys did have to go home and another one was preparing to go back.  While it was so hard leaving our little A, I went knowing I would have to leave her.  These families (and many others who have already left) went thinking their children would be coming home.  So when people ask how the trip was...obviously I was beyond overjoyed that I was able to meet and spend time with our little girl and see/experience her country.  But my heart was also burdened with so much sadness.

Before I share about little A, I will say the Congolese people are a resilient and strong group of people.  They are survivors.  We were encouraged by several there who said they may be burdened by the state of their country or their situation in life, but they have hope and joy in the second coming of Christ.  I wanted to have a pity party for what most of the people there are going through, but they reminded me that's not what we are called to do as Christians. 

Buying beans and lots of other food to take to the orphanage.

We took donations to a school and orphanage.  Here is one of the teachers on the job.  Since everyone breastfeeds, babies are always with their mamas.  Love it! 

Our translator whom I loved...such a good Godly man!  His beautiful wife is a seamstress.  We had her make us a couple things.

 

As I mentioned before I didn't get as much paperwork done as I had hoped, but I would do it all over again to spend time with our little A!  I will TREASURE our week together the rest of my life. 

LOVE this girl!!  When she was tired that thumb was in her mouth...so adorable!!

I keep a journal for each of our kids (which is why I don't take the time to update this as often as I'd like) so I wrote each night about our time together.  She is such a joyful, happy baby full of life and personality!  She is 10 months, crawls everywhere, and is pulling up on furniture.  She only fussed when I wiped her nose or she was sick of being in the car.  I asked the foster mom, Mama Rosalie, what makes her upset, and she said she doesn't like to be left alone.  If she is by herself she will cry.  I can definitely see that.  Little A loves people and loves to be held.  For a girl that likes to be held she is also a wiggle worm!  She will fit right in with her rowdy brothers. She was very curious and all over the place, but still right by me so I could hold her at the drop of a hat.  I didn't mind!   She was a fighter when it came to bedtime.  I would try rocking her to sleep (without a rocking chair), and she would squirm like crazy.  She would eventually fall asleep on my chest leaned back in bed sucking her thumb...precious moments!  Actual co-sleeping was a little rough...especially in a twin bed.  I only slept an hour our first night together.  We were both pretty restless, and she kept crawling up on my chest to sleep.  So sweet, but impossible for me to sleep like that since I can't even sleep if Zac is touching me in bed.  Thankfully it got a lot better as the week went on.  Little A loves taking a bath, liked to touch my face and put her face on mine, really good at eating table food, and has the cutest/daintiest sneezes, whines, squeaks, etc!

She has 4 teeth and two more are poking through up top.  She likes to drink from a water bottle and would gargle the water.  This girl was full of smiles and loved to jabber!  The best thing about our time together was that she KNEW I was her momma.  I don't know how, but she did.  Several Congolese people even noticed her strong attachment to me.  She loves people and would let Melanie, our driver, translator, or other moms hold her for a bit, but it didn't take long for her to lunge back for me. 

She had such a contagious smile!

Even when her foster mom came to pick her up she was happy as a lark to just stay in my arms.  I talked to Mama Rosalie for about 10 minutes, and she never reached out for her.  When it was about time for her to go Mama Rosalie started talking and playing with her and A went to her with a smile on her face.  It was good to know that she loves both her mamas.  I will say she did fuss a bit when she was strapped on Mama Rosalie's back (I don't have those pictures yet, but will share them later bc it is adorable).  We think it was because she knew she was officially leaving to go back because she never fussed when I put her in the ergo.  That could just be a biased mama's speculation though.  :)  I'm not going to lie it was ROUGH leaving her.  I cried the night before when I was singing her to sleep for the last time.  Then to make it worse the foster mom arrived 2 hours early to pick her up on Monday which was shocking since usually everyone is late there!!  So from the moment I heard she was downstairs, 30 minutes it took to pack all of A's stuff up, while I was talking with Mama Rosalie, and when I had to turn the opposite direction to go back upstairs to our room tears were streaming down my face.    Luckily I had a ton of packing to do to keep my mind busy.  I had to just keep moving.  It was hard not having Zac with me.  I gain so much strength from him.  I am so thankful Melanie came with me though because it would have been even harder going through that experience alone.