Joe's goodbye party

Friday was a pretty busy day at Amani. The last Friday of every month all of the children, staff, and volunteers clean Amani from the top to the bottom. We all split into groups and I was assigned to the boys changing room, time out room, and one of the sleeping rooms…all of which were filthy! I was covered from head to toe in dirty water by the end. Also one of the little boys that just came back from being on the streets was showing me a cut on his heel and his toe was not in his sandel properly so I asked him to fix it and he looked at me funny and then I realized that he had a sixth toe on each foot and it was the sixth toe that was sticking out of his shoe. When I went to trim his finger nails I noticed he had six fingers on one hand too. I felt bad after. I also noticed all of the other kids are always touching his extra finger and toes. Hopefully he is okay with it and it doesn’t upset but I was not able to tell. One of the boys had a pretty high fever and there were a lot of cuts and scratches but besides that there was not much else happening in the health room.
After a morning of intense cleaning and we had a going away party for Joe and Libby. The party consisted of giving the children soda and dancing. Some of them are awesome dancers. It was pretty entertaining. I tried to add a video fo the kids dancing but the connection here is so slow that i just waited a half hour and then decided to cancel because it wasnt even half way through.
For my orientation I stayed until about 9 pm to see what the night caregivers do. The kids were fighting a lot and one of the older boys punched one of the little ones in the head really really hard. I was really angry at the older kid but it is hard to discipline and to stop them from fighting because I still can’t understand Swahili really well. One of the girls came downstairs and started to cry. I tried to talk to her and figure out what was going on but she wouldn’t talk and just kept sobbing. I just sat with her and hugged her and then I went and talked to the night worker because I was concerned that maybe the boys were doing something to her or someone was hurting her but the caregiver told me that she has a lot of anger and does that at night sometimes. I really wish there was more I could do for this girl but I have no idea what she has gone through and also can’t erase anything that has happened to her.