Volunteering Day 1

I don't know where to begin. I don't know how to put this into words. I swore to
myself I will not come off as preachy. I don't want to sound like I'm trying to be
some great writer bound for the Nobel Peace Prize. I do know I want to document
everyday of my volunteering experience in the Kenyan slums. I guess I'll just have
to be honest and hope you forgive me if I come off as a prick.

I didn't know what to expect. I'll just put that out there. Sitting at home on my thousand dollar couch watching my two thousand dollar TV I've seen the commercials before. Kids. Hungry. In Africa. Flies surrounding them. Dressed in tatter and torn clothing. Pleading to the camera for help. Somehow, I will admit it, I always wondered how acurate these commercials were. In my synical mind I thought once the cameras were off, the kids were patted on the back for playing the poor kid part, and handed a pocket full of candy and sent on their way. It couldn't really be that bad? Could it?

Well I guess it all depends on how you define bad. As I ducked my head through the
tiny slit cut in a rusted sheet of metal my defenition of bad was about to get alot
cloudier.

I stepped into the school yard. A muddy patch of dirt closed off from the rest of
the slum by sheets of metal. A rotten smell immediately hit my nose, and I noticed
that not far to my left, and even closer to the schools source of water, was an
over flowing set of bathrooms. The school itself, nothing more than a few walls and
a roof divided into countless class rooms sat in the middle of the space, looking
as if the owner had abandoned it decades earlier. It looked rough to say the least.
It begged the question ' how can kids learn in an environment like this?' And then
I met the kids.

To say I've never experienced a time of equal joy and utter heartbreak would be 100%truthful. They ran to us. Smiles beaming. Eyes filled with excitment and wonder. All dressed in their "school uniforms", all pressing their way through, beside, and over one another...just to say hello to us. They wanted to touch us. I'm not sure why, maybe to make sure we were real. Whatever the reason, within the first 5 minutes of being there every child had shaken my hand. Some two or three times. In the blink of an eye the muddy septic field was gone, and I was surrounded by 50 of my newest friends.

I was standing there. Taking it all in, when one of the older kids in the group
came up to me and asked me if I could sing a song for him. I let him know that no
one wanted that. Trust me. Then I asked if he could sing me a song. And he did. He
clapped his hands twice to get a beat going, and before he could utter the first
word of the song, the entire schoolyard ran to surround us. Every kid was singing.
They danced. Shouted. And sang in perfect harmony. And I was in the center of it
all. It was one of those moments you only see in movies. A moment that makes you
step back and ask 'Is this really my life?'

It's impossible to explain the feeling that comes over you when a group of
strangers, especially kids, are so excited to see you. It makes you feel instantly
like you are home, and as these kids giggled and danced out of their mind with
excitment, I felt right. I felt like this was where we were meant to be.

I can't say everyday will be this rewarding, or that my next entry will be
positive. I can say I think I already love these kids. I hope at the end of two
weeks they might feel a little of the same for me.