30 1 / 2012
African babies
January 20th
So there’s a group of adorable African children who have found me. They come to my house everyday to play. We color and sing songs. They ask for money a lot, which is kind of heartbreaking and at the same time exasperating. Every 5 minutes during an hour of coloring they will ask me. But they are cute, and drew a bunch of pictures, which I put on my wall, and they really liked that.
Today it was getting dark, and I asked these two girls (ages 4 and 3) where their mother was. They took me to a shebeen (a moonshine bar worked out of someone’s house) where we found her dead drunk. I realize now that’s why they are at my house all the time. The mother also has a small baby that is breastfeeding, and is probably ingesting that home brew. This is really unfortunate, as these home distilleries never have a consistent proof, so this mother may get something super strong by accident, and then either get the baby drunk with her breast milk, or not give the kid food for a day.
I don’t know what to do. I kind of made a rukus being there (the lekgoa at a shebeen! Always cause for excitement), so I got her to go home, but I think she just put the kids to bed and went back to drink more. I have no idea how to handle issues of child abandonment in my village. I want to get social workers involved, but as a white person coming in after hundreds of years of colonial imperialism I don’t think that’s really something that should come from me. For now, I’ll try to partner up with the Health Education Officers in my village. Until then, kids coloring at my house will have to continue.
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