Tuesday, I spent the night at Watoto Children's Village. This is the ministry I wrote about before that has a "village" of homes for about 2,000 children. They have groups of 10 homes in circles, each home with a house mother and 8-10 children who truly call that place home and their house mother "mom" their entire lives. They live in the home until they are ready to leave for university, at which point a new child is able to join the home.
EMI is helping to design a wastewater treatment plant for the children's village. Right now, all the buildings are connected to septic tanks and soak pits that are much too small, which means the wastewater is not getting treated properly. Pat (a civil engineering staff from British Columbia) took Dan and I out there to help us get set up, and then just Dan and I stayed out there overnight. Dan used complex GPS equipment to survey the topography of the site. My job was to collect wastewater samples so that we know exactly what needs to be treated by the treatment plant.
So we found a couple strategic locations, opened the sewer manholes, and taped a stick to half a water bottle; every 3 hours, I then got to fish out raw sewage (while wearing disposable latex gloves) and pour it into a semi-leak proof tupperware container, which I kept inside a cooler. Engineers do all the dirty work while architects stay in the office and draw pretty pictures. =) (Since joining EMI, I've learned there's an eternal rivalry between architects and engineers.)
Walking around with all our funny-looking equipment certainly drew a lot of attention from the kids. It was neat to see the kids all over the campus, full of life. The kids are incredibly well-behaved and open. Several little kids just ran up and hugged my legs as soon as they saw me. Everyone seemed so full of affection.
We ended up having all our meals at one of the houses, and they kind of adopted us into their family. We had met them a few weeks ago, and when they saw us again, they couldn't contain their joy. The house mom couldn't stop smiling and hugging all of us. And the two younger boys (in 1st and 2nd grade) seemed to want to spend as much time with us as possible. The house next door also had a 2-year-old girl, who ended up becoming attached to us as well. Since I only had to sample the wastewater every 3 hours, I ended up with a little extra time, and so Wednesday morning, I just went and hung out with the two young boys and the little girl for an hour. It was so much fun! They taught me how to braid banana plant fibers into a rope, and how to make "aeroplanes" out of leaves and thorns. Then the boys joined me on my last wastewater collection adventure and took some pictures and video of me!
Fortunately Pat gave me permission to skip the 3am shift, but I was SO TIRED from carrying around all that wastewater and from not getting much sleep. I was pretty wiped out for the next couple of days. In fact, the night I came back, I had a minor emotional meltdown because I was completely exhausted, and I had to go take a nap before dinner in order to be civilized enough to eat pizza with other people. =) We were then supposed to leave for a weekend in Rwanda on Friday morning, but fortunately we decided to postpone until Thanksgiving weekend.
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