Feels like home...

Today after church we interviewed three of the girls here, who are biological sisters, along with their mom and their grandfather who were visiting them for a few hours in the afternoon. The girls are ages 11, 7, and 4 and have been here at Hekima Place for about a year.

When they still lived with their mother, they lived in a slum nearby under the support of their grandfather and mother. However, the grandfather has been out of a job for quite some time and their mother, who has AIDS, had been in and out of the hospital quite a bit for awhile because of illness. As a result, the two oldest girls had been taken to a children’s home. This children’s home, however, was poorly run, was dirty, and did not afford the girls the time they needed to do their homework for school. The woman who was paying to sponsor these two girls, as well as three other girls at this orphanage, came to visit the home and was appalled by the conditions. So, at that point, she found out about Hekima Place and asked for these five girls to be admitted here. So that is how those girls came to be here.

One day, though, the mother came to visit her two oldest daughters and brought her youngest daughter with her. At this time, the mother was suffering from a drug-resistant strand of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is highly contagious and the drug-resistant strands can be, as you can imagine, very difficult to treat since they are resistant to many of the first-line treatments (www.xdrtb.org). When Kate, the director of Hekima Place, saw the mother with her very young child, she talked to her and explained that she would allow her daughter to live at Hekima Place with her sisters because she did not want this little girl to have to be exposed to this difficult illness. The mother, heroically in my mind, agreed to leave her daughter in Kate’s care. Clearly, this would be the best option for the little girl’s health and opportunities in the future, but the strength the mother had to have to be willing to so selflessly give up her baby girl is admirable. Nobody would ever want to have to make that decision—I can’t imagine how difficult it would be for a mother to let go of watching her daughter growing up every day and of being the main role model in her daughter’s life—but to be able to do so when you have to and to be able to conclude that the best thing for your own child is to, essentially, not be raised by you, is courageous.

Seeing these girls—these three precious girls whose smiles warm your heart—and hearing their story and their mother’s story causes me to wonder how we can allow the world to exist where children are better off not being raised by their own parents, who are otherwise fit to be caregivers other than the fact that they do not have the right financial resources or access to a healthy environment. There’s something wrong with this picture. All over Kenya, loving and gentle parents are having their families torn apart because they’re dying of preventable and/or treatable diseases, because they can’t get a job or can’t afford to live somewhere with clean water or sanitation. It’s just, simply, not fair. Each person’s situation is unique and far more complicated than we often realize. But we just have to take the time to understand.

Understand all and forgive all.

Well, we interviewed the girls with their mom and their grandfather. The mother and grandfather spoke some English, but we decided it might be easier to just let them speak Swahili or their mother tongue, Luhyah, and to have the oldest daughter translate for them. That didn’t seem to help, though.

This was, simply put, the most challenging interview we’ve done so far. The language barrier was just too difficult to overcome. We’d been getting really brief answers before with other guardians because of language difficulties, so we thought having a translator would make it easier. But the oldest daughter is still only 11 and still really learning English and Swahili and doesn’t really seem to remember much of her mother tongue, Luhyah. (The language hurdles these girls and kids all over Kenya and much of the African continent have to overcome is truly unfortunate. But I’ll talk about that some other time. )

Then, on top of the language barriers, it appeared that the mother and grandfather were hesitant to say anything other than that they are “so happy the girls are here at Hekima,” which makes sense because they saw us as two people who work for the place that is taking care of their girls. They would, naturally, be hesitant to say anything that could in any way jeopardize the care of their girls at Hekima Place. Even though it would be natural to be worried about her daughters, to miss them sometimes, to be concerned that they’re growing up without their mother’s constant presence—all of which may or may not be part of this particular mother’s thought process—she might be hesitant to articulate those thoughts for fear that Hekima Place would interpret that in a negative way.

So, all in all, kind of a total disaster as far as getting anything usable for our documentary or the promo piece.

But hey, disaster can make great art, right? Well, maybe. We’ll see. Who knows, what seemed like the most difficult moments during the interview could end up being really telling in themselves. One scene in particular stands out: Lindsey asked the middle daughter if she liked Hekima Place, but she stays silent even as the mother and grandfather constantly plead with her, in both Swahili and English, "say 'yes', say 'yes'." She wouldn't say a word. Silence is golden?

We’ve thought about possibly focusing our documentary on the fact that even though Hekima Place is such a wonderful home and provides so much love and support and opportunity for these girls, the girls would still, in many ways, prefer to be at home. Not because their homes are so much better but just because their homes are, just that, their own homes. Home is the place we all want to be at the end of the day when we lay our heads to rest. How many of us can remember the homesick feeling we got the first time we spent a night away from home or the first time we went to summer camp? You’re there with your best friends having the time of your life, but ultimately, when the lights go out and you’re waiting to drift off to sleep, your thoughts start to wander and suddenly a deep pit builds in your stomach and your whole body feels uneasy and you just want to be in your own bed with your own pillow, cuddled up with your favorite teddy bear from when you were just a little toddler but that has secretly remained your security blanket for those stormy, shadowy nights when you’ve just gotten done watching a scary movie and at every flash of lightning you swear you saw someone outside your window. It’s that feeling that if you could just walk out of your room and see your mom and dad seated at the kitchen table going over some bills or paperwork, they’d be able to make you a cup of Sleepy Time tea with drizzled honey and give you a hug and everything would be all better. But it’s not about your Cinderella sheets or your favorite teddy bear Oatmeal or the Sleepy Time tea. It’s about those people who’ve always been there since you were too young to hold your head up on your own and who rocked you to sleep at night. It's about the people who gave birth to you and the people who raised you and the people who were supposed to be there with you until you were old enough to take care of yourself and have a family of your own. It’s about the sense of home that is deeper than time or place. It’s about the security of unconditional love and of the familial ties that give us a sense of belonging and a glimpse into our past and a confidence in our future.

Yes, we can find that other places and in other people. People do it, I know. We can work to recreate that invaluable connection with other people…but it takes time. And it takes effort. And Hekima Place truly does seem to understand that and truly does work very hard to create the security and unconditional love these girls need. But it takes time. No matter how incredible this place is and how much better these girls’ lives will be if they stay here than if they were to stay at home or with their relatives, there’s still that longing to be home--home with their families, home where the heart is. Even though I’ve heard many of them say how incredibly grateful they are to be here and how Hekima Place has quite literally transformed their lives—and I believe it, too—they’re still kids who just wanted their mommy and daddy to tuck them in at night and tell them that everything will be okay when they're going through rough times. It's nothing against Hekima Place, at all. It’s merely testimony to the strength of family and the desperate need we have to maintain our familial bonds and the urgency of the global village to do something to preserve the lives of the people in these families.Yes, we have to do something about these 12 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. We need places like Hekima Place for the 12 million already orphaned. But we also need to do something about the millions more who are going to be orphans if we don't stop the unnecessary spread of HIV.

But Lindsey's not sure if we have the talent at this point to communicate all that in a 15 minute film. And given my complete lack of experience in documentary film up until now, I think it's safe to say that if she can't do it then neither can I. We’re just afraid we might end up portraying Hekima Place in a bad light..which is quite honestly the very last thing we would ever want to do because this place truly is incredible and these girls truly are blessed and they do know that. So if Hekima came off in a bad light it would be dishonest on our part.

But we’ll keep searching. All in all an interesting day, though.

The three girls’ mom invited us to come visit her at her home in Kibera--the largest slum in East Africa, just a short drive away in the capital city-- in a couple weeks so we’ll do that and interview her again, this time with Gladys as the translator. Hopefully that will go better.

Peace.