While everything was taking place with the foster project, and I was knee deep in videos, another task fell on my lap. There are fifty orphan children that will receive free medical care from the clinic located here on the Nsoko Center property. In preparation to open the clinic, they wanted to make ID cards for each of these children. And in order to make the ID cards, they needed photos of each of them.
As I’m sure you’ve all gathered by now, I love to be behind the lens, and had no problem accepting the job of photographing all fifty kids. We wanted to make it as fair as possible, and limited each of the eight care points to six children. The remaining two were chosen by Pastor Gift.
I had visions of all fifty kids converging at the Nsoko Center at the same time; forming a single-file line. Then, with the help of a few of the girls from the Real Life team, we would snap their photo, and record their age (that they would know off-hand) and respective care point. The whole ordeal would take two hours, tops. Oh, my skewed, western thinking.
It took more than a week just to track down each kid. We’d show up at the care point, and rather than having a list of six orphans, they’d have a list of six sick children. So then we would wait for the gogos to compile the correct list of kids. Then, half of the kids weren’t at the care points, but in school. Though we tried to head it off and get all the kids from school at once, we ended up returning to the schools multiple times.
Then, many of the children didn’t know their birthday, and we sat around the care points waiting for them to run home to get their dingy birth-card, or waiting on teachers to nonchalantly show up half an hour later with their class records. Some of the children didn’t even have a birth-card, and resulted in the gogos (grandmothers) at the care points just guessing their year of birth. It took hours, and hours, and many times, yielded very little results.
It was definitely a reality check of the difference in cultures. But…it all paid off. A few days after finishing with the photos, the clinic opened. So now, we have a functional clinic right on the property of the Center, and these precious fifty children will be able to come for free at any point. Praise the Lord!
