The Beginning...

I just spent the day with 70+ kids who've never held a paint brush trying to cover oil-based walls with water-based paint and had an absolute blast. Some folks from MUHURI came (including my supervisor and the CEO of sorts, which was a pleasant surprise...) and we let the kids perform (which I filmed), played frisbee and futbol, drank juices with lunch, and almost got the dining hall painted. Story in pictures:

A great deal of the paralegals that I run into once in awhile while transitioning from the prisons to MUHURI offices to the Remand Home came out to play. My "boss," Fatma, is in the front wearing green and Husna (who loves to ask my opnion on social hot topics) is next to her. In the back you can see what will one day (with enough funding) become a kitchen made out of stone and the dining hall behind the tree.

While the walls were being washed, we had the kids dance for us. This is an awesome story: half of Mombasa is down with the flu due to the change from rain season to heat season, including me, and this week Roo and I both felt like caacaa at the Home. So after doing some paralegal things with the kids, slept under a tree to give them time with the spiritual leaders. After we woke up and felt just as bad, they all organized and danced/sang for us to make us feel better! The dances they performed today were very similar - they perform with an abandon that puts our self-consciousness to shame, my friends.

This is the head honcho, Hussein, who runs MUHURI. There are three different projects going on right now and he manages them all with a casual leadership that I adore - I've rarely seen CEO types work up a sweat playing futbol with a bunch of kids in remand or get down and dirty with paint, but he showed up a lot of the younger folks today! You can see how much brighter the walls look with this paint - even though I found my perfectionist self getting frustrated with kids doing up-down strokes then side-to-side strokes or the paint not working well because of the oil-water mixture, everyone was extactic about how fresh it started to look. We'll have to go back on Monday to add a final coat that hopefully makes it look more complete, then the carpenter will begin installing shelves at the end of the wall in this picture, a white board will be put where Hussein is painting, and we'll line tables down the middle for classes and such.

And if anything was a success today, it was playing. I brought my frisbee and we found a ragged soccer ball so all the kids were running around doing recreation things they never get the chance to do...made my whole trip. Getting this shy girl to take a picture with me was an accomplishment in itself. After the day was done, it was hard to remember that they have some sort of issue with the law - more than half are "Children in Need of Care and Protection" so haven't committed a crime, rather are victims, so seeing them play around today was simply beautiful.

And this just sums it up...putting young folks in front of a camera is like putting light infront of flies - they flock. Everyone who wanted to got a chance to help paint and will get to help with the mural later in the week. Fatma is pictured here with them and at this point, we've pretty much called it a day because trying to put more paint on top of barely-dry paint was just a mess. I had an absolute blast and can't believe this is how I'm spending my summer - definately nothing like I imagined but better than I could have ever hoped for. More updates to come soon.