Oprhanage Visit 6/29/09

The Embassy arranged a visit to an orphanage in Maputo for anyone in the "US Mission" that wanted to go. We dropped off donations from the US government community. I do not have any pictures, but hope to have some soon. A colleague was able to take some pictures, which was nice and I hope to get copies of them at some point. The oprhanage was a lot bigger than I expected. It housed 300 kids and had a school that was respsonsible for teaching 600 kids. Most of the orphans were boys (250 boys to 50 girls). I found this surprising, but they say the reason is because the girls can be of use for domestic work, etc. Therefore, families are less likely to disgard girls. When you think of an orphanage, you normally think of a sad situation. Don't get me wrong, the living quarters were very minimal for these kids and it is a sad situation. However, you realize that they are better taken care of in the orphanage than they would be anywhere else in Mozambique because of the extreme poverty. This orphanage also tries to match the children back up with a family member (pretty amazing). Adoption isn't common here and the government will only let residents of MZ adopt the children. We were given a personal tour by the current head of the orphanage. We also got to visit with some of the kids, who clearly did not want us to leave. A few of the little girls enjoyed playing with my sunglasses. I felt very bad just going for a few minutes, because the kids were very upset when we left.

I left there thinking that there are some really amazing people in this world, who really just live to help other people. They are too few and far between, but they are responsible for making huge differences in this world. It inspired me and also made me realize how little most of us do on a daily basis to help our less fortunate neighbor.

Here is the website for the orphanage: www.irismin.org. It is a faith based orphanage and operates purely on donations. They can always use donations of money, items, etc.