The Pursuit of Happ(i)ness

Someone once said that love is blind. That someone must have known something very honest about love. I think he knew that love pulls a fast one on us, making us believe one thing but not cluing us into the fact that we may be the only one to see it that way. Maybe it's a little more like a pair of tinted glasses no one else has worn, this thing called love.

Why the focus on love? I am thinking about this because the last 11 or 12 weeks of my life have been colored with a lot of interesting things; things that sometimes makes me forget that I'm a white girl in Africa.

Notice, I seem to be forgetting myself more than anything. Frankly, it’s not very easy to forget you are living in the middle of nowhere in Africa. I wake up to an actual tambourine ringing at an ungodly hour, watch the electricity go off about 20 times a day and feel an unholy abhorrence in my tummy towards ugali and other African specialties. I can scientifically prove that there are more ants in Tanzania than there are stars in the sky and I am CONVINCED that Mt. Kilimanjaro is really just a cosmic science experiment gone bad. Seriously, who would mount a sno-cone in an open-faced sauna? Signs of Africa are everywhere around me. But somewhere between all the signs of life and the constant noises of kids and talking, I forget that I am in a hard place, that Tanzania struggles under a lot of pain, and that most of the kids in Africa will always think that Norway is next to Canada and the US, if they don't think Norway is a village, that is. But most of all, I forget that I am at an orphanage.

Like a lot of people who come to a far-off place, I had a vision in my head of what an orphanage looked like and what working there would entail. And in none of those pictures did I see myself or kids having nearly so much fun, so many laughs, so much tickling or play so many games as I have here. I’m willing to admit that some of the…uh…mayhem...could be my fault. Simultaneously a pupil and a victim of my older brother’s torturing methods, I became quite a skilled instigator/actress in what you might call the art of provoking squealish, squirming delight.

But what I have sat down to write regarding Nyumba ya Furaha, The Joyful Home’s fitting KiSwahili name, is when that inner crust shakes every now and again you stop and really look at each child’s heart. You remember that they are not glowing with life because life happened naturally for them. They are here at Nyumba ya Furaha because life happened unnaturally, and they are learning to live and grow up despite the glitch in the universal system of family. Most of the time, though, you just don’t see this sort of sadness or anything to pity about these nine kids, and it isn’t because they have everything in the world. Quite the contrary, they have few things and eat few delicacies. New clothes aren’t new; they are just new to them now that they have been handed off from someone else who bought new clothes for themselves. They don’t go out for pizza on the weekends or have family trips to the movie theatre. On birthdays, they don’t get many gifts or cards with money from distant relatives. On Christmas, sometimes they don’t even go home or have a home to go to.

These are the moments where the thin veneer over happiness becomes a little more transparent, the moments where you feel how from one second to the next an entire one or two or three months of laughter vaporizes. This is when the tinted lenses come off and you see a very different world than the one you’ve lived in. But then, something amazing happens…a few minutes later, you can make them laugh again. You don’t have to put your rose-colored glasses on to tell that they are really happy children with true happiness lighting up their soul just then. But you do have to stop and take some serious stock of what you think about happiness if an orphan in Africa can be happier than you and the kids you know.

Strange though this may seem, I have nothing depressing to tell you about Africa or about the orphanage. Remember when I began, I was talking about love, not pain. So it is 500 words later, when I have let some of my day’s travels pour out onto an electronic page. You see, it isn’t depressing because, despite the unnatural outplay of one of the early scenes of their lives, these kids are not sad, not in the least. These few months here at Nyumba ya Furaha have been some of the most joyful, silly and ebullient months of my life( although in all fairness I haven’t a single memory before the age of three so those first few years could have been quite silly as well. No one was never crowned graceful for the methods they used to take their first few steps). So it is with these kids, some of them who were abandoned as early as age three/four. Against all odds, these kids have really mastered the pursuit of happiness that Thomas Jefferson penned into immortality even if TJ didn't really outline what happiness is.

All happiness may be at the end of the day is a memory. It is remembering that no matter what tints your shades at the moment, life still has value. And of all things happiness never forgets, it's the concept of value.

Take that, TJ.

Tales from a Happy Home

The natives here have a saying. They say that Kiswahili was born in Tanzania, got sick in Kenya, died in Uganda and was resurrected in the Congo. Hearing jubilant chatter float up from around the washing area outside Nyumba ya Furaha, you would have no doubt that Swahili was born here in Tanzania. The joyful banter of the nine kids at Joyful Home is a mess of yelps and squeals and the occasional blood-curdling scream when some unfortunate soul is ‘beaten’ by his brothers and sisters. ‘Beating’ is the English equivalent for everything from corporal punishment to rough play. Anyone who gives you a sharp smack on the arm is even accused of beating you. Rarely do the tears and screams last more than a few minutes. Tutayo, a Masai girl from a distant village, says it is because African babies are tough; they do not cry. No offense to Tutayo, but that is not quite right. African kids may rarely cry, but the babies are wailing all the time. But then if we’re honest, most adults are crying all the time, too; they just don’t let it show.

Crying or no crying, Tutayo is right about one thing at the orphanage that I work at. For all the kids and all the ‘beatings’, there is not much crying. Just like its Swahili name, Nyumba ya Furaha, the Joyful Home really is a fountain of joy overflowing on a dry, dusty plain beneath a quiet mountain. It seems there is always laughter there. And like every truly beautiful thing, laughter does not come in a word. It comes in the midst of life, unfolding itself in a single, unsuspecting moment but lasting for eternity in the memories of those who beheld it. The glorious thing about laughter is that it moves not by car or wave or pen, but through the heart, so you can carry it with you everywhere. Let me carry some of our laughter to you, today.

The Joyful Home carries nine kids who together make up one of the oddest families you could ever picture. Just now, the oldest, Neema, is 13; the youngest, Baraka F, might be as young as six. In February we celebrated his seventh birthday but depending on the day you ask him, he may or may not adamantly insist that he is already eight. Between Neema and Baraka F there are seven other kids, two more girls and five astonishingly energetic boys.

I haven’t met all the kids you’ve ever known in your life, but I assure you that you have never met kids who clean as much as these kids do. Every morning they rise with the dawn and make an astonishing raucous with dripping buckets, water squeegies and wet rags as they clean the Joyful Home and themselves. Cleaning subsides into a feast of white bread and sweet tea for breakfast, where they eat all their meals at three wooden tables in one of the bigger rooms in the house. Breakfast is usually uneventful, except for the one day that a visitor joined the morning meal. In the middle of bread crumbs and scalding tea, a scorpion slid out of hiding and into full view. Mad chaos broke out among the table-dwellers save for one kid who was strangely silent. Israeli said nothing, just bolted up from his chair and shot out of the room as a discussion broke out about how to get rid of it. The talkers were far too slow. Before any plan could be plotted, Israeli came barreling back into the room with a machete brandished high and sliced the scorpion in two. He casually tossed the machete aside and sat back down to his bread and chai.

I know, I know, machetes and nine-year-olds and slicing scorpions in two all sounds very exotic, but if you knew Israeli, this would not seem odd at all. His hobby is banging things—walls, dirt, floors, the small doghouse the kids built outside the Joyful Home. When he doesn’t have a hammer in his hands it is usually because someone has taken it away. Israeli’s obsession for hammers and hitting things was strongly comforting while we sat in the immigrations office watching officers talk about our visa papers because we knew that if worst came to worst, we could count on Israeli to come bust us out of prison.

When there are no hammers to play with or people to break out of prison, Israeli plays with normal toys like soccer balls and toy cars and flashlights, or “torchies” as the kids affectionately call them here. And of course, there is one more toy ever-presently at hand for young Israeli, and that is the vast and wild land of Africa. Beyond the unfortunately scorpion there are ants, bugs, beetles, grasshoppers, flies, wiggle worms, centipedes, millipedes, donkeys, and fellow boys to chase around. I once saw Israeli grow tired of even all these toys, though, and watched as he climbed to the top of a slender tree growing just out front of the Joyful home. And when I say slender, I mean this was a gangly sapling. A sloth would have turned its nose up at this tree. But the stone the builders rejected became the capstone of Israeli’s great day as he shinnied up the smooth bark and planted himself right smack on top of the tree. The thin wisp of a wood shuddered back and forth as the willowy boy began full out swaying back and forth as though a huge gust of wind had come up. All that had come up was a burning song in Israeli’s heart. I melted into laughter as I watched one happy kid swinging the treetop back and forth and belting out a loud song at the top of his lungs.

Welcome to the Joyful Home.