Last Day

Spent the last 24 hours here in what felt like a flurry of activity - but looking back, it turns out that I really only did one extra thing. Still. That's a lot in a place with an easy-going tempo like here.

Yesterday morning was my first official visit to the HIV Orphanage that's part of the SRH campus. I'd been there a few sporadic times before - once on my first day, stumbling through a haze of Benadryl, and again when some French folks wanted to donate a TV to the boys' ward and Dr. Hrishikesh thought another white person in attendance would make them feel at home. And then of course, kids rarely stay where you put them - there are often small posses of kids in identical uniforms and hairstyles running around the hospital grounds, waving to me and shouting "GOOD MORNING MADAM!" at any time of day.

But yesterday was my first official visit. It's a small, clean, and efficient place, run - as such places always are - by incredibly dedicated women who came for a 1-year, part-time position and ended up staying for 16 years. The home started with three orphans and has since expanded to 36, more than half of whom are on daily antiretroviral drugs for their HIV. (All the inhabitants are kids who are HIV+ and whose parents have already died from the infection.) They work amazing transformations. Kids come in with no education, with weights and heights in the <1 percentile, and - through drugs, schooling, nutritious food, and adults who aren't afraid to touch them - become normal children.

They've done such a great job, in fact, that they now have to figure out what to do with these kids when they become adults. The oldest girl has just graduated secondary school. How can she get a job, when employers ask about HIV status and refuse to hire any positive candidates? Where will she live, when unmarried women virtually always live with their parents? Can she get married? Who will arrange it? Good problems to have, given her prognosis when she first arrived at SRH, but tricky issues nonetheless.

Today: presentations, exchanging of small presents (nail polish remover and a Cadbury egg, so far today - already traded in my flashlight for my final 5th and 6th giant watermelons last night), packing, and then 24+ hours of traveling. Oof. God grant me an empty neighboring seat on the plane.