Just know that we moved to the new house and don't waste your time reading all this because it was just me venting!

It is now 3:30 am and I will be leaving in just under 2 hours for the airport. At this point I am no longer tired and I think it is finally time to try and write. I really don’t know where to begin with anything. I guess I can start by apologizing that I have not been in touch with anyone for over a week now. It has been by far the most stressful and frustrating week of my life. There were times when I thought my head would explode, and times when I thought I might make others’ heads roll. Talking with Matt over dinner tonight, we tried to put this experience into words. We were thinking of what we would tell people when asked about our trip. The best description I have come up with for the last 7 days is that I have never felt so wrong and right all at once. With each step I took forward I felt more resistance and struggled with more doubt of my purpose here.

As most of you know, my main goal for this trip was to finally move St. Lucia to its new home. I thought it a basic assumption that all parties involved would be in support of this. But there I go assuming again, something I should know by now is never wise when I am here. I believe my last post talked about Matt leaving for safari and me being left with the preparations for the move. So Thursday and Friday I worked harder than I ever knew I could. I sorted out the weighty issues of water and a security gate. I purchased a new stove, got a washing machine repaired, took measurements for construction at the new house, and so on. The days were long, but rewarding. Friday night I was surprised with a working tv in our apartment, so I turned my mind off and rested comfortably, believing wholeheartedly that we would move on Monday.

Saturday I took it a little easier, preparing for the plumbing and the water delivery the next day. Sunday passed with plenty of minor obstacles with the water, but nothing I can really even remember after today’s fiasco. I really should be writing about the move and celebrating, but it was very anti-climactic for me, so I am having trouble enjoying it at all. Anyway, by Sunday night we had 10,000 liters of water hooked up to a pump for the house. All that was left was for the plumber to come back in the morning and pump it into the pipes so that we would have running water. I decided we would go on with the move since we would have all day for the plumber to finish while we transported the belongings of 20+ people. I hired the truck and we showed up Monday morning at 8 to get started.

So here’s where it got fun. Tobidina decided she wanted to check the house to make sure everything was ready. This seemed fair enough; how could I say no to her looking at the house in which she would be working? I was only the mule, here for money and moving. Although I was skeptical, and sensed she would find reasons for not moving, I hired a taxi and we went to the new house. Meanwhile, the movers waited patiently for our word that they could start loading the truck. Even after knowing that there would be no gate yet (it was delivered but the posts were being constructed), and knowing that the water was being hooked up that day, Tobidina decided that these were reasons why we could not move. Her number one reason though, the real clincher, was the issue of transportation for staff to the new house. The house is in a more remote location where dala dalas do not often run. This was an issue I discussed EVERY SINGLE DAY with the nurses since I arrived. I told them that Karama would pay their transportation costs but that they needed to find out what they would be. I was a broken record each day, asking them if they needed anything else or if there were any new issues to be addressed because we were preparing to move on Monday the 27^th. But no problems were mentioned - not until moving day.

Again, I am having trouble describing what any of this was like, because each day has surpassed the last in disappointment and aggravation. I remember feeling furious that I had wasted so much time, and I was even more enraged when Winfrida (after finally getting a hold of her) seemed to feel no urgency herself in resolving the situation. I had to pay the movers for their wasted time and head back to the new house to oversee the plumber as he hooked up the water. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I had to buy a new generator and several new parts to get the system working. Even just a trip to town was stressful, especially for a mzugu who will be ripped off wherever she goes. I was able to get a generator in time to finish the plumbing that day, but only to be hit with a new and potentially devastating problem. Once we walked inside to try out the faucets, we found flooding everywhere. All the bathrooms were swimming pools and the hallway was already a slip ‘n slide. We needed to get the original plumber in order to find the source of the problem, but he would not be available until the next morning.

I was really beginning to lose hope that the move would happen as I only had 2 days left. It was Matt’s 21^st birthday, so we tried to put St. Lucia aside and relax, but the disappointment in my mind could not be ignored. It was a sleepless night, so I got up at 5 to start planning out what I needed in order to fix the problems. I finally reached Winfrida at 9 and she gave me the number for the plumber. Just the night before she had told me that he had no phone, yet another lie of convenience that I am growing so used to here. Anyway, I found a ride with Juma, the man who came to help us move the day before, and I offered to pick up the plumber so we could get him there as soon as possible. He declined, and we waited until 10:30 before getting fed up and going on a manhunt for him throughout Kijenge. He was supposedly on a dala dala, so we stopped when we came to each one until we found him. After just a few wasted hours the work was able to begin.

I finally hit a stroke of luck amidst an onslaught of setbacks. The plumber was able to fix all of the leaks within about 2 hours. We now had running water, working electricity, and an additional 10,000 liters of water that I had delivered while working out the leaks. I called Matt to tell him we could move, actually believing it since Tobidina had agreed to move as soon as they had running water. She made it quite clear to me that if I had running water the next day, we could move immediately. So I called St. Lucia and found a list of excuses the length of my life to justify why we still could not move. Transportation was again whipped out, even after I had now personally secured the staff rides to and from work, door to door. But silly me, I was not thinking about the health of the patients. Apparently, according to Tobidina, they would die if we moved them. Wow. I wish we had known that before we built the house! I guess in that case they can never move! Then there was the matter of waiting to notify family members, who have known about the move for months. I’ve already mananged to block out most of the other excuses because they were so insulting. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but more importantly, I couldn’t believe I had been so blind as to not see it before. The staff absolutely did not want to move. Their lives were convenient at St. Lucia, and the move would make tasks such as going to town for supplies more cumbersome. In a society that lives day to day, this new house demands planning and bulk shopping to overcome its distance from town. The move was Winfrida’s dream, not the nurses, and while I could understand their lack of enthusiasm, I could not justify Winfrida’s behavior as she allowed such delays after I came from the other side of the world and worked my ass off for her organization. Didn’t anyone care about the kids? Did no one else’s heart break when we had to send the truck away on Monday and tell them we were not moving? The fact that Winfrida would just as easily forget about the move as she had forgotten about me the whole time I’d been here was too much. She was going to let Tobidina continue to feed me asinine excuses and she seemed perfectly okay with it.

I think it was around then that I had to stop talking to Tobidina entirely. She was yelling at me that they have to sit and make a plan because they were not prepared to move, while I was choking back vomit as I replayed all the discussions I had had with her about the move. Throughout this time I could not reach Winfrida at all, which was no surprise, but was now more distressing than ever. On Monday she had been apologetic, telling me that she hoped we could finish the water and move the following day. I thought if she at least wanted to move that the rest of the staff would have to go along with it. After all, it’s for the kids, not the employees. But I later found out from Connie that Winfrida had turned off her phone to ignore my calls because she herself did not know what to do. Connie was my only ally and she was thousands of miles away. I came back to the apartment to vent on Matt and contemplate what I should do with the keys to this beautiful new house. I already knew of plenty of people who’d be happy to have it, myself included.

To move things along in this never-ending story, Connie soon told me that Richard, Winfrida’s husband, would come to talk to me and sort things out. All I could do was wait. I waited a few hours and he told me he’d be there by 4. But 4 passed and he called at around 4:45 to say he was going to go home and visit some friends from America first. After hearing that, it was a good thing I didn’t have a gun. Connie let loose on Winfrida and I headed back to St. Lucia to at least see the kids, even if it meant I had to tell them that we would again not be moving. I needed to be reminded of why I was doing any of this, because none of the adults within the entire country seemed at all supportive.

After a lot of angry phone calls and threats of losing funding, I guess Winfrida realized that she could not do this any longer. She gave me the go ahead to move, so I immediately called the truck and started moving things outside. I knew that I was making the nurses hate me even more, and it killed me, but I had to ignore it and think about my job there and worry about my reputation later. It went against everything I believe in, and the whole time I was wishing I could just stop and let the nurses have it their way. But none of this was about the nurses. And none of this was about me. This house was not some American dream being force-fed to unwilling recipients. This was a Tanzanian’s goal, a goal for kids who could have much better lives, a goal for a more sustainable future. So I tried to feel invisible and I started the process of breaking down beds and clearing out closets.

Richard then showed up to take the nurses to the house again to make sure the water was working. They took so long that by the time they were back it was pitch black and impossible to move. We had to cancel the truck again and wait until morning. It was then time for the firing squad. Richard was about to leave me in a room with 4 staff members, literally with my back to the wall and all of them burning angry expressions into my eyes. I demanded that Richard at least stay to translate, because if the nurses wanted to address me, I wanted to make sure I understood everything. They could not come up with any problems with the electricity or the generator, but they of course found new reasons to stall the process. The new stove, which Tobidina had picked out with me, was suddenly too small. And this meant they should not move. The security guard (whose biceps are twice the size of my thighs), was not good enough, not “official” enough. The fridge was too small. The old house would not be safe without people living there. The washing machine was brought up in some way, but I’m already erasing this experience from memory. There was suddenly a laundry list of supplies that were needed, but that were never mentioned before. I stood there, understanding what it must feel like to be raped. I was a villain to these women. I wanted to just take away their words and hand them stones. All this sounds like gross exaggeration, but if ever I should be taken seriously, it is here. I was close to tears by the time I was released from the room. I no longer knew who I was. I had no idea why I had come, and I could not figure out who had wanted this house in the first place. Everything I had done was wrong, and yet everything I had done was discussed with and guided by staff. Everything I had done had been at the request of Winfrida, the very woman her founded St. Lucia and designed the new house. How could I be so awful if I was doing what was asked? I know that I was constantly sensitive to our two colliding cultures and our delicate relationships. I had made sure to always be nothing more than an offer of a helping hand, never a forceful fist intervening in others’ lives. But somehow this had not been enough. Somehow all was still lost, and somehow in a period of 2 days I lost all faith in my passion for this work.

In a peacemaking effort, I signed myself away to be the personal shopper the next day for all of the new appliances and supplies. Burying my frustration with the stove that I had already bought or the washing machine that was already delivered, I promised to do my best to get what they needed, and to have Ed, the next volunteer, pick up what I could not finish. In exchange, we were going to move. But instead of that being a celebration, it was a compromise, and both parties seemed to be licking their wounds and measuring victory against defeat. I hardly had the will left to care; even the kids were losing hope that they would ever see their new house. Mercy had told me all along that “it was not true” when I told her we were moving. They knew better than I that no matter how perfect the house could be, there would be other barriers in the way.

I went home and Matt got us some takeout because neither of us wanted to cook or even go out. I passed out almost immediately from exhaustion and emptiness. This morning came too quickly and Matt and I got ready in silence, neither having much to say, because projecting hopes at this point was just sadistic. We arrived at 8 and had the entire truck packed and ready to go by 9:45. Not too bad at all. We wasted more money in bringing the dala dala to move the kids, only to discover that they first had to go to the clinic to get their ARVs. This was more information that could have been shared last night. But we decided to move the truck and unpack everything so that by the time the kids were back the house would be set up. Then we would move them and go to town for supplies. It seemed foolproof.

Matt, Janeth, and I spent the entire morning at the new house sorting through everything and trying to put together a home. We filled an entire room of clothes and spent hours trying to separate them. At least the move was an opportunity to weed out the unnecessary clothes that will now be donated to villages. I swear I’ve never seen so much clothing in my life. It’s funny how people with so little have the world’s largest wardrobe.

By 1 o’clock we had revised our plan to go to town first because the kids would not be back until 3. All we were waiting for was Tobidina. She punctually showed up around 5, thus rendering it impossible to get to appliance stores to buy the new stove that would replace the one she picked out a just few days ago. We instead just bought gas for cooking and petrol for the generator. Then we spent over an hour in the market stocking up on food and soaps. The light was waning again and this time Matt and I knew how difficult it would be to move in the dark. It was 7 o’clock when Tobidina was ready to leave and we finally went to go get the kids. At the house we found a yard full of crap to be moved, little of which could fit in the dala dala with the kids or the car with the female patients. We wasted more time completing useless tasks that should have been done before our arrival, and around 8 we finally left. The excitement had long since dissipated and had been replaced with tired children who were crying because they could not see enough in the dark to walk over the stream and get to the dala dala. I stood in the stream transferring children across until I got to Cecilia, who is again sick to her stomach and was crying. I gave her a row in the car to herself to lay down, but there was not much more I could do at the time. The doctor is out of town until Sunday, and with me leaving so early in the morning there would be no one to take her to the hospital. I had to make like a Tanzanian and just hope for the best for her health. How comforting. At least Ed is already informed that he needs to keep a close eye on her when he gets here, though that isn’t enough to clear one’s conscience when it comes to leaving a sick child.

We got everyone in the cars and got to the new house to find that the generator had taken to switching off every minute or so. We had no light as we moved everyone inside, which of course helped to improve my unraveling relationship with the staff immensely. The guard and I found a way to prop up the switch and keep the power on, but by this time our rides were angry and ready to leave. Tobidina came at me talking about a taxi and problems of transportation for old time’s sake, and I had to take to the storeroom to cool off for a few minutes. Just last night I asked point blank if that issue was resolved or if there was anything else I could do to make the transportation easier. Personally, if I were offered the opportunity to go from paying my own way by dala dala to getting a free taxi to work, I don’t think I’d have much of a problem. Tobidina wanted me to call Winfrida and discuss the taxi with her, presumably so that I would pay for it. I hadn’t heard a word from Winfrida all day. She has made this trip a thousand times harder for me than it had to be with her intentional unavailability and her lies of convenience. After all we had gone through to get the right keys to the house from her, to get phone numbers from her, to get any information at all from her, the least she could have done would have been to call and see how the move was going. Or maybe she could have even apologized for all the crap she put me through with wanting me to come and help move but then condoning all of the delays. If you can’t already tell, I really didn’t want to talk to her. But maybe I’ve learned on this trip that I can’t always be so stubborn, and I may have to just put aside my personal vendettas in order to ensure that the nurses get to work and the new house is not just a night’s vacation home. So, I called her and kept it very brief; she did apologize for my trouble but it really meant nothing at that point.

We had moved and I was upset that no one was able to enjoy it. I could not understand how Winfrida could have changed so much. Matt and I felt completely neglected by her throughout our stay. I guess I don’t know what she might have going on, but by the end of today I couldn’t deal with it. I just told her I had to go and she asked if I’d come in the morning to meet with the taxi driver. She even forgot that I was leaving in the morning. It was all very uncharacteristic of the Winfrida I knew before. So I said goodbye and told her I had to go say bye to the kids. Gertruda was asleep on the new couch and we didn’t really get to say a good farewell. David was mad that I was leaving because he had wanted to spend a night with me in my apartment. Most of the others gave me rushed hugs and kisses as our driver was shoving us out the door. It was all more than a little depressing.

As much as I came into this trip feeling underserving of being with everyone for the move, and as much as I’ve thought it’s unfair that Connie couldn’t be here, I realize now that there was no satisfaction to be had and no celebration for anyone. I almost think it’s good that Connie wasn’t here, because it may have been even more disappointing for her. I am trying so hard to look at the trip as a whole right now and to wrap this up on some sort of positive note. But if you’ve made it this far in reading then you’ve seen that I am pretty preoccupied with the past several days and I am unable to just appreciate the fact that we accomplished what I came here to do. Maybe in a few days I’ll feel proud or excited. I know that I pushed myself and did more than I thought I could, but it doesn’t feel like it amounted to anything. Even though we made the move at last, the efforts feel in vain. This trip I found myself to be merely an ATM machine to the nurses, serving the antithesis of our goal in building this house to help reach self-sustainability for St. Lucia. But they’d rather have my money. How did humanity get so far off track? Why is my race an immediate indicator of my socio-economic class? And why can’t I try to do something about it without collateral? Why I am feeling bad for myself and marginalized when I hold the historically privileged position? This move was supposed to be a privilege. The fact that I would be able to help complete something that so many have worked for was supposed to be exciting. It was not supposed to be the most poisonous experience of my life.

I guess I can only hope that once settled into the new house, and once used to their new routine, the staff will be happy and everyone will find peace. Thinking of the kids playing there and having real showers there really does salvage my desire to come back in December and see them. I may have moved them in, but I didn’t get to see them live it. This trip was hardly about the kids at all as I was busy spending 99% of my time working on the house. It would be nice to be there and witness the changes, hopefully for the better, in their lives since the move. Until then, I think I will continue to feel a lot of confusion and exhaustion whenever I think of this week.

I have to go prepare for my taxi; it’s almost time to go. I think I’ll post this entire tirade in Cape Town, and then do another, hopefully happier, post about Cape Town itself. I am ready to go. And I know there are some who are ready for me to leave.

At lease the kids will miss me. And I already miss them.