The Breakfast Club

I had a wonderful day today, had a meeting of my Breakfast club, first one in a long time.

Took my youngest and meet the ladies at a semi "local" eatery to celebrate one of us coming home and share the news and boos of our current  commitments. L had just come home from volunteering at the orphanage in Uganda for the last 6 months. L ( fifty something if she is a day) has a grown family and a wonderful hubby who understands and supports her impeccably.

In Uganda there is a very high rate of mothers dying during birth. The people are so poor and lack knowledge or ability to feed newborns, often out of desperation and some times grief, if they do not know someone who is already breast feeding in the family, a wet nurse, they have a tradition of taking the babies to a field to let them die of starvation or an equally gruesome fate awaits the children in the field. Snackies for the local beasts.

Now the African culture is definitely one for taking in Family, it is not unusual to see one sister take in the children of another sister if she should die in birth or of aids, (which is happening all tooooo often. Aids is a scourge), then another family member may die and they will take them on too. But eventually due to the amount of poverty and tragedy in a lot of African countries there does become a limit to how much one family member can do and take on. That is where the orphanages come in. These orphanages are not supported by their Government, be it monetarily  or materially, they are funded and run by outside interests. Sometimes it is by just ordinary folks kinda  like the ladies of our breakfast club.

This particular orphanage has been built beside one such field and is scoured daily by the volunteers and the local ladies, teen moms that have no other place to go,  that they have hired to help. Babies are picked up and taken care of. Often in a matter of days you will find the father after grieving for a while has been able to think more clearly, been able to find a helper/wet nurse or  family member comes to the door asking if their  family "baby" was taken in, fathers are brought in, taught how to use bottles, ( they have no means of getting these on their own really) given lessons on how to care for his newborn and milk from the cows that the orphanage owns. Of course this also helps the folks running the place to keep an eye on the children's progress as the new family now comes back almost every day to get more free milk for the babies. (these people are devastatingly poor)

There has also been a foster system set up that has matched smaller families with the children and they are supported by food and very meager funds for incidentals to take in some of these children. This strategy has worked out very well as it is very cohesive with the culture to take care of family and children as much as possible and again the children are monitored as they are all going to the school that has been set up. The schools is very well attended as education is very highly prized and seen rightly as a ticket out of the grinding poverty.

Interestingly the girls are snapped up quickly and the boys tend to be left to stay, it was a puzzlement, until we understood that girls are paid for with a bride dowry when they grow up and the boys must pay for it. It has been impossible to get across to families that they will not be responsible for this burden when the boys grow up to a marriageable age. :) They feel the children are theirs and they are now the family and they are responsible. Now if only we could import that level of commitment and attitude to some Western cultures.

Currently this small place has about 120 children on any given day living there, babies seem to keep around the number 15 or so and almost all of rest over the age of two. In their summer time it drops down to about 30 as family members who have large numbers of children, ( the sister who has three sister's kids for example) will take the children home for a month or two but are unable to cope for  the full year.

So that is the current project that the Breakfast club is working on and meeting about.


We have all connected thru the years by one person or another thru Hosting children in one way or another. Some of us have taken in children from Chernobyl to give them relief and an opportunity to get healthier, some of us have had kids return year after year each summer until they have become almost adults. One just cares for  downs syndrome children. Some of us have hosted Native / Inuit children that have had to come south for health reasons such as lung disease, it is very hard to cope in the super sub zero temps if you have lung issues. ( Lets face it not  lot of doctors are interested in being snow bound in the Attic for 6 to 8 months a year.)Some with children from war torn Africa that were suffering from Post traumatic Stress, patch them up and send them off home. Always, always the condition is that the children have  to go back no matter what or you could ruin the program for the other children that could benefit. Countries are suspicious of white western folks that want to "help" black or ethnic folks with their children and history has proven their suspicion right.

So over the years we ladies have molded into a group, new ones added in and some have fallen off, some religious, some not, some older, some not so old. Most are married, a few are not. Some with children of our own, some have none. Some are economically advantaged, some not so much. Some with PHD's, some just a plain old high school. But there we were this morning having our breakfast talking about our future gaols sharing notes, who had what children in their homes, who was taking a break, touching base on how our natural families were doing, bitched about bureaucracy, ( one has to be careful with that topic, because you could get permanently stuck)  who was going back to volunteer to do hands on work. (It will not be me.) I had a wonderful time, a Bestest time as one of my kids would say.

Tomorrow night we go to hear L give a presentation on her trip to Uganda, our families will be there, it will be open to the public, the Cattleman swears he hears his wallet groaning already.....