Dose of Reality

To say the last few days have been rough would be a huge understatement. The work has been physically exhausting but on top of that we lost one of the little girls on Saturday. Sipokazi was the quiet one when I got here because she was slowly not feeling well. She got progressively more sick over the past few weeks, fighting AIDS/TB. A few days before she died I made her a sign that told her she was brave and beautiful and she hung it above her bed. I guess I had this naive notion that she could stick it out and be back to her old self again. The night before she died I had held her and massaged her back but the nurses told me to stop because she could become to dependent and that would only make her sicker. Looking back I should have just kept massaging her since she died anyway, at least to let her know she was cared for. Her funeral is Friday. Caring for the other kids is a nice distraction but it still is tough not to tear up thinking about her. The other people here are fairly nonchalant about the whole thing. I guess when you work here long enough and see this time and again you kind of have to in order to stay sane.
In happier news, I convinced the housekeepers to let me into the storage shed today and found new shoes for the kids in all the donations. Finding 26 pairs of shoes and sizing them while kids climb on you for 7 hours is not an experience I would willingly have again, but the kids were so happy it was worth it. They were all showing off their shoes to each other.. very cute. It was tough sorting through the shoes.. a lot of them had belonged to past kids and I had to mark out the names of the old ones and write the new ones in. This job would be a lot easier without those little reminders. One cool sidenote though.. a lot of the new shoes I found for the kids were TOMS shoes. The site tells you more about them (tomsshoes.com). I had received them as a gift a while ago and it was funny seeing the donations here.. maybe one pair of those had come from my gift? The kids loved them regardless. It was worth the sweat and frustration. The smiles reminded me why we're all here.