The Orphanage

Well, that's where I work throughout the week. It consists of three buildings (a fourth building is under construction). The buildings (and also the garden, yard and chicken ...) are generously surrounded by a wall. In one of the buildings there are offices and a little medical practice, whereby there is actually no doctor working there. In fact, doctors are north of the capital rather seldom.The main reason for this is not only the general lack of doctors in Togo, but also the much lower salary that can be expected in the north. In the orphanage consultations are held by the nurse. He asks a few questions and maybe measures the blood pressure (... usually on both arms?!?) and then prescribes the medication depending on his diagnosis. In case the medication does not help, the patient comes back for further tests. These are done in the 'lab' by the priest, as no doctor is present. In general one tries to avoid expensive testing. In case though someone is really severely ill, there is still the possibility of the local hospital...

In the other two buildings there are the kids. One of the buildings has the bedrooms, toilets and showers. In the other one there is the kitchen and a dinning room, which also functions as class room for the older kids that do not go to school yet. There are hardly any toys to be found around.

The kids are mostly abandoned by their parents. In some cases the parents have also died. Shortly before our arrival four more babies were welcomed in the orphanage (including also some twins), some of which were just left outside the gate. The babies are absolutely tiny. Though at least in the orphanage one will take care of their basic needs.

During the first week, the French girls and I had helped in turns by the babies, the older kids and the medical practice in order to get an overview of all work areas. Nowadays we can pretty much chose ourselves, where we want to help out. Personally I prefer the older kids, as one can do more activities with them. The working day normally starts for us at 8am, then there is a lunch break from 12pm till 3:30pm and then it continues till 5:30pm. During the lunch break we either go directly back to our house (a 15 to 20 minutes walk under the bright midday sun) or we take a taxi-moto to the internet café in town and then later another one back to the house. Lunch is served at home usually prepared by someone from the organisation that I'm travelling with. The evenings are similar.

The older kids are taken care off by a teacher, who tries to teach them songs, how to draw and write. If the kids are not doing as told, the teacher at times hits them with a stick or other object. We already mentioned that this isn’t acceptable in Europe (and actually it’s also illegal here) and we tried to show her alternative ways of disciplining the kids…

One thing that one notices here is, that there are hardly any toys visible for the children to play with. Even the toys that the French girls had brought along, had largely disappeard from view after only a few days. That means of cours also that the kids do not really know how to play with toys and how to take care of them. For example, the little cars were quickly taken apart and had also plenty of dents; the little dolls were soon missing arms, legs and heads, not talking about the clothes). With the puzzles we tried to be more careful to avoid them being destroyed to quickly ... by the way, not even the older kids were able to master rather simple puzzles...