Shohini 5

Since my last blog entry, there has been so much to write about. But I won't write everything that happened but instead we (the four of us) are splitting up what to write about. So I'll start with the Friday after the last day at Consol. This weekend, basically was spent doing nothing. Kim and Tanya had to move out from Korea Lodge because there weren't any space since we hadn't made bookings up to that day. So Becca and I spent Sunday in the room going crazy by ourselves. We were speaking in British accents and screaming and saying ridiculous things. Before that we were all just fooling around, thinking about what games we would play with the kids. I don't I've laughed that hard in a really long time. I think we are going crazy slowly. Monday we wanted to spend doing something productive with our lives since we were bored out of our minds during the weekend. Instead all we did was change money, get groceries and buy tickets for Blantyre. There was insane traffic so it took almost all day to do that. So we woke up this morning early to check-out and leave by 8:30am. The car we had was a gigantic car and was really comfortable. We reached Michingyi pretty fast and reached around 10:30 am. The kids were out of class and we met the finance manager who we later found out was agogo's (grandfather/founder of Home of Hope) grandson. We asked him to give us a tour of the place. I was amazed. The place is pretty gigantic and accommodates about 640-660 children and about 142 support staff. There's a primary school, nursery, secondary school, library, a small (decently equipped) clinic, hostels for boy, girls and babies, houses for the staff and a graveyard. While we were given the tour, the younger children just really wanted to meet us in their classrooms and groaned really loudly if we didn’t enter their classroom. It was really adorable. They didn't speak a whole lot of English but they were taught how to say "welcome visitors". We then went to the garden/farm that was outside of the compound but still home of hope territory. There were all sorts of things; maize, sugarcane, vegetables, fish ponds, beans and of course chickens running around. We went up the hill and it was beautiful; I just wanted to keep climbing the hill and go over to Zambia. But we only went up to the Fax House which was basically a donkey barn when the Scottish people were the only white pastors till agogo became the first black pastor. He used to go up there which was now an abandoned place. It was a gorgeous place and beautiful view. It was away from everything but it could see everything like the home of hope and beyond it; it was beautiful. We stayed there for a little bit and then came down and went to the clinic, where little kids were staying, the hall, and then to the secondary school. After that, we went back to our rooms. We met Rodrik, who is the helper here, and he taught us many sentences in Chichewa though I've forgotten most of it and he's supposed to quiz us tomorrow. We decided to go out to play with the kids. The rest of our stay at Home of Hope was full to the brim through hikes, meeting new children and teachers and hearing their stories, devotion and beautiful singing and a difficult goodbye at the very end.