Msamaria Street Center

So there I was, sitting at a table with some chipper young boys chattering away in Kiswahili (surely poking fun at each other, or, more likely, the blonde mzungu across the way) while stringing brightly colored beads onto thin pieces of wire, when I started thinking about survivors and scars.

Let me take two steps back. Last week, just before Christmas, Amka School closed until January 10th for the holiday/ summer break, leaving me without an assigned volunteer placement. No problem! There are plenty of places with kids that stay open all year round... namely, orphanages and street centers. My more cynical readers might be thinking, Oh yes, what's more cheery and uplifting than an orphanage on Christmas? Nothing could be more sad than saying goodbye to my tiny, adorable students that I've come to know and love, however (more on this particular last-day-goodbye in another post)... and you'd be surprised. Truthfully, I was excited, too, to check out other volunteer opportunities, dive deeper out of my comfort zone, and make a few new kids laugh, so... enter Msamaria for a day.

Unfortunately, my information on this particular street center is somewhat limited. What I have gathered from others (largely volunteers like myself) is that the center itself suffers from the usual suspects -- overcrowding, underfunding, and my new favorite, corruption. During most of the year, the center is chock-full of children of all ages (nearly all young boys). Some of them are orphans, while many others are children who decided all on their own that the center -- with it's pee-soaked mattresses and pealing- paint walls -- was a better option than the homes they came from. While some (even as young as 7 years old) arrive at the gate by themselves "merely" tattered and malnourished, others wander in with a lifetime's worth of suffering and sadness. Abuse. AIDS. Abandonment. Pick your poison.

Yet there I was that sunny day in December, two days before Christmas, watching the older kids play soccer and sharing a dish full of green and blue beads with a 10-year-old boy, laughing and arguing about which international "football" team we preferred. He eventually grew frustrated with what he deemed my "minimal" knowledge on the subject and took up comparing Ally (another volunteer) and I to different animals in snickering Swahili, assuming we wouldn't understand what they were chatting about. Guess what, though, little guy? I just spent the last 7 weeks practicing animals name with nursery school kids, so I know your game! Naturally, we called him out on it after he determined I looked like a "simba" (lion) with my hair like the "jua" (sun). Busted. Granted, the humidity has been particularly smitten with my curls in the worst kind of way, as of late, so I guess I can't really blame him.

I digress, but little boys seem to be the same all over the world, don't they? These kids, though... they're a little bit different. They face more difficult conundrums than which superhero to be for Halloween, if you know what I mean. Rather, they wear their every-day outfits down to thin pieces of fabric and sleep multiple boys to the same smelly bunk bed. The morning I arrived, they spent the first twenty minutes sweeping up the dirt front yard with a broom made of sticks and washing plastic dishes in a concrete sink. And, believe it or not, they bead jewelry to pay the bills.

You read that right -- the boys come and go, but a steady stream of them sit with CCS volunteers every morning, beading bracelets, necklaces, anklets and earrings to sell in town in order to pay the Center's water bill. Because, for a while? Yeah. They didn't have running water, and SOMEBODY has to pay for it.

One look at these kids and their decaying Center and anyone would be filled with a sense of injustice. Never mind Pity, jump straight to Indignant Frustration; do not pass Go, and do not collect $200. How can there not be enough money to pay the monthly water or electricity bill for these kids? Why has this simple but now seemingly impossible responsibility fallen on the shoulders of street children (and the occasional, high-turnover volunteer)? Seriously. They already have nothing! Whose not doing their job?

That's the funny thing about having nothing, though; it's never really the full story. People who have nothing, like these kids -- the people who appear to all the world like nobody's, invisible to everyone save for themselves -- often have more "somethings" than a real Somebody (not to completely Dr. Seuss you). These kids... well, as far as I can tell, they have energy and pride and sense of brotherhood the rest of us dream of... and a will to live like I've never seen. With physical reminders in the form of deep gnarled scars, many must relive their already long, painful histories we can only dare to imagine every time they look into a mirror. But they're stronger than that.

The kid sitting across from me at the beading table? He has scar, wide and raised, down the side of his left jaw bone that looks for all the world like it should have split his face in two. The first time I saw it, I inadvertently shivered, the ways he might have acquired it swiftly flooding into my brain... and then I felt wildly ashamed. It suddenly reminded me of a passage I read in a book last week. The narrator, a young, female Nigerian refugee, pleads with the reader, "I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived."

And so I smiled at the little survivor in front of me, as that's exactly what he was, and thought about how his (and every other) scar was actually infinitely more beautiful than any bracelet we could create. (Those kids make some beautiful things, too, I have to say.) Scars mean healing, and life... and right then, life demanded that the water bill be paid, so I went back to beading with new spirit in spades.