This week, however, was a bit out of the ordinary. All of the staff at Amani participated in a workshop to discuss current issues and plans for the future. It was very important that ALL of the staff members attend the workshop, so we (the volunteers and 2 substitute staff) were left to watch the kiddos. In some ways, it was actually quite nice to have some more relaxed time to spend with the kids—to talk about their lives and sometimes just to play. But some of the time, as you can imagine with 40+ kiddos, things were pretty crazy….
For example, one of my jobs every morning was to get Bossy (who I’ve mentioned before) and his brother John, ready for preschool, and to walk them there. Seems easy enough, right? I mean, look how sweet and cute they are, how hard could it possibly be?
Oh my goodness. Every day, I tried to be more and more prepared, and every day something else seemed to go wrong. Either we couldn’t find the key to the cabinet with the clothes, or somebody had “stolen” someone’s pants, or Bossy was hiding under the bed and refusing to take a shower, or Bossy was refusing to get out of the shower—you get the idea. Needless to say, I’m pretty sure we were late to school every single day. But everyone’s still alive, and that’s what counts, right? And they are still pretty cute...
Although we (the volunteers) were spending most of our time watching the kids, we did think it was important for at least one of us to be in the staff workshop so we weren’t totally out of the loop. We ended up attending in shifts and then spending time at the end of the day to fill the others in about what had happened.
I’m not normally big on meetings, especially those not in my first language, but I really liked being in that workshop. It was a truly great thing, and I’m thankful I got to be a part of it.
Before I can explain it more, I think it is important to recognize that, while sometimes it is easy to paint Amani as this happy little place with lots of happy little children, it is more complicated that that. This “happy” picture is true in lots of ways—the kids usually do seem quite happy—but it’s still real life. There are so many challenges and, lots of times, questions that seem to have no answers. For example, when is the right time for a child to go back to live with family? How much responsibility should Amani take on versus how much the family should be required to take on? What’s more important—that the child receives a good education or that the child is able to live at home? How long should Amani continue to support a child who often skips school or doesn’t seem to even be trying to pass? The list goes on and on, not to mention the fact that we are working with kids who have often dealt with abuse, or drugs, or trauma, or all three. AND, much of the time, these kids are teenagers. I remember how confused and crazy I sometimes was as a teenager, and, let’s be honest, I didn’t actually have any real problems. So even if we get all of our answers right, the kid might just wake up one day and decide to leave. That’s one of the hardest parts for me—watching the kids you love make choices that you don’t think are best and then letting them live with the consequences. Needless to say, the people at Amani have some really hard jobs.
And all of these things put together are what made this workshop really beautiful. Like I said, the entire Amani staff was there, from the cooks to the teachers to the accountant. And everyone worked together to pinpoint the areas where we are being successful and the places where we have room to grow. Hard questions, which sometimes can be easy to want to cover up, were asked. And they were asked in an open and safe way, and everyone worked together to try to make things better.
Because I have been here so many times, I’ve seen quite a few kids come and go. Some of the kids’ stories have really happy endings; some don’t. And sometimes it is easy to look at the kids who aren’t success stories, those who have made those choices that we are letting them live with or who maybe we didn’t know how to help in exactly the right way, and feel really discouraged.
But, I think I am learning, in part thanks to the seminar this week, that feeling sad about things that didn’t turn out well doesn’t really help anything. What helps is to look at them and learn and to continue to grow and work together and improve. It’s like Dorothy Day said, “No one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.” Although hard questions were asked and, for many of them, there still aren’t any good answers, I think everybody came out of the seminar this week feeling at least a little more hopeful. And it’s a good thing, because with more and more kids arriving every week, there IS a lot of work to do.
Please pray for our kiddos, and the staff who care for them.
