The day begins at 5am with devotions and singing in the assembly hall. All children attend school and help with household duties. In their spare time, the children play and, like everywhere in Africa, you often hear the children singing.
Housing
Houses are simple. They are furnished with the mother's bed, at least six children's beds or cots, and shelves for clothes. Floors are concrete, walls are made of local bricks and wooden rafters hold up the uninsulated corrugated iron roof. Most rooms have a single light bulb and no power sockets. A spring in the hills behind the orphanage means we can provide basic flush toilets and cold showers. Teenagers live in either a girls' or a boys' dormitory.
Health
Children often arrive malnourished and/or ill. Many children are probably HIV positive. We have a small clinic on site. When we can't treat our children, we drive them along the bumpy dirt road to the District Hospital. The orphanage nurse, Dollie, lives on-site and is also a foster mother to some of our children. When we have enough money, we buy medicine in bulk in Lilongwe.
Food
The staple food in Malawi is ground maize, which is served three times a day. At breakfast, it is made into porridge. For lunch and dinner, it is served as nsima, with beans and cooked vegetables. A couple of times a week, the children eat a small amount of fish or meat.
In Malawi, food supply is unpredictable. Visitors notice that stores often run out of staples, such as salt or sugar for weeks at a time! We are used to this and have survived food crisises by growing our own food wherever possible. Rev. Chipeta's wife continues to look after our farm. As she is now in her 70s, she is starting to think about a successor. Our farm grows maize, tomatoes, cabbages, pumpkins, sunflowers, bananas, mangoes, groundnuts and cassava. Other groceries, including rice, cooking oil, salt and sugar, are purchased in bulk in the capital city, Lilongwe. Bread and milk are expensive and reserved for special occasions.
