Home life and trip to dump site

Hi everyone,

My family has been getting many questions. So to answer some of them: the place where I live has electricity which is very lucky. We have running water on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Although that's not very reliable - no running water today and it is Thursday. I had a bucket shower since I didn't shower yesterday either haha. The house has concrete floors and we sleep on wooden bunkbeds. The shower is literally right beside the toilet. There is a drain right in front of the toilet that the water goes into (no stall or anything). School goes from 8:20-4:10 and I have about a 20 minute walk to the school. I am also finding it very lucky that there are not too many mosquitos...although there is sooo much dust! I inhale about a tonne of dust everyday lol. These are some of the kids at the school:

Today was hard. We went to school in the morning and then in the afternoon we went into town with our host dad (James) and one of the teachers. We bought water for ourselves and then juice and bread because we were going  to visit the garbage slum which is very close to where we live. It was really hard to witness...there are so many families literally living on garbage. The way they survive is through running after trucks that dump garbage and picking through the garbage to find anything edible. The women knit hats and make cool purses out of the garbage to try to sell to visitors. There are 600 kids living in this slum and only about half can afford to go to school. It was really sad to see people living in such poverty. Most kids didn't even have shoes and they were walking on garbage all day.

The girl to my left is name Ruth and she is 19. She has a 3 year old baby which apparently is quite common in this slum.

They all sung a song at one point. It was beautiful. I tried to upload a video but it didn't work :(

It is hard because all of the people think that we are rich and will be able to give them lots of money. It's hard to say no to buying things for people, but I have to become better at recognizing their need but also recognizing that I'm not really in a place financially to fill everyone's needs. Especially since financial aid won't solve most of these problems unless there is a sound action plan to go along with it. Instead, I am trying to focus on more sustainable ways of helping...one thing I am doing is looking into building a website for the school to raise awareness of their issues. I have some other ideas...we will see what happens. :)
Kweheri!

Lisa

P.S. Shoutout to my beautiful sista Bridget...the kids here think your name is really funny!