street wise

It was extremely difficult to come up with a way to describe how today felt when we were all recapping the events over dinner.

We drove past the street kids today, a group of homeless children who live around Lodwar, on our way to the church to meet the Unembraced kids. It felt oddly discomforting that we were driving past homeless children this morning without giving anything when we were going to spend a day with the kids who were "lucky" to have been taken out of their homeless environment. Aaron was able to step out and film after Pastor Joshua explained to them it was for a documentary involving the church and we wouldn't be making any money from them. Otherwise they would be expecting us to pay them for their "likeness". This chance meeting for Aaron helped give him a new visual for how he wanted to capture information for the documentary, and ended up scoring more interviews with these kids. They wore ragged clothing on their extremely dirty bodies and ate what they could get out of an empty bean can from the pile of trash freshly dumped. The city people will dump wheelbarrows full onto the side of the road and the kids will wait around to dig through it. There was a leader of the group who told them what to do and when to do it. These "leaders" are necessary protection for some of them, a way out of getting beat up by other street kids. The children, Moses told us, came to live here because of tribal fighting, AIDS, , famine and desertion by their parents. They come and have no relatives so they try to survive as best as they can. The old ladies have a hard time as well because if they are widows they were left with nothing to survive. In the modern era of the Turkana culture the women are responsible for practically everything do with the survival of the family: cooking, caring for the kids, running the house, and bringing in the income... and yet they have no power over the finances or their place in the world. The Pentecostal influence here has at least done something in the way of fixing this problem: the hold a men's retreat every Saturday and one of the topics of the retreat is to understand the fault in this way of thinking.

I still can't explain how my day in Soweto affected me. Maybe tomorrow.