I started to volunteer once a week at a children’s program run by an organization called Compassion. Compassion runs a sponsorship program for the children, and each child in the program comes to this one-day camp/kid’s club every Thursday. It’s run at a youth centre close to my house (it’s actually the same program that Ben and I were at in December giving candies to). One of my friends in my English class is one of the leaders and he invited me a few weeks ago to come help.

So far it’s been great. There are 220 kids in the program, and a lot of them are orphans or come from tough situations. In this program, the kids play games, make crafts, take classes about hygiene, get help with their school work, etc… plus, they get a good breakfast and lunch.
The kids are really funny. The program is run by nationals, so I’m the only white person there. The first day I was there, we started off the day by playing games in the field. Literally, there were kids that just stood there and stared at me. By the time we got to the crafts though, they started to warm up to me. They started asking me a ton of questions and saying things like, “How come your skin is different from ours? I want white skin because all white people are rich”, “Is it true that all the white kids in school get their own desk? We have 6 kids sharing the same desk at our school”, “How come your hair is different from ours?” I just laughed. I know that I previously blogged about how there’s a gap between Africans and foreigners, but the way these kids were so blunt about it, I just couldn’t help but smile.

I haven’t taken any pictures in a while. I’ll bring my camera to Compassion next week to take some pictures.