Day 19: Visit Kolfe Orphanage

June 20, 2009

Saturday

Third day in a row with power! Whoot whoot!

This morning JT went with me to visit Kolfe Orphanage. This is the older boys orphanage that my friends, the Mestases, visited when they were here last year, and where Solomon and Haptomu, their "unofficially adopted sons", live. You can read their description here and here, and see a slide show of Kolfe here. When we got there, we met Haptomu and he told us he had been playing foosball, so we joined him and a bunch of the other boys in playing. Then Haptomu showed us around a little bit. I had my camera out and got asked multiple times by Haptomu and the other boys to take their picture. They are a whole lot less pushy about it than the kids at Kechene, but they wanted their picture taken just as much as the little kids do. I was more than happy to oblige. Solomon was not there when I was visiting because the boys said he was at college classes still. So I’m coming back on Friday afternoon to hang out and the boys said Solomon should be there then. One of the best things that Haptomu showed me was from his own personal trunk. In it was a mailing envelope addressed to him from Mom and Pop Mestas. He very proudly showed it to me and you can tell it meant a lot to him.

Once JT and I got back to the house, I left with all the girls to go shopping. We went to Bole, to one of Brianna’s friend’s jewelry store called Salem’s. It had a bunch of gorgeous, cool things in it so I bought a lot of gifts for people back home. Brianna also asked me to take some picture of the merchandise because she is helping Salem with a business plan and wants some images to use for display and advertising.

For dinner we acted like true Americans. We asked our friend, the taxi driver Haptomu, who drives for Cherokee, if he would be willing to drive to a restaurant called Island Breeze, order pizza for us, wait for it to cook, and then deliver it to us at Cherokee House. Delivery pizza. Haptomu graciously granted our request, which in NOT his job at all, and we were very thankful towards him.