Getting the shelter up and running...

Today was also our first day of teaching on Mondays and it went well. Now we’re teaching four times a week, working on the garden another day and supervising their cleaning (their sleeping places, cooking areas and clothes) another day.

We then had to round the children up for a meeting and had a long, long chat about blankets before distributing them. And finally we had a meeting with the children who are moving in about rules, behaviour, arguments etc which was excellent.

They’re now all crammed onto the floor of their bedroom, curled up with their new blankets, safe and secure for the first night in however many hundreds of days. As good as that’s been, drawing the line and trying to explain and defend it has been difficult and tonight I even had to throw out a boy who’d sneaked into the bedroom to sleep because his younger sleeping companions were now sleeping in the centre and he was alone on the street… I am kicking myself. I should have anticipated how this decision was going to break up sleeping groups and done some preparation work but I just didn’t think…

This week’s priority is trying to find safe places in the community where the other boys can sleep. If that proves difficult I’m tempted to rent a place for them… At the moment though Plan A is to try to bribe the local defence force who have an empty house. Africa has evidently corrupted my morality. In hindsight, without any real resistance either.

How the children were living before the shelter opened...