The Call of Kilimanjaro by Jeff Belanger

Author:Jeff Belanger [Belanger, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

The colors of Moshi: pottery lining a market street.

Streetlife in Moshi. Vendors with their wares on blankets on the sidewalk, alongside carts of fruits and vegetables.

“It’s considered rude to take picture without first asking,” Augustine told our group.

The reminder made me feel ashamed. It should have been inherent. We weren’t at the damn zoo, taking pictures of flamingoes flinging crap at each other; this was a bustling urban center with human beings. Although it looked exotic to us, this was everyday life for the people of Moshi. I felt ugly for even considering reaching for my camera and taking someone’s picture.

Still, the documentarian in me also struggled. I wanted people back home to see this and to feel what I felt. The dichotomy of such poverty and beauty. But then I found redemption for my self-disgust that Sunday afternoon. Ten of us paid a driver to take us to a place we’d heard about from Leukemia & Lymphoma Society groups who came here before us—the Amani Centre for Street Children. The ride was only about fifteen minutes, but it gave me a chance to see Moshi by road in the daylight. I saw cafés that looked like tin shacks, markets, more vendors, and housing that lacked doors and windows. The rusted metal of the houses was painted in bright yellows, greens, and blues—the popping colors in stark contrast to the rust underneath. Each building looked an average of about fifteen feet in width—the size of my living room. Billboards for Pepsi and Fanta soda were familiar, but plenty of other signs in Swahili were not.

“This is middle class,” Augustine leaned over to tell me. There were places where conditions were much worse.

The Amani Centre was just off a main road and down a dirt road. The property was fenced in. When our minibus pulled up, a uniformed guard carrying a rifle opened the security gate for us. It was clear within minutes that we weren’t on their schedule for the day, and they weren’t quite sure what to do with us.

The Amani Centre provides food, shelter, and education to street children, and dozens of the kids it helps—mostly boys—came around to check us out. Some smiled and said hello (in English); others looked on with a kind of detached curiosity. They were wondering what we wanted—if we were there to gawk, to help, or what. They were just kids, like all kids, but some of the boys wore a distrustful look that could have come from being ground down too soon in life.

The director ushered us into a classroom where kids were practicing music on plastic recorders. She gave us a brief overview of how the organization takes in street kids, runaways, special needs children, and kids whose parents might be addicted to drugs or unable to care for them. We were touched, and the ten of us emptied our wallets after the presentation. It was a good opportunity to make an immediate difference.

Three children in the corner played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” for us on their recorders, and we applauded.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.