The One With Enea (12/9/2012)

Yesterday Dahlia and I were walking to Isoko when we were stopped by a woman named Enea.  She is a nurse and was friends with the two WorldTeach volunteers who were in Kafule before Dahlia and I. She told us to stop by her house on our way back from Isoko.  We got to her house and knocked on the door.  She opened the door and we stepped in and I am pretty sure we were transported into a tropical paradise.  Kafule is amazing, don’t get me wrong.  But Enea has a whole outdoor courtyard with banana trees growing, lattice with ivy covering it, benches and a table, and a chicken coup with 96 week old chicks inside!  So we sat and ate and talked for a while.  Enea is an incredible woman! She works at Isoko hospital running the Isoko Orphan Project (IOP).  She has 3,000 orphans under her care all over the region! There is not an orphanage, the kids either live with extended family or by themselves to Eneas work is mostly doing home visits.  She travels around spending time with the kids, vaccinating them, deworming them, and running programs for their physiological and social health.  She said that sometimes an orphan will show up on her doorstep crying with nowhere to go and she will take them in for a few weeks.  When the organization runs out of money she supplements from her salary (the project is funded by Germans).  She makes sure that all of the children are in school (IOP pays half of the school fees).  She has been running the organization now for 20 years. 

She told us that Kafule Secondary School has 15 double orphans (both parents are dead) and 55 single orphans (one parent dead).  One of the double orphans is the schools head prefect (every year the students and the teachers vote on a head prefect and a head girl who are given a lot of administrative work to help out the teachers).  He is one of the most dedicated boys at the school, always coming to me for extra problems, always staying after school to help other students study.  It is so heartbreaking to really know some of these students and now to be finding out that they are orphaned!

But the craziest part of our conversation with Enea was about Zambia.  Enea was given a scholarship to get a degree in Zambia so a few years ago she went.  I told her that I was in Zambia last summer and we realized that we were actually in the same part.  I asked her if she has ever heard of an organization called Every Orphans Hope (the organization that I worked with while I was there) and she told me that she did her field study there! What a small world we live in!