One month!

Oh man I've been here a month! Still amazing, still challenging (still wanting cheetos)...My days still consist of home visits, mostly to the families of the kids in the school but also with weavers.  One family consists of dad, who is a guard at our guest house, mom, who is a weaver but used to carry fuel wood, plus three boys, one of which goes to the school.  Super smart kid, great dancer too! Then the mom's sister is a cleaner at the guest house, and another sister in law is a single mom (the dad committed suicide a few years back) who has a kiddo at the school as well.  The visits with the families of the kiddos is humbling enough, then hearing about the former fuel wood carriers, many of which started carrying these giant bundles of wood down from the mountain at like 8 years old, puts a lot in to perspective.  We caught a couple taxis to get up Entoto mountain the other day, but did a good amount of walking up it as well.  I'm telling you, I was out of breath just walking up a small section of it; I can't even imagine walking down that mountain with almost 100 pounds of wood on my back, walking back up it to get more, plus trying to go to school and provide for your family. This is women and young girls doing this.  You don't see a lot of men doing a lot of heavy lifting around here.  These women are strong.
I've got a bazillion pictures up on my google so if the few I post on facebook just aren't enough, there's like 200 more there.  There's the fabulous people I'm here with, and the fabulous people I've met, plus scarves, food, goats, everything.  Plus I've got a ton of pictures from the dermatologist and dentist visits.  But I can tell you the results.  Hygiene is poor.  I mean like super bad.  But what do you expect when mom has to walk a half mile to get water from a community container, or your bathroom is a hole in the ground covered with sticks? Of course these kids aren't brushing their teeth 3 times a day and have dandruff scabs and scabies.  I've cried possibly twice since being here and once was the other day after the dentist visit.  We took a selected 10 people, some kids some adults (parents and weavers) to see a group doing dental work and what they realized was all of the kids could have had basically every tooth pulled.  Granted they are baby teeth and will fall out, but what will happen to the adult teeth if they keep up the same patterns they have now? It's easily to get frustrated and say, it's systemic, how can I help, what can be done about this? It can get huge and very overwhelming.  It's sad just to hear how little these families make each month, or the lists of (usually preventable) diseases they have.  And yes, I understand, these problems exist in America too, but truly, this is just on a whole different level.  We saw a family where every member had hemorrhoids, which has like such a simple solution.  Or a father who is depressed but there's not great systems in place to get the extremely poor basic mental health care.  I could go on forever about everyone I've seen.  They all have amazing stories.  I'm just blessed to get to hear them.