African Delights: Reverse Yovo-Phobia

This week's Friday's favorite involves a cute little African child and an area known as the fishing village. The fishing village is a very poor part of town, where people live in banana leaf huts in rather close living quarters. The kids play in the ten foot high trash piles and I'm sure the food (not to mention clean water) is hard to come by.

I happen to be doing some nutrition education in the fishing village on a day in which the people of this small community were getting free grub courtesy of Mercy Ships. As you would expect, mass chaos ensued. People were everywhere. Kids running around screaming and playing while the mamas and papas stood in lines held off by crowd control tape. The food was being sorted and taken at a local church. I'd never seen so many people come out of the woodwork to attend.

After my nutrition teaching was over, I sat down for a bit with the kids, waiting for the food hand-outs to finish. A little girl crawled on my lap while we sang for who knows how long with the other children. When I got up to help with the food delivery, this little girl on my lap started screaming. So I picked her up and toted her around for a bit. After a while I needed a break so I put her back down. The lungs of steel came out. I couldn't let her go without people staring at me like, "why don't you just pick her up?" We did this scenario probably three more times. Each time I set her down to work she would follow me around and grab onto my leg and just let it out. I wondered where in the world was her mother amidst all these people? But I had no such luck in finding her.

I was asked to help out with food sorting so I set her down again. I was looking at this other lady next to me and her child was tucked so nicely on her back in the typical African fashion. The lightbulb went off. I asked to borrow her extra cloth (which the African ladies here seem to have plenty to share) and I put this little girl on my back. For the next 30 minutes I got quite a few bickers from the African teenagers but I had found my relief from the constant screaming at last.

Then, just as we were finishing our sorting, guess who decides to show up?....Mama! She didn't want her back quite yet so this now hushed little girl continued to stay content on my back. Her name was Julie I learned. Where Mama had gone, and why had she left her child amidst such chaos for more than an hour? Never did figure that one out.

The name for white people here is yovo, and you often hear the term "yovo-phobia" especially on the ward where the kids want nothing to do with the white folks that prod and poke them. But here in the fishing village, while, even if it was a nuisance, I guess it was better to have reverse yovo-phobia and get a little love from the Africans than to have no love at all!

Here are some other cuties from my day in the village