broken heart

Yesterday my heart broke the worst since I have been here. I went with some other volunteers to a different orphanage called House of Mercy. There are 79 kids there total, some in boarding school for high school, others gone for the day at primary school, and then about 35-40 there for preschool/kindergarten. The kids are amazing and so full of life which is awesome for the situation that they are in. The girls loooved playing with my hair and it was being pulled in a million different directions. All of them were once street kids meaning they had a family at one time and then were abandoned. The place where they live is in the middle of a slum and not that large. There are rooms with 30+ kids sleeping in them. Small kids will sleep 10 to a bed and teenage girls even sleep 4 to a bed. With the drought there is not enough water for all of the kids to bathe so only the girls get a shower every day and the boys get it once a week. The place is run by one full time person who started it and there are 3 volunteers that come everyday. Its insane! People in the area support kids for lunch which means they bring that child lunch everyday but not all of the kids have that so they cook some on site but some of the kids at primary school don't get lunch. I don't know what else to say to try to describe to you what these conditions are like! Oh yea and to top it off, they rent the place out and the owners are selling it. They have started construction on a new home but don't have the funds to continue so they have to wait until they are there. They need about 4 million shillings to do the next step which is only a little over $5,000. I asked the director what they were going to do if their place got sold and they had to move out before the new home was ready and she had not a worry in my voice and said "the Lord will provide." These people have such faith and such trust that they will be taken care of and you can see it in their eyes and in the look on the children's faces. It is truly amazing.