“Aka, eipenda?
(Older sister, finished?)” the eight-year-old in front of me queries.
“Almost done, chile (younger sister),” I reply.
I scrutinize the fine-toothed comb in my hands and find a tiny black
blob. Sticking my fingernails into the tight
space between the teeth of the comb, I endeavour to get the blob out. I dip the comb into the pail of water to
clean it thoroughly.
“Aka,
me too!” another voice pipes up.
I look up to see the chaos before
me. Some children are waiting patiently;
others are busy scooping water with pails out of the water tank into buckets (we
have no running water) to prepare to wash their hair; still others are
impatiently crowding around me demanding that they be next.
A week after our 20 children arrived
at the children’s home, I was doing the girls’ hair and I made a horrific
discovery: lice. I had never thought to
check everyone’s hair when they first arrived.
I always assume that people don’t have lice, and not the opposite. It never even occurred to me to check. I should have known. I’ve encounterd a lot of kids with lice and
I’ve heard that most village kids have it.
Since then I’ve been washing the 5
girls’ hair with lice shampoo every day, every time I’m at the school. It’s taken a lot of cajoling and persuasion
to get them to cooperate. They don’t see
is as a big issue because they’re used to it.
I mean, everyone has it, why not jump on the bandwagon? The girl who was the least reluctant to
cooperate had 100 big fat adult lice combed out of her hair during the 1st
hour! If her thick black hair is as dark
as the midnight sky, then the nits in her hair are as numerous as the
stars. And I’m talking about the stars
you can see when there’s an electricity cut and there’s absolutely no light
pollution.
Just yesterday, boys approached me to get their hair
combed. I haven’t combed every boy’s
hair yet, but out of the 6 heads I combed, 5 had lice. Fantastic.
Now half the children at our children’s home have lice. I might as well take on the position as the
licerminator. I’ve seen lice in every
shape and size. The baby ones are
transparent, but they’re red if they just had their breakfast. As they group up they turn gray and then
eventually, black.
The problem is multifold. First of all, the medicated shampoo isn’t
strong enough and it’s intended to “stun the lice” so you can comb it out. The first thing I’m going to do in Canada is
to get some strong lice shampoo that actually kills the lice. Another problem is that all the kids sleep on
the floor on bamboo mats. Because they
sleep so close to each other, I get them to sleep in alternate directions. However, some of them rotate 180 degrees, and
by the time I wake them up the next morning, their heads are touching other
kids’ heads.
Not only does sleeping on the floor
exacerbate the lice epidemic, but it also can be dangerous for the kids. Last Friday, we spotted a 1m long snake near
the bathrooms. Later, we were playing a
group clapping game with all the kids sitting in a circle on the veranda when
suddenly one of the older boys jumped up in fear. He had discovered a scorpion on the
veranda! Snakes, scorpions, and
centipedes (whose bites are terribly painful, as I discovered in Feb) are
common where the school is located. We
are the only settlement in a 2km radius, and we’re surrounded by forests and
fields. Beds. A simple solution. We trust that God will provide for them soon.
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