Angel

I just want to tell you a little bit about Angel (she's the one on the left of this picture). For those of you who don't know, she had a sad start to her life. Her mother asked a lady on the bus to look after Angel, while she went to the toilet, then she got off the bus, and never came back. The woman left holding Angel, took her to the chief of the village as she already had several children of her own to look after, but the village chief said, "You must look after her, she's yours now." As a result the woman took Angel home, but was unable to afford to feed her properly. By the time she was able to approach Tubakunde for help Angel was seriously underweight and needed to be put on a feeding programme at the local hospital, and to be treated for diseases. Now, however, she is a gorgeous healthy little girl (who is always the first one to finish her food!) Last night, her young carer was late collecting Angel, and everyone had gone home including the child-carers so I was left looking after her. It was lovely to spend some quality time with her. And she is such a determined learner - we had this pop-up dinosaur game and you had to turn or push each of the buttons in a slightly different way to get the four dinosaurs to pop up. She mastered two of them straight away but had more trouble with the other two - but there was no way she was going to give up. I showed her how to do it, but she still couldn't do it until she had tried and tried and worked it out for herself. I was amazed how long she was occupied doing it. Then we played dangling upside down games...after a little trip to the toilet which wasn't quite in time :-) Finally a little girl came to pick her up...I think she was beginning to think she was going to be spending the night with me...I know I was! Could have been tricky when we couldn't speak a word to each other! Since I wrote the above, Angel has started greeting me in the morning - she seems to have got used to me now!