A day in the life of an orphan at ICMC
• Wake up at 5am
• Roll up our sleeping mat and put it away. 6 of us share the one mat
• Have what we call a bath, which is using a bucket and pail to pour water over my self
• Put on my clean set of clothes
• Wash the clothes I just took off so I have clean clothes to wear tomorrow
• then we have a time of prayer, we pray for our sponsors, for our friends, our school and for Pastor Jay and Mrs. Christy
• After ½ hour of praying we have our breakfast.
• Then we do chores, some clean up, some sweep.
• Then we change into our school uniform for the day and go to school some walk some catch a bus depending on what school we go to
• When we come home we change out of our school uniform and put it away for the next day.
• We are allowed to play for an hour, then it is back to study for about 3 hours before dinner.
• We have dinner about 8pm
• After dinner we have another time of prayer, after prayer we study again for 1 hour
• Then it is time for bed, we sleep on a mat on the floor, under the mat is a concrete floor, we share this with between 1 and five other children depending on our ages.
My Toys.
Most of us don’t have any toys, the orphanage has a few cricket bats and some sport equipment and we get to use them sometimes on the weekends.
If we have been fortunate some of the overseas visitors might buy us some things or bring some toys with them. In 2005 a team from Australia bought about 100 toy dolls that were sown together by Australian children, some of us have never owned our very own doll. Ms Gracie is one of our wardens and she has polio and is about 30, she got one of the dolls and she was very happy as in her whole life she had never been given one.
My things
I don’t have many things, I keep my things in a small chest called a Tiffin box. It is about the size of a school case.
I have 2 sets of clothes and my school uniform, I have a photo of my sponsors and a colouring book and 3 coloured pencils that my sponsors sent me for my birthday. We would have more but out of the 2,000 children that live here only about 600 have sponsors, so all the money gets put together and Pastor Jay feeds and clothes us all and sends us to school, that way we all get feed and no one goes hungry or misses out on school.
My Birthday
We don’t celebrate our birthdays, some of us are very lucky to get a small gift from our sponsor, but so many of the children don’t have sponsors and it would not be fair to them.
Also many of us don’t actually know when our birthday is and some of us don’t even know how old we are. One time when Martin Uncle visited he bought Pastor Jay a birthday cake, he surprised him at church in front of everybody. Pastor Jay cried because he was 53 years old and he had never had a birthday cake in his whole life.
Christmas
We love Christmas, it is a special day to us. All the children gather at the Promised Land which is the largest of our 3 centres, it is on about 90 acres. We have a special meal and we even get some
chicken with our curry and rice, it is very nice. Then we all get a present, every year we get the same
thing, and we get so excited. The boys get a shirt and shorts and the girls get a dress. We are so
thankful for this, without this new dress each year many of us would not have any clothing.
I love living at the Orphanage, in my village sometimes I would eat only one time a week. I would be so hungry, we had no toilet and the whole village would use the one field, and I didn’t go to school.
At the orphanage I get 3 meals a day, and I have somewhere to sleep and not have to worry about the snakes getting in, and the best thing is that I get to go to school. I get to learn many new things and one day I would like to be a school teacher and have a job in the Government school.
If I lived in the village I would have to beg for my food, it is so much better living in the orphanage.