the great outdoors

Making the orphanage courtyard a little nicer, a little safer and much more accessible for the kiddies!!

Kids at the door of the room they live in. Just this one single room, all the time!

One day we let the children out of their single room and allowed them to be "outside"
- Outside in this context meaning in a covered concrete courtyard. They were incredibly excited..... once they  got over being scared! These kids live in one room. When they get bathed they go to a different room. And when they are sick they might get taken out to a doctor - but that's hardly a fun trip out! Otherwise always in one room with up to 9 other kids.

Enjoying playing outside for the first time in their lives!

The pure excitement and joy on their faces was amazing! and I had to make this more permanent!!

Kids walking around the courtyard. note the large pane of glass on the right, rusty and spiky clothes lines on the left and the permanent wet/slippery patch in the corner. 

Here are some photos of the outside area pre-Lucyfication

Garden - complete with broken wood, tetanus nails, and broken glass

Large wall - looking very haunted-house-esk

otherside of the area, bike parking and weird dangerous clotheslines (nails sticking out of wood that they hang the washing on) 

This corner is permanently wet and slippery, and features storage for random bits of glass.

First job, Finding a way that this works for the carers.
 If it doesn't work for them there is no point. They need space to hang clothes, they need the kids to be safe and not finding rusty nails ad broken glass, they need it not to take up their limited time. So we agreed that the half of the courtyard near the gate be for the washing to dry and people to park their motorbikes. The half near the house for the kids to play. So I contracted some guys to build a fence, and I painted it pretty colours :)



Second job: One wall is covered in mould and the paint bursts into dust clouds when you touch it....
that ain't acceptable! So a whole lot of scrubbing and cleaning through years and years of paint! I went through 4 different COLOURS of paint on the low wall..... no idea how many layers, or years that represents.

The large wall is mouldy and dirty and just ugly. But, big and flat and perfect for murals!! So I managed to find a friend of a friend of a new Vietnamese friend - who is an arts student and willing to paint a mural for free to help the kids out! YEY! Another round of lots of scrubbing and paint scraping and cleaning. From this wall, I more than half filled a shopping bag with paint chips/dust. It isn't that big of a wall!
- of course, if a local person had done this it would have all been completed in an afternoon. They would have slapped a big, thick coat of paint over the peeling, mouldy paint currently on the wall. It would have looked vaguely shiny for a couple of months.... then all fallen off.
I'm not into that - so we scrubbed that wall to within an inch of it's life (or through an inch of paint anyway!)

The roof always leaks down onto the wall. So I had to explain a number of times - there is no point us painting this while it is leaking.... how do we fix it. but eventually the roof got fixed in an extremely Vietnam way - a piece of rusty, scary twisted metal that i am 100% sure was scrounged from the side of the road somewhere to go over the larger gap and a bucket of concrete to cover over the smaller gap.

Painters with our nice new clean white wall!

the smaller wall, I have to finish adding some more letters to
make this one be more interesting as well

Third job: The scary garden
There is a particularly sad looking garden in the courtyard. This is lovely for the kids to see trees, and leaves (one child pointed at the leaf and asked in Vietnamese "Is it a fish?" he had never seen leaves before and so was just trying to work out what it was and guess at words he had heard people say) and could be nice. The dirt in the garden is sand and bits of broken bricks and concrete. I don't know why you would dump all you chunks of concrete in there - but that's what it is! It also features a number of planks of wood with rusty nails coming out, and bits of broken glass (even a glass cup that was broken and just placed in the garden - WHY!).
So I cleaned out all the glass I could find, and the wood and made a nice fake grass lawn!

New garden bed

 Fourth job: Something nice for the kids to do!
The kids loved just being outside that first time! That's great.... but I still wanted fun things for them to do. So I got the fence builders to also build a ball pit, and acquired 500 balls!

At first the kids were a bit scared.... although I later discovered that this is because people threw them in with no one inside to help them not drown in balls! Once I got in with them - they were very happy to play!

I discovered upstairs a perfectly fine rocking horse - it was just hidden upstairs because apparently the kids would fight over it. Now, when there was 6 walkers in the room.... and they had nothing else to do, I could see they might fight over this great looking toy. But having to learn to share toys, to play with each other instead of just hoarding as many toys as possible is a pretty intensely important skill for these kids to learn. How will they ever learn that when nobody sits with them to play productively. Or shows them how to take turns! So that rocking horse is coming back!

these faces melt hearts!

Nice soft mats for smaller kids to get some outside time too

Playing on the rocking horse and the scooter board

I am so happy with how the wall painting and out side area has turned out!

Even more happy that the carers at this orphanage seem to like it too (and are realising that the kids can burn energy outside and fight less, because they have more space!).

 The carers are also letting kids come out without my prompting.... in fact, I am glad to be finished and packing up the paint scrappers, and buckets of paint seeing as often while I was working on the wall a few kids would get brought out.... supervised for a few minutes - then the carer would go inside and I would be stressing that someone is going to smash someone else on the head with a paint scrapper or something!