Meme Maria's Megameno Miracle

Megameno is the name of the orphanage the Furman Study Away program has worked with since 2007 in Windhoek, Namibia. While the story of its origins is fuzzy, from what I can gather in 1998, Meme Maria Shaalukeni opened the doors of her two bedroom home to the twenty something kids she had become discouraged seeing abandoned on the streets. I don’t know how it happened exactly. Did she take in one or two? Did word spread that she had created a refuge for kids who had no one else?

The acronym “OVC” (Orphans and Vulnerable Children) has become all the rage in the HIV/AIDS community but my guess is that long before it became “fashionable” to help OVCs, Meme Maria had opened her doors and let them in.

When we first met them in 2007, they lived in a small 3 room house in the Katutura neighborhood of Windhoek. Looking back, I’m not sure how she managed. It is never clear how many children are actually living there and how many have simply stopped by from the neighborhood to play with the other kids or get a much needed meal. But on any given day you can find upwards of twenty kids around the home. Officially 21 live at the orphanage and it is estimated that only half of them are enrolled in school and rumored that as many as five or six are HIV positive themselves.

To say the conditions we found the children in back in 2007 was “desperate” is an understatement. Our group spent our time picking glass up out of the back yard (basically a fenced in dirt plot), hand washing all the kids clothes in big wash basins in the backyard, helping to make pap over a fire (a corn meal based staple of most Southern African diets), washing the babies assembly line style in a small wash bin in the house, and simply holding the many very young children that were there without enough adult arms to hold them. It was overwhelming. I distinctly remember wondering how long they would survive in this condition. The silence was deafening. How can there be this many small children around and no noise?

We were beside ourselves with what we could do to help. There had to be more. Every day we went we brought snacks for the kids. I recall that one day the students took up a collection among themselves and with their own money purchased food, diapers, and KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) for all the kids. I remember our tear filled departure as we placed all the small babies on the ground lined up near Meme Maria as she couldn’t possibly hold all of them.

The change I observed in 2009 almost brought me to tears. It was hard to believe. Donations had contributed to the building of a dormitory style structure that now housed most of the kids in bunkbeds in separate boys’ and girls’ rooms with proper toilets as well. The building has separate classroom space and our 2009 group donated funds and energy to help build a patio between the new building and Meme Maria’s original house so that mud would not be tracked into their new space. As always we brought snacks for the kids and that year tried to take them on a couple of excursions, once to the public pool and a second trip for a hike around a dam, a rare treat for kids who rarely get to leave the neighborhood.

By the 2010 trip, the desperation is less visible and I worry a bit that, because their situation is not so overtly desperate, the urgency to help may dissipate. I hope that is not the case. Our visits to Megameno have had (and I hope will continue to have) a dramatic impact on my students. One of the students from the 2007 trip actually went back to Namibia for a yearlong internship after graduation and worked with Megameno to help establish its status as an NGO and assist in the building project. Students from the 2007 travel group,  sponsored a silent auction and raised $3,000 to support a new building for the children.The group from 2009 raised over $2500 for Megameno through another silent auction and the individual efforts of one student through a university wide competition.

We talk a lot on the trip about “the West’s” responsibility to “the rest”. I fear some students get discouraged and feel they should simply throw their hands up because the task is too large, bureaucracy too burdensome, or corruption too likely but when I look at Megameno it reminds me how, even a limited amount of donations, can help sustain the lives of children born into a harsh world. Money can help Meme Maria sustain her Megameno Miracle.


For more on Megameno see:

1.     Anna Bartolini, a student from the 2007 Study Away trip wrote an article for Furman’s Alumni Magazine and her sorority, Chi Omega's magazine.

2. Liz Lineback, a student from the 2009 Study Away trip did a blog on Megameno for her Communication Studies Class.