Meet the Orphans

When I first arrived here, I had so many questions about the orphans: Who are they? How old are they? How do they live? What is their story? After a month of living here, I still feel as if I hardly know them. There are about thirty orphans in all (including David's children, who live just as the orphans do). I had originally thought that being an orphan meant that both your parents were deceased. But that is not the case for many of the orphans here. Many of their parents are still alive. For some, their parents are divorced and one or both of the parents have remarried. And their new spouse(s) don't want a child from a previous marriage, so they rather pay to keep the child in an orphanage. This doesn't make any sense to me. The youngest child is four years old (Peace). The next youngest is ten (Delight) and the rest are older. There are only about five girls and the rest are all boys. And most of the them are teenagers and some are even eighteen and older but still going to high school. My goal right now is to interact more with all the orphans. So far, I've been spending the most time with Peace, Delight, Sophia (13), and Mawunyo (12). The other orphans are still warming up to me and I've been finding it really difficult to a build relationship with the others, for many reasons. 1.) there's the language difficulty, sometimes they don't understand my American accent and they often prefer to speak Ewe (pronounced Eh-Way), 2.) they are used to volunteers coming and going and it's probably really difficult to get close to new volunteers knowing that they are just going leave them behind soon, and 3.) I'm not used to dealing with/hanging out with teenage boys. Last night, we tried to have dinner all together with the orphans. But it didn't work. Some of them didn't know and already ate, and they all got their food at different times and all the children were finished eating before we (the volunteers) got our food. Also, the children mostly spoke Ewe and the other volunteers (Debbie, Monique, and Janina) mostly spoke German. Tonight we try again.