He tries to think of a way to explain it, the words needed to make her understand how people look at him sometimes, what it feels like when he knows they’ve been discussing the fact he watched his mum die when he was a child. The pity that follows. ‘It’s suffocating, completely suffocating.’

Yvonne squeezes his arm then stands.

‘I think I was wrong about this place, Yvonne.’

She shakes her head, ‘I don’t think you were.’

‘I can feel it.’ He looks at the outhouse, the chickens running ragged and balding. ‘Can you imagine what it would feel like to even give a £100 to this place? I’d constantly be wondering where it went, how the kids were getting on.’

‘You’re going to have that wherever the money goes. It’s never going to be spent exactly how you want it to be. Unless you stay here and set up your own orphanage and you’re not going to do that, are you? Makimei oversees two orphanages like this in the area. There are loads of children in need and you can’t help them all.’

‘But there must be something I can do, other than transfer a ton of money and hope for the best. I wish there had been something Mum told me about this place, some clue of what she would have wanted for it.’

Yvonne laughs then, completely out of the blue.

‘What?’ Kiama asks, wondering if he said something stupid, ‘Why is that funny?’

‘It’s not. I was thinking about something your mum said to me after she came out here. She always wanted to set up this project where the kids would get a rucksack filled with pencils and books so they could learn to read and write.’

Kiama smiles; that’s it, why is she only telling him this now? This is huge. ‘Such a good idea,’ he says.

‘But these kids are already at school, that’s being taken care of. Your mum got stuck on the idea of putting therapists into orphanages. It sounded like such a stupid idea at the time.’

‘Therapists? The kids aren’t even wearing clean clothes.’

‘I know and that’s what I thought at the time too. But she was right. Kindred Kenya puts all this focus on volunteers who have medical training, but what if it trained up someone who knew how to talk to children who had been through trauma, children like—’ she stops and looks down at him, nervously twiddling her fingers.

‘Children like me?’ he says.

She nods, he gets it now.

Chapter Twenty-One

Leaving Party

September 2009

Yvonne