Progress

What an amazing two days! On Tuesday we made it to Kibwezi, a tiny town about four hours southeast of Nairobi. When I was in Kenya three years ago, I met a man named Cosmos while visiting Kwa Watoto, another AYA partner. He told me about the children he had been taking into his home because there was no where else for orphaned or needy children in the area. I put him in touch with Pastor Fred and our AYA volunteers who came during the past couple of years. My mom and Tina, who are both with me now, made the initial trek to Kibwezi to visit Cosmos, his wife Rachel, and the children they are helping. They were living in a rundown building and with no regular source of income or food. Kibwezi is in a drought stricken area where even getting water was very difficult and expensive.

Tina was so touched that as after their initial visit, she said, “Please don’t let me forget them”. She didn’t! Tina and her church, The Sycamore Tree, were instrumental in raising the money to buy land and build Immaculate Home of Peace (which we call IHOP) their own permanent home. Although they recently moved in, they had an official opening ceremony of “The Sycamore House” with us. We had songs, food, and lot of laughs.

Today was another great today. We started by visiting MEDS (Mission for Essential Drugs and Supplies), a non-profit organization providing medication and supplies to other non-profits serving the poor. Several people had given us money for emergency needs and supplies and we figured this would be an excellent way to put it to use. Most of our partners do not even have access to basics like pain relievers, cough syrup, and anti-diarrhea medicine (still a deadly problem killing over 10 million children a year). We had an unbelievable mound of medication we were able to buy for a relatively very small amount.

Next we were off to Korogocho, a slum area of Nairobi. Upon first glance, Korogocho quite honestly looks like the closest thing you could find to hell on Earth-dirt, garbage, tin shacks, street children sniffing glue, and hundreds of thousands of people crammed together. However, if you look deeper and get to know the people you see their hard work, innovation, hopes, joys and their unrelenting determination to make a better life for themselves and their children.

We first stopped at Comboni Mission Sisters. AYA has been supporting the Children’s Health Project where we are currently providing medical care and treatment for 30 HIV-positive children and 32 HIV-positive pregnant women. It was a great joy to meet with Sister Encarna again. What an inspiration she is. She comes from Grenada, Spain, but instead of living a relatively easy life in that beautiful region, decided to give everything up and devote her life to the people of Africa for the last 30 years.

After a brief encounter with a drunk man holding a lead pipe who demanded I take his picture with Sister Encarna, we moved down the “road” to Rehema Primary and Orphange where we were immediately greeted by masses of school children posing for the camera and wanting to touch mzungu (white person) skin. Pastor Erastus is the director and a resourceful man who can do amazing things with small amounts of money. He manages to feed all 500 children in his school everyday and runs a school that scored number one in the region on the end-of-primary exam, even scoring higher than the better-funded government schools. After a few small grants from AYA for chickens and a sewing project, he has grown and expanded the projects into thriving sources of income for his school and orphanage. I was most excited to see the newly constructed orphanage built with funding from AYA donors. After walking through the narrow pathways filled with sewage and garbage, we arrived at the new home. It is truly a safe haven in the midst of the slum and a beacon of hope for children who formerly had no where else to call home.