Ive been here just over a month! Living in a dusty town called Naivasha, in the Rift Valley 1 hour North-West from Nairobi. The house overlooks lake Naivasha, near Mt Longonot and the area is in the Rift Valley, near Hells Gate National Park. Temperatures go up to high 20s and its hot before 9 in the morning. The dust is immense. some of the roads are so rough they look like tracks to the beach.
Food isn’t to bad, and I have some favorites. The fruit: pineapples, mangoes, bananas, avocados – are incredible. Plus the coffee isnt to bad and there are Macadamia nuts galore! My hosts name is Catherine and she has 2 kids, Isreal 4 and half and Checo 2. Very cool little kids. The house is massive and her hospitality is brilliant. At the house we have 5 volunteers from the UK, US and Aust. where we all go to the same placements.
Naivasha has had next to no volunteers since the 2007 post political violence, so we have been the first in 2 years. So with that, the need is massive. Its hard, and Ive had a bunch of conflicting tensions.
Presently we are at 2 placements. Monicas Memorial and KCC Slum.
Monica’s Memorial is a school-nursery which is funded entirely by volunteers, 50 kids, they have a feeding program here which services 2 other primary schools, so up to 200 children can turn up for lunch. Its all cooked on site and the staff-volunteers are great fun. The kids come from a mix of no parent homes, grandparent headed homes. Each child is known really well and they stay at school from 7.30 till 5. We have done a bunch of things with them, teaching, playing sports, football, feeding, cooking, walking them home. Its crazy, when we arrive in the morning, they all come running up to me calling my name within seconds of stepping through the gate. The ages are from 2-14.
Two weeks ago we got a Sustainable Kitchen Garden dug in. We divided the plot into 6 plots each with 8 kids to manage. At one end we put up some netting covering 2 plots and planted out seeds. So we have Kale, Silver beat, Carrots, Leeks, Red Onions and Potatoes. The kids have taken it as their own project, so Im stocked. I did a teaching lesson in the classroom about watering, the sun, birds, weeds, what times of the day to water etc. So far so good! I have a good feeling that the seeds will germinate as they are specifically for the climate and East Africa.
The KCC Slum is a new project we have just got up and running in past 2 weeks. This week was our first feeding program in the slum which has been a massive learning experience. Precently there is no aid whatso ever in the slum and the people are regarded as the bottom of the society.
So for the feeding program we have been given an area of land on a farm. It has a packing room for french bean harvesting. The room is free for us to use and the surrounding area is about half ache which is just grass area with some shade trees and a water source, which is pumped from a nearby dirty lake. Not the best, but its something. The feeding program we’ve started consists of us cooking, over a fire, in a big drum, this basic meal called Uge. Which is basically porridge. Our aim is to feed the most needy kids, kids that don’t go to school, because they cant afford the school fees and uniform. We have a register of 68 kids. So on our first day, Monday. 200 kids showed up! It was quite some undertaking. The kids are starving here. Plus lack of clean water, its a full blown water crises. So we have to boil the water over a fire then add the Uge flour. The process can take 3-4 hours to prepare. So for that time…its a mad mad play-teaching time. When the uge is ready, the kids line up, fighting for their space in the line, with either a plastic cup, or a something that’s used as a cup. We pour the uge into their cups then they sit down to eat. This first day, as it was our first time, and the kids hadn’t had this kind of food aid, as rough. Rough because, after they had finished, or half finished, they lined up again, pushing and shoving, for a second cup, it got so intense, where the kids were pushing in on the volunteer girls serving, so much so that they just walked away, and literally kids were fighting over the remaining food in the tub. The kids are starving. The babies sit on the ground, crying, out of starvation, sickness and no mum around as she has either died of AIDS or is working in the nearby flowerfarms for a 100 KSH (1 Pound) a day.
For man power we have Catherine (our host mum), who speaks Swahili and English, and is also managing the project. We then have 4 mums from the slum helping us with cooking and keeping the kids from losing the plot. Only one speaks basic English, Agnus. We visited her home last week when we were going around talking to families in their homes. None of the kids speak Swahili and most of them who turned up, dont go to a school. So social skills, eg biting, pulling punching, fighting – happens a lot. Its so tough. But Ive immersed into it and the kids jump all over me, climbing on my back pulling my arms, hanging off my arms like monkeys…its such a crazy time, madness at other times. So my Swahili language skills…are getting better ,fast, out of complete need!
We have a volunteer teacher from UK in Newbrey. She teaches at a special needs school (Trinity) Cool girl. With her we set up a school today.Built it yesterday, opened it today. Too fast in hindsight, as it was a crazy chaotic day, but, sometimes its better that way. The school is basic. Just a shade cloth (from the flower farms), with posts and attached to the packing shed on the land we’ve been given. We have done basic resources like, making A-Z with things to match the letter, shaps, number 1-10, colours of the rainbow. Really basic. Theres a 10 yr old boy called Samuel, one of my favorite kids, he couldn’t even spell his own name. I cry about 10 times a day. So the school is there for a resisted 68 kids who are in most need. And so we have to turn people away. As we don’t have enough food for everyone. There are about 2000 kids in the slum. the whole area is about 6500. They rent these shacks, made of corrugated iron, cardboard, old plastic. Tiny rooms. And they pay rent. There are 300 landlords and if they cant afford rent, the landlord will throw them out and lock the doors. Rent ranges between 500-800 KSH per month. ( 5-10 pounds). We went into one home last week, the woman has 7 children, the husband had left in Jan this year, youngest child is 6 months. She can only work 2 days a week, for 150KSH a day. So when we arrived, she was behind 2 months in rent, the landlord was arriving that day to collect, and she had didn’t have the money for rent and she only had 1 bag of salt in the kitchen, so she hadn’t been able to feed her family for 2 days. Cold chills and just pure anguish for what this woman was facing. So through watery eyes we just handed her pure cash. She then blessed us as we left.
Ahhhh! This is such an experience, and Im learning so much. I planned this trip so much and I did the research and despite the craziness of living in an emerging country, I still want to work in international development. Despite the corrupt police, insane pricing structure, lack of leadership and the overwhelming extreme poverty.
This weekend we are heading to Nairobi to set up an website for the project, and upload photos. We are in the middle of setting up a Barkleys bank account here,so funds can be sent directly.
Thats it for now…sorry its taken a month!
