Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Up at 1am so I can call home at a reasonable time back in the US (6pm). Robin and I talked and shared a few minutes together. We talked about the drought here in Kenya and the flood and resulting road and school closings. 8,000 miles apart and worlds apart. Quick breakfast at the Sportsman's Arms (I brought my own instant grits and oatmeal to compliment the food), checked out after our one night stay, and headed back to Segera to finish up a few things. As we turned off of the main road toward the mission, two small children were waving us down for a ride. They were in their school uniforms and were obviously late for school. I would guess that they were still about 3 or 4 miles away from the school when they climbed into the car with us. It was probably around 9am and Andrew had said that they would leave around 6am to begin walking to school. After a couple questions we learned that Gladys was their teacher and that they were neighbors and one was about 4 and the other 5 years old. I don't know what kind of picture comes to mind if you let it consider letting your preschooler out of the house for a 4 hour walk to school. But this is as common here in Africa. When we rolled in I noticed my good friend James who was the concrete foreman leading the concrete flooring job we did at the Eilile school back in June. And then as I was getting out of the car, his brother Alfred, the one I had worked so closely with, came up and gave me a big hand shake and a hug. This kid did the work of four or five of us back in June and never broke a sweat. It is always a huge pleasure of my to run back into friends when I revisit communities but it means the world to me that they recognize me. It always reminds me of how important relationships are and teaches me to never take them for granted. Alfred told me that he had been working at Black Tank where the water pump was and they were building a house and putting up the necessary framing to house the solar panels that would run the pumps that were now being run from generators. I noticed a mzungu at the mission and went to meet him. Scott was from Charleston, SC and works for a construction firm there. An opportunity came up for a three month volunteer assignment with Water Missions International to work on projects in Kenya, including ours and he was finishing up his last week on this project. Scott and I talked for a bit, enough to find out that he is a Clemson graduate as well but the dates differ between his graduation and mine by 19 years, ouch! Seriously, I don't feel that old but when you do the math it just creeps me out. Before our final staff meeting, I wanted to venture down to the shallow well again to see the progress. I was joined on my walk by a little girl of about 10 in her school uniform and carrying her gerry can. Two guys that were working on it were walking my way but when I asked about it, they turned around and wanted to show me. This hole was just about a perfect circle from top to bottom and I am just amazed at how you accomplish something like that by hand. The guys lowered a five gallon bucket and hauled up some "life giving" water to fill the little girl's container and she turned to be on her way. The guys' English was about as good as my Swahili so the conversation and understanding between us was not very good. They interpreted my question of how they dug below the water line as a request for a demonstration and one guy sat on the edge of the top of the hole, stretched out his legs to reach the other side and as if he was lowering himself to sit on a chair, he was suspended in the hole, back against one side and legs extended with feet firmly planted against the other side and began "walking" himself down this hole. It was no simple feat but he made it look easy. When he reached the bottom he was standing in a few feet of water and started showing me how he would dig from the sides and bottom while the guy up above would hoist out the water and loosened soil. We finished in the "upper room" at the mission with the staff and prayers and left - headed back to Nairobi and the Heart Lodge. But on the way, we had two stops to make. One was out to Black Tank to see the progress of the solar panels and housing that Alfred and James along with Chris and Scott were working on. And I got to see the pump working to pump fresh clean water out and the people coming from out of nowhere to fill up their buckets and head back out into what we would call a vast landscape. I met the man that lived right beside the pump on a previous trip and now he was eager to come and shake our hands as an unspoken "thank you" for the water that was pumping out of the ground. We checked out the house, great concrete work, and the tank stand and the welding that was going on on top of the house that would hold the solar panels. Scott said that they would be pumping from the power of the solar panels tomorrow but we'd already be in Nairobi. We left and I said good bye again to my friend Alfred and we headed to our second stop, the community of Karigoto. There is a water pump here as well and a sand filter was recently installed so we got to see that. We walked to the sewing training facility on one side of the road where a teacher was working to train local women on making school uniforms with the knitting machines. Across the street, we saw other women that had graduated the training program and were making the uniforms. They would make the pieces, like sleeves, and those pieces were handed off to another lady with a sewing machine that would assemble them into the final product. The community recommends the poorest women in the community for the work that would otherwise not have any means for an income to feed their family. They are looking for more machines and that will be an ongoing project to obtain funding for the machines as a micro-enterprise project for this area. The road back to Nairobi always seems longer than the road out for some reason and we were in the final miles of making it back to the Heart Lodge, the same place we had just left the day before. The traffic slowed and we assumed it was a crash of some sort up ahead as the cars divided some to the left and some to the right of what was in the road. Kurt was the first to say that it might be a body. As it turned out, that is what it was. a body lay still in the middle of the road with many people surrounding it so that it would not be disturbed. I don't know what happened to cause the accident, but the result was pretty clear. We continued in a somber mood in one direction away from the body as the emergency vehicles were making their way through the traffic toward it. A few feet down the road from the accident, people were unaware of the accident and continued as normal. I was reminded of the funerals of my father and nephew and that as our procession drove by house, people and shops, people went about their lives while ours had been devastated. Life is fleeting. But both the impact of a life and their death can be felt for a long time after we are gone. What impact for God's kingdom will we make while we are here?We reached the Heart Lodge within 30 minutes after that.
This was the first time I would eat dinner at Heart Lodge. We were met by Charles who we had a chance to meet back in April before my family was moved to the overflow house. And now another friendship and recognition was displayed when Charles saw me again. We went back to the same rooms we had left the day before and waited for dinner. Power was out and I debated whether to shower in the near dark or run the risk of taking one in complete darkness if the power did not get restored. In the time it took me to debate myself the dinner bell was literally rung calling all guests to dinner. In typical family fashion, we waited for everyone to join before we asked the blessing together and lined up to fill our plate with carrots, broccoli, fried fish, rice and a strawberry pie for after the meal. I met Jessica, a writer for Business Weekly. She had come on her own by securing some grant money to do a story about the land in Africa that is being bought for farm land by other countries that did not have land of their own. Africa was being sold off to foreigners as farmland. I had heard that China was doing this a lot but her research found that the biggest purchaser in Kenya was the middle east, where oil money was plentiful but farmland was not. Oh, I forgot to mention that on the road between Nairobi and the Segera mission I noticed signs for rice production and for sale and sure enough there was an area that was farming rice. I always knew that the land was rich enough to grow anything here but rice surprised me. I can understand why someone or some country would find it attractive for purchasing. I also got to meet Vickie Winkler the founder of Heart based out of California and the owner of Heart Lodge. She had many stories of how she had been involved in getting recognition and funding for her ministry serving others with HIV/AIDS and helping prevent it through education. She was a joy to meet and listen to and was filled with much wisdom and offered plenty of great advice. She is one of those people that you could just sit and talk to for a long time and be enriched on many levels just by being in her presence. She even had hotel recommendations for The White Sands in Mombasa and The Big Tree in Masai Mara. We said our good nights and headed back to our rooms. Power had been restored so my shower was lit and I laid across the bed and faded off to sleep. It had been another long day.
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