Blog 4:
Nairobi in daytime is brighter than Nairobi at night, perhaps
the better to show the mud and grime.
Big cities certainly have advantages: opportunities, commerce, culture, social
life, and entertainment. I enjoy visiting metropolises, though I live in little
Long Beach Mississippi as I prefer the peace of a smaller town. Jared and Francis met me for breakfast in the
hotel lobby and afterwards Brian drove us through the traffic to the downtown
bus station. This is the first time I’ve
traveled to Keumbu by air, the past three times I traveled there from Nairobi
by bus. In 2010 the only transportation
was by matatu, the 14-seater van that
took six to seven hours on medium poor roads.
By 2012 they had full size 50-seater luxury busses that made the trip in
five hours on the paved two-lane highway. This trip to the bus station was to
drop off my extra suitcase to ship to Kisii, the suitcase full of gifts for the
orphans and some for the hospital. After
the usual expected bureaucratic challenges, we dropped off the suitcase and the
men dropped me off at the airport in plenty of time for my 10:20 flight to
Kisumu.
You may have noticed the tendency of towns starting with the
letter K. In Kenya, every name starts
with K, M, N, or O (Obama for example).
At the hospital I always wondered how they kept their medical records
straight, since they had no file cabinets, unreliable birthdates, changing
names, and no social security numbers.
Yet, they always seemed to find the files they wanted.
The flight to Kisumu took thirty minutes, and the landscape
change incredible. Kisumu is a resort
city on Lake Victoria, the landscape green and verdant, small farms and pretty
white stoned buildings prominent on the descent. The cloudless cartoon-blue sky brought late
morning temperatures in the 80s, pleasant breezes as it took me five minutes to
pick up my bags and step outside. No
Pastor. Another twenty minutes, and
still no Pastor. I borrowed a phone and
gave him a call. Car trouble … he’ll be
there. So I sat outside and wrote on my
blog and enjoyed the respite until he showed up. He’d rented a small black hatchback to pick
me up, no air conditioning of course, and we enjoyed the two-hour road trip
over mostly paved roads towards Kisii Town.
Kisii Town is the capital of Kisii County, one of about 20
or 30 Kenyan counties, each named for and with boundaries based on the original
tribes. Kisii are friendly, happy, and peaceful. When the 2007 riots occurred, following
disputed elections, Kisii was one of the few counties without any violence of
any kind. The Kisii are an industrious
people, laboring long hours, tolerate hardships with smiles, and are clever
honest businessmen. Sidewalk vendors sell socks, backpacks, electric widgets,
roasting corn, or stacks of oranges. They
are not artists. They do not sell beads,
drawings, sculpture, musical instruments, handmade toys, or books. The walls of their businesses and homes have
no photos of relatives, pictures of elephants, or clever witticisms. No rugs decorate floors, no frills adorn light
fixtures or footboards. A checkerboard
linoleum flooring is about as fancy as it gets. (Actually, Pastor’s main room
does have some decorations: a lace head lining, a handful of photos, a
calendar, and a map of Russia.)
We finally got into Kisii town at 3 pm, with our first stop
at the bank where I gave Pastor $1500 to change into Kisii shillings to spend
on the orphanage. As I think I mentioned
in a prior blog, 100% of the money from sales of my Ndovu and On a Mission books
go to the mission. Then we went to a
restaurant Pastor wanted to try, a new one with an Indian sounding name. A loud generator grinded outside and inside
everything was dark. The wall menu
offered some awesome looking pizza and Indian food. However, the reason for the generator was the
lack of power. They could only serve
items not requiring cooking. We elected
to go elsewhere.
Across the street from this unsuccessful eatery stop, Pastor
entered a wholesale distributor where he spent the $1500 on sundries. We left the order with plans to pick up the
supplies later.
Further up the hill we found Zonic Café a spot that used to
be a cell phone shop. Again, bare walls,
they had a TV and two soft drink refrigerators, one each for Coke or Pepsi. They had a big ice chest advising, “Eat Fish
Today for Healthy Living,” so I was in the mood for fish. They had no menu, and said the dinner choices
were beef with rice, fish with rice, or chicken with rice. We both ordered the fish. The waitress left and came back in five
minutes. No fish. We chose the chicken. This is typical of Kisii restaurants. They often have lovely elaborate menus, but
don’t have anything on the menu available.
Eventually our plates came with a quarter roasted chicken (white for
Pastor, dark for me), accompanied by rice, greens, and slaw (see the photo). We ate with our fingers.
As we finished our meal, the weather changed. First wind,
howling, bowling, buckling wind, bowing the ten-foot conifers nearly to the ground,
creating flying missiles of plastic bags, Daily
Nations, and fruit peels. Then the
rain. Beginning with three-pound pellets
smacking my shoulders like a bully’s greeting, proceeding to a deluge,
overflowing the gutters and turning the mud roads into brown soup. We struggled back to our car and drove
through Noah’s wrath to the supermarket, watching the cobblestones tumble with
the flood down the hill, smacking into their brethren at the base of the hill. We dashed into the store, our shoes muddied,
our clothing soaked. (The Daily Nation is the most popular
Kenyan paper. 80 cents an issue, at 120
pages, it’s full of amazing stories, such as murders, political corruption,
sports news, and living features. When I’m
here I try to pick one up daily.)
Every visit I buy presents for the orphanage, what would
seem necessities to us are luxuries that change their lives. After paying to have electricity installed in
2011, in 2012 I bought Terry a two-burner electric range top, to get her out of
the smoke filled out-building she used for cooking with coal. Last year the burner broke and she was back
into the outbuilding, breathing soot and relying on reused burnt charcoal to
make fires for cooking. Today I bought
her a two-burner gas range top, (at Pastor’s request). It cost $50 and will save her lungs and make
cooking SO much easier. I also bought
her an electric kettle for quick liquid heating. For Pastor I bought a DVD player. Someone else had donated a television, and
once back at the orphanage he hooked the DVD player up and delightedly put on
one of the stack of Kenyan music DVDs he’d accumulated. His Kenyan music, by the way, consists of
religious tracts (he is a Pastor after all), in which groups of women in bright
native outfits dance and sing praises to the Lord. All songs are sung in Swahili, with English
subtitles.
The rain had stopped by the time we checked out and we drove
to the wholesale grocer where they began loading the purchases. $1500 buys a lot of supplies. There were dozens of toilet paper rolls,
cartons of cooking oils, napkins, sugar, salt, and spices … you can
imagine. The trunk and back seat had no
more room. The grains will be delivered tomorrow,
fifty-pound bags of flour, rice, and cornmeal.
With the car as stuffed as it could be, we headed down the road to
Keumbu.
When I first came in 2010 a pot-holed, terrain challenged
road connected the two. The third Kenyan
president emphasized road building as part of his agenda, and by 2012 that
stretch offered smooth asphalt, cutting the trip from about 50 minutes to
roughly 20. However, only the main road
is so carpeted, and to get to Pastor’s place requires a 4-kilometer singe-lane
dirt road hilly challenge, made slippery and messy by the rains. He negotiated the course well, with only the
occasional sideways spinning, and soon we pulled into the most amazing
transformation!
In 2010 Pastor’s abode consisted of three buildings, the
main home, a second structure for the girl orphans, and a small cooking
shack. He also had the use of his
brother’s land next-door where the three male orphans lived in a small mud
hut. There was a well, but no running
water and no electricity, and they counted on what they could grow to feed themselves:
avocados, eggs, maize, bananas, and milk straight from the cows. At one point, after I had paid to have
electricity and plumbing installed, he told me, “You’ve raised us from
poverty,” and there was some truth to that.
That spark has ignited a fire, and today his place is a beacon of
achievement.
Pastor began adopting orphans about 2008 when a homeless
waif wandered into his church one day begging for food. By the time of my 2010 visit he had nine, and
by 2012 thirteen. Today he has forty. I
asked him how he got so many so quickly, and the answer was as complicated as
the children’s cases. The need is
huge. Because of its reputation as a safe
haven, it’s a popular place where other churches refer their outcasts. Some children just walked in. Pastor picked up street children and took them
home. One came in after having been
pistol-whipped, the bruises and cuts still bleeding. At forty he had to call a halt, though if
some leave, he replaces them. They leave
in different ways. Two just disappeared,
probably ran away. Most finish eighth
grade and are ready to go on with their “adult” lives. Five have found sponsors to pay for them to
go to prep-school (what we call high school) at a cost of $1400 a year. If any of you readers belong to a church or
charitable organization interested in intervening in a really good way, please
keep Pastor’s orphanage in mind.
Seriously. 100% of any donation
goes to the children, nothing for administration or advertising. Even a few dollars a month would make a world
of difference. (Western Union, Pastor
Robert Nyamwange, Kisii, Kenya. If they
ask for a test question use something with the answer – orphanage – or buy one
of my books, whose sales go to the mission work).
I asked how he could possibly provide for all these
children? He told me donations come from
local churches, and there are friends, like me, and from other volunteers who have
come through. Many of the volunteers are
students. The biggest problem is feeding
the children. Imagine you have forty
mouths, three times a day, at thirty days a month, that’s 3600 meals a
month. Even at only 50 cents a meal,
that’s still $1800 a month in food costs.
My $1500 donation helped for this month.
Pastor took me on the tour of his campus, showing incredible
changes. There’s a large boy’s building
in the lower grounds, a huge new cowshed, a goat pen, several new chicken cages,
holding 40 chickens, and a new rabbit pen.
A freshly created fishpond has 300 minnows, with projections to be
ready-to-eat in four months. On the top of the hill they’re building a new home
for the volunteers, one room will be a kitchen (currently Terry cooks in the
hallway of the main building, which has 3 bedrooms, a main room, and a bath,
total space about 800 sq ft). This new
building will have 5 rooms, 3 bedrooms, a bath, and the kitchen. The foundations and early walls are
present. Unfortunately, just as I
arrived they received bad news: the fellow who promised them $8000 to get them
started on the building decided to only provide $2000. Now they’re stuck, for the foundation, if
left uncovered, will be destroyed by the rain.
The biggest change is their water project. I have no idea how he managed this, but
Pastor raised 1 million shillings, about $12,000, to install a process that
filters water from the creek, runs it to a collecting cistern for further
cleaning, pumps it up the hill to the top of his property, where it’s
chlorinated and changed into drinkable water for the whole camp. As a side issue he created a walled spot next
to the creek of filtered water for his neighbors who, until this time, merely
filled their buckets from the community creek.
It must be true that God helps those who help themselves, for God has
certainly blessed Pastor and Terry, and all their charges.
As we unloaded, out of the main house stepped a white face,
the first I’d seen since leaving Nairobi, catching me completely by
surprise. Pretty Lebanese/American Mirna
graduated college in Connecticut, and, working as a waitress, happened to
overhear one of her customers talking about volunteering in Kenya. She was intrigued, and now is on a six-week
volunteer stay at Pastor’s, teaching at Terry’s school and helping around the
house. I’m occasionally asked by people
reading my “On a Mission,” if I’ll take them with me to Africa. I won’t.
However, you can come on your own here, and I’ll help you plan it. It’ll cost you round trip airfare, (about a
thousand dollars) and spending money.
Pastor will arrange for your pickup in Nairobi’s airport and you’ll live
in the orphanage compound and have a truly life changing experience, including
seeing as much of Africa on side trips as you can afford. For example, a nice safari through wildlife
country will run you about $500. Or you
might fall in love with Africa. Brian, a
mid-twenties business major also from Connecticut, came in May 2013 and sleeps
with the boys, helping with all sorts of projects, and doesn’t have plans to
return to the U.S. any time soon.
By the way, driving at night is pretty scary. The streets are dark, pedestrians crowd the
edges, matatus will weave past you
and suddenly swerve to the side or out in front of you, as do motorcyclists,
and the dirt roads are full of ruts and slippery patches. One danger one doesn’t have is wild animals
darting out in front of you. People have
killed them all off. No deer, no
rabbits, no squirrels. No wild animals
of any kind, except for the occasional bird.
“Really?” I asked. “None at
all?” “Well,” Pastor granted, “perhaps
an occasional snake.”
As we sat down to dinner, I handed Pastor a gift copy of my On a Mission. I should have waited until after the meal,
for he was too fascinated to eat. A large
part of the book is about him: his orphanage and his church, and of the 200
photos, a good portion feature people from his town he recognizes. Great fun.
Our dinner fare included the typical Kenyan servings of boiled potatoes,
lentils, rice, served on flattened maize cakes. We haven’t had Ugali yet, the typical corn
mash. We drank chai, the milk/tea
combo served warm. It’d been a long day
and I drifted off to the sound of voices speaking Swahili at the other end of
the hall.
I awoke the next morning and enjoyed breakfast of manosy, (three-cornered fried bread),
sausage, and chai. Temperatures of about
60 felt invigorating for a morning walk and picture taking, including my
favorite subject here, the Keumbu market place.
I’m always amazed at how cheerful and bright are the people, their goods
spread out on blankets or on a small table.
The salespeople sit there all day, hoping to make a couple hundred
shillings, maybe $2.
Later in the morning Pastor and I visited Emmanuel Light
Academy, the school where Terry is headmaster, which means, I figure, they own
this school. When I last saw it, three
years ago, it had 3 buildings to provide schooling for about fifty kids, grades
one through eight. Now there are three
levels of preschool, and maybe 120 children in five buildings of
classrooms. Their school scores number
one in the district of 53 schools, and, as can be seen by the photos, have
happy determined students. I asked them
if they made a profit off the school.
Well … they could except they give free tuition to orphans, or,
basically, anyone who asks, so they only have about 30% paying customers, just
enough to make teacher salary and property rent.
We followed up that visit with a trip to the hospital. When I arrived in 2010, Kesumu District
Hospital was a level 3 (out of 6) and had three nurses and no physicians. They had no running water, no x-ray, no
surgical suite, a choice of twenty lab tests, 3 IV antibiotics, and one old
rickety ambulance. By 2012 they were
still a level 3, had 7 nurses, one physician, a bore hole I had paid for, and
associated running water, a half-built x-ray, a completed unused surgical
suite, and the same lab tests and antibiotics.
They had had a better ambulance, though it was wrecked. The people present in 2010 were roughly the
same as those n 2012. This year
everything seems to have changed. The
hospital is now a level 5, a fancy new ambulance, a completed x-ray building
and surgical suite, and a staff of two physicians and twelve nurses. Everyone is new, the only remaining staff
from the past I knew, Walter the pharmacist, Agnes the lab tech, and Matron the
OB nurse, were all off duty. The CEO,
physician, medical records chief, central supply lady, head clinician … all the
people I had known, were all gone. I presented
the gifts I had brought, medications, pulse oximetry, and a copy of my book,
and they all went into a bottom drawer, probably only to be seen again on the
black market. A bit of a
disappointment. Neither the x-ray
department or the surgical suite have been used. I wasn’t given an opportunity to see or treat
patients. The well I had placed has
collapsed, though the rest of the water supply works, so they have rain water from
the system I set up and the new cistern and pump providing water for hand
washing, the lab, the pharmacy, OB needs – everything but the kitchen, which
needs cleaner water I suppose. We did go
out to get a picture of Pastor and me with our trees. We planted the trees two-feet tall in 2011
and now, as can be seen by the photo they’re about 12 feet, providing shade and
beauty, if little in the way of memory of what we did there.
What makes a missionary?
One decides to go somewhere on a mission. One shouldn’t expect to change
the world, to receive gratitude or even remembrance. The sense of accomplishment is the
reward. I’ve traveled to rural Africa to
help the people, setting processes in motion, water in the hospital,
development in the orphanage. Peter is
one of the orphans I supported, and dedicated a poem to him in On a Mission. Now he’s in prep school (see the photo). David, Pastor’s son, I started supporting in
2010 and he’s now a senior in Prep school, thus a twelve grader. He’s consistently in the top three in all his
studies and will no doubt go on to university and great achievements. Pastor told me the money I’ve given to the
orphanage and the work I’ve done at the hospital have helped hundreds. But what he’s most grateful for, what he
believes has made the most difference in the world, is the education I provided
for David. This will be a lasting
legacy.
Tomorrow I leave for Johannesburg. It’s a full day of travel, leaving the
orphanage at 7 am, driving to Kisumu, boarding the plane by 11, flying to
Nairobi, changing planes and off to Johannesburg, arriving about 7pm. There I’ll be met by Marian who has promised
to take me on tour of some of her charity projects. More on that in my next blog.
Philip
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