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NOTES FROM KENYA |
Related PagesBaumann and Coffey have gone to Kenya to do volunteer work with indigenous women, preferably working on microcredit or economic self-sufficiency training. | |
NOTES FROM KENYA - Joanruth Baumann and Dick Coffeyposted 05/16/2007
Thought you might like an update on where we are now and what we are doing. We are currently west of Kisumu (look on the map for Kenya, then look west to Lake Victoria - we are west of that, almost to the Uganda border). We are 2 hours from Kisumu in the bush working with "Mama na Dada", (Mother and Sister), a community based organization that works with young women, adult women, AIDS patients and at-risk nursery school age children. The girls get AIDS very young from the fishermen at the lake and have no futures but poverty and death. The children are frequently AIDs orphans who are seriously ill, malnourished, mutilated, burned or abandoned. We feed them millet and corn porridge twice/day, bathe them everyday and provide them with a happy, educational environment. There is also a women's micro-credit group which is languishing. I am working with them to reenergize the team. The commercial opportunities are so few that the options are difficult. With the young girls (12- 18) I'm doing seminars to talk about health, hygiene, education and opportunities in the wider world, abstinence, family budgeting and self esteem and decision making. I'm trying to figure out how to establish a small fund so that there is some hope that some of them could go the high school (it's expensive here and few ever go). We are also working on a Memory Box project, interviewing dying mothers and fathers, creating a family history for the children who will be left behind. We try to create a family tree, a story of who their parents were and what they were like, a tape of their voices, a photo and an unofficial will, that the uncles may or may not abide by. I'm designing some adult ed classes for women whose lack of English and arithmetic is holding them back in marketing their vegetables. Our own living circumstances are better than they were on the coast. We still have no electricity and we have to haul our water from a tank (or have it hauled up from the lake on a donkey) and scoop it out of a barrel in our hut...cold, green water! But we have a sun shower which Dick fills and puts out in the sun, so we have a warm shower in the evening and the weather, though hot, is drier and has lovely breezes in the afternoon. We look down on the lake and the hills of Uganda are lovely on the horizon. When rain clouds and wind whip up, it is a sight to sit and enjoy! The boma has cows, goats, sheep, chickens and dogs roaming around our hut (that dad blamed rooster has got to go though!)and we have 3 bats that live in the peak of our thatched roof. I bug them by shining a flashlight on them and they protest. They leave at dusk for the bugs and come back in the night. We go to bed when it gets dark (bugs, bugs) and get up with the sun.. that's the only time cool enough to do laundry and get it on a line, etc. Despite all the difficulties, dirt, mud, bugs!, snakes (yes, cobras, mombas, etc.!!Ugg!), the people here are happy, smiling, so friendly with clean clothes and a willingness to share all. There is truly joy in their hearts. Some of the women volunteer full time at the center, teaching the children, cooking for them or as home health workers walking great distances to visit sick mothers, give them anti-retro virus meds (which sometimes they pay for themselves!) and rescuing children who, at 5 and 6, have been left in charge of the home and younger children, doing all the cooking, cleaning the mud hut, hauling water, cow care, etc. Some of these children are old at 6. One, a tiny girl with burns all over her body, I have never been able to get to smile - and I've really tried. One was so unused to food, he couldn't eat for a few days after he was brought in. We eat healthy food and enough, but it is monotonous and, with no refrigeration, after seeing the same chicken meat or cabbage sit on the counter for 3 days, I'm not going to eat it.... so its rice, rice, rice. Best to all in the San Juans. Joanruth Baumann and Dick Coffey |
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SAN JUAN ISLANDER © 2008 |
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