Beautiful Kenya

Kenya surprised me by how beautiful it is.  The skies were breathtaking and I saw some of the most incredible stars.  I was also surprised by how lush and tropical it was...there were mango and avocado trees everywhere.  Here are a few more scenery-like pictures.

Group shot in Masiland while we waited for our vehicle to be fixed.  We had to wait 2.5 hours here while a car drove to the nearest town to get oil for our vehicle.  At least it was a beautiful wait!

Street shot in Ngong.

Another street shot of Ngong.  The vehicle on  right is called a matatu and that's what we traveled everywhere in. They were very bumpy rides!

A shot of the Kibera slum in Nairobi.  Kibera is the second largest slum in Africa (the largest is in Egypt). 

Kibera.  It took us 12 minutes to drive by the whole slum.

Kibera

A shot of Ngong. Those clouds are telling of the weather we sometimes had!

Another shot of Masailand while we waited for the oil.

Typical Kenyan roads.

I think this is such a powerful picture.  It was taken by my friend at the LP daycare.

Sun setting in Masailand.  The sunsets and sunrises were breathtaking there.

A small Masai compound.

Ugunja Community Resource Centre

For the last two weeks of our trip we traveled west to Ugunja to team up with UCRC.  UCRC is a fantastic organization that empowers its community by initiating programs like sustainable farming and micro-financing and funding health clinics and schools just to name a few.  It was great teaming up with UCRC because we were exposed to a lot of different issues that affect the people of the community.   One thing we learned a lot about was the devastating violence that struck Kenya after the elections of December 2007.  We didn't hear too much about it in Canada but over a 1000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced.  There is an election coming this winter and UCRC had been working within its community to try and prevent it from happening again.

Enoch and Jamila! They are part of the Amani Youth network associated with UCRC.  Lucky for us we spent nearly every day with them as we visited different places in the community.  They are fantastic and so hospitable.

Group shot outside of the UCRC office with Aggrey, the founder of UCRC and Enoch.

A classroom at the Early Childhood Development Centre that we spent a fair amount of time at.  We played soccer and games with the kids, taught in the classrooms and started a garden for the children and their families. 

Planting kale at the ECDC

We went with community health workers to make house visits to people who have chiggers.  Chiggers are little bugs that live in the dust of people`s homes and infect their feet and sometimes hands.  They especially like to dig under the nail beds.  Once they are inside they grow, lay nests and suck blood.  Its incredibly painful.  This man was 80 years old and had chiggers.  There was a spirit about him that just made you smile.

To treat the chiggers the feet were soaked in a lysol/water solution for 30 minutes.  These three children had awful cases of chiggers.  They were also malnourished and alone at home. Happily when we returned the next week we saw one of the boys and he said his pain had really diminished.  That was happy news but it was sad to think that regardless of how simple the treatment was, many people don't get treatment and suffer too long.

This baby girl was sitting alone outside her home on this burlap sac.  She was so quiet as she sat there and it was devastating to see the state she was in.  Here I am wiping her down with baby wipes.

One way to prevent chiggers is to  'smear' the mud hut homes with cow dung and new mud to suffocate the bugs.  Here I'm helping a community health worker mix the mud and cow dung. 

A lovely woman making chapatis! One of our favourite foods while in Kenya.

The compound we stayed at for the last two weeks of our visit.  We slept under mosquito nets in a mud hut, used pitlatrines and had bucket showers!

At the LP daycare

 While in Ngong my team and I spent a lot of time at the Living Positive daycare.  The daycare was opened so that there would be somewhere in the slums the children could be supervised while their mothers were beginning to work.  It can be dangerous for children in the slum because adults can take advantage of them and drugs are readily accessible.  Mum's big wish is to get as many kids as possible sponsored to go to boarding school so that they can get a good quality education and get out of slum.

For two weeks we came to the daycare for a few hours almost every day to play, paint and do some much needed maintenance.  The kids were all amazing and so beautiful.  They loved playing clapping games, singing songs and just holding our hands. 

They liked having their pictures taken.

Lunch time for the babies!  This is also what the classroom walls looked like before we added the plywood walls.

The rain and flooding was really bad this year so the kids weren't able to play in the playground.  With our donation money my team and I hired construction workers who leveled out the play area and added the cinder blocks and a drain system so the water wouldn't pool as it had been doing.  This picture is taken midway through. The building in the corner is a small kitchen where lunch is made for the kids each day. They usually ate white rice and cabbage. 

We added plywood walls to what was just a dark, tin room and then we painted it nice and bright.  I drew the sun!

Mum loved it!

These are the latrines at the daycare.  They are just holes in the ground and quite common throughout Kenya.

A big group shot on one of the last days with some of the kids and the teachers.  On some days there would be up to 80 kids at the daycare but there were only a handful of teachers.  The conditions at the daycare were nothing like what we expect to see here in Canada but at least it was somewhere safe for the children to stay.

This is Sheila, the daughter of Josephine, one of the women in the WEEP program sitting with one of my team leaders Breanne.

Aren't they beautiful!?

The baby room!  The babies were so well behaved.  We would love to donate diapers to the daycare because often times the babies spent the whole day in the same diaper seeing as the daycare did not have the funds to provide new ones and parents couldn't afford to bring extras with their child.

There was so much singing all the time! One of our favourite songs was 'Making Melodies'.

Staying at Living Positive

Living Positive Kenya is the organization that my team and I worked with for the first two weeks of our stay.  Living Positive (LP) is an incredible NGO.  Its main goal is to improve the psychological and emotional health of HIV+ women in the Ngong Hill Slums and help bring them out of poverty by teaching them skills like tailoring, bead work and candle making so that they can generate some income for themselves and their children.  I saw first hand how crucial a role LP and the support network there is in improving the lives of the women.  From the laughter and kindness they displayed to us from the second they met us you would never have guessed the horrific struggles these women have so strongly endured.  Its truly the most inspiring place I have ever visited.

Before going too far I must introduce Mary Wanderi, the founder of Living Positive.  As a sociatl worker in the Ngong Slums, Mary (but who everyone fondly refers to as Mum) quickly realized that if the mothers could be saved before wasting away from HIV they would still be able take care of their children, a job that no one does better than a mother herself.   What started as just a soup kitchen of sorts to help the women take their medication has turned into a internationally recognized organization that receives funding from both the Steven Lewis Foundation and HEART.  Mum is seriously one of the most loving, smart and inspirational women and her laugh is so contagious!

The room at LP where the women do their tailoring.

    A look at a road leading to the Ngong Slum   

                               .

  Each day we visited the home of each of the 13 women involved in the 18 month long Women Economic Empowerment Program (WEEP) to hear their life stories.  Here we are outside of Alice's home that she shares with her incredible husband Charles, their son David and Alice's two other daughters. 

This is Mum and Fridah on Fridah's new bed in her new home.  The flooding and mud was terrible where she was previously living in the slum and it was going to make it impossible for her to get well.  We were so happy to have found a place out of the slum for her and her two sons Collins and Franklin but it was devastating to discover that she had literally nothing to move with her.  My team and I purchased her a bed so that she would be off of the floor and I hear there is a new bed on the way for her two sons.  Fridah spoke good English and was able to tell us her life story with just a bit of help from Mum to translate.  Her story was difficult to hear but her smile and positivity brought a smile to your face regardless. 

It's been a few days since I've returned home from Kenya and I'm excited to get this blog up and running so that I can share some of my experiences with you all.  Already when I look at my own pictures I feel a sense of disbelief that I was actually there and actually saw and did the things that I did.  My time was beyond incredible and I feel very fortunate for being able to go.  I already want to go back!