|
June 29, 2004
June 29, 2004
Busy day but I will take a moment to write a bit. Calm my mind. Getting ready to go to Nairobi tomorrow with the kids. Have to organize everything for going and arranging for caring for the house and animals while we are gone. Supati kitten is improving but still needs lots of care. We will meet Reuben in Nairobi where he is working on formulating his PhD research question. That does keep him busy and traveling. Also, dentist appointments for all the kids. Loiweti to fill a tooth and the others for a check. 7 hour drive just for dental care! Also, will be finalizing with the US Embassy Self-help Fund on our proposal for the Seren water project. I hear that there is a good chance that we will get the support. I’m am so happy about that. Water is such an issue with the pastoralist communities. This proposal, if funded in full, will help both the school and the wider community with various water related projects. It will be so good. I have been very busy the last few days sorting out all the pro forma invoices and getting the proposal as fine-tuned as possible. We are also going to Nairobi to say good bye to the coordinator of the US Embassy Fund Marian, who has been so helpful to us for funding the other two water projects we just finished. She has also become a good friend, along with her family, and I will miss her. Her husband’s latest job is over at the Embassy and he is going on to a new assignment in Washington, DC. The Ex-patriot world is so transient. They only stay in one place 2 to 5 years and then off to another destination in the world. I make new friends, just get to know them well, and then they are gone. Oh well, I have a lot of ‘permanent’ friends also in Kenya. And even with my more ‘temporary’ friends, I enjoy their company while they are here. And it is only their physical location in relation to me that is ‘temporary’, their friendship lasts well beyond our close proximity. When they leave Kenya, I have friends to visit in the places that they go to. And with the internet these days, it is very easy to keep in touch. In this global world, building friendships in every part of it is important. The more interconnected we become, the more hope we have for working together towards a better world. Every contact and every friendship counts, even if it is for ‘just a moment’ in our lives.
June 26, 2004
June 26, 2004
I am so excited again. I have our kitten, Supati, asleep on my lap as I write this. We thought she was dead and we would never see her again. And we are fortunate she is not. Yesterday, some girls informed my boys that they had seen a cat in a latrine a few plots down from ours. They told me in the night so I said they should go check in the morning. Mid-morning today, they came running into the house with Supati, still alive but very weak and not able to use her back legs. Poor kitten. She had been stuck down in an unused latrine for 2 weeks, slowly starving to death. Despite being in such bad shape, she was happy to be rescued. We have been feeding her a little bit every half an hour or so, as she can’t eat much at one time. She just wants to be held and petted. Her mother has rejected her and only hisses and runs away when we try to get them together. I hope she will come around. But in the meantime, Supati seems to have taken me as her mother. She is very, very skinny, but still healthy enough to recover with tender loving care. I am a little worried about her weak back legs. I suspect they will start working again once she fattens up a bit. All the claws have been worn down to the quick from trying to climb our of the hole. Poor thing! I get horrified thinking about her stuck in the cold, dark hole with no food for all that time. Being eaten by a hyena would have been much better than that, in a way. Though, I am so glad we finally found her. And so is she. She has just woken up a bit and is purring away as I stroke her. She is wrapped in a cloth to keep her warm and she is completely content to stay there, which considering she is a cat, shows how much trouble she went through. Well, time to go feed her a bit more.
June 24, 2004
June 24, 2004
I am so exited! Great Rotary meeting today. We were able to have two visitors from the Rotary Club of Nakuru come and give us a presentation on exactly what Rotory International is all about and what we needed to do to pursue becoming a Chartered Rotary Club. And the turn out for the meeting was wonderful. 29 people attended. And we have managed to register over 30 people as interested in getting the club going strong. I was starting to despair of ever getting our club on its feet when the last couple meetings only had 5 people one week and 11 the next. We need a minimum of 20 for the charter and while we had that many on paper, participation in the meetings had been a problem. But now, with the visitors having come, people are totally on fire for the whole idea. The visitors were the President and the incoming President of the club that is sponsoring us as a new club. They were so inspirational. And so informative. With hard work and persistence, we have now have the goal of being charted by November this year, at the latest. Nakuru is 3 ½ hours drive away, which is why it took so long for the club members from there to visit us. But now that they have come and see the potential, they are also keen to help us achieve our goal, despite the fact that they will have to commit a lot of time and travel to us. Service above self. That is the spirit of Rotary.
June 13, 2004
June 13, 2004
It is a relaxing Sunday evening after a busy end of last week and weekend. Lots of visitor and visiting time. Wednesday last week, Maria, a person from Sweden who has been in Kenya since February came to stay with us up to Saturday. She has been volunteering with the Kisma Pstoralist School being set up by the Kisima Trust. The aim of this school is to provide free education for poor, but bright pasoralist students from all of the different pasotralist groups in Northern Kenya who otherwise would not be able to afford Secondary School. I had met Maria very quickly a couple times before and she had contacted me about coming to Maralal to explore possibilities for research subjects for her further studies once she went back to Sweden in July. I introduced her to different development organizations during the day and then we would stay up sitting by the fire until all hours talking after the kids went to sleep. It was really nice. Reuben had gone to Ngurunit to do his own research subject explorations as he is getting very keen to pursue his PhD.
Saturday morning, as the kids and I were taking Maria to the bus, Jaco called saying he and his supervisor had just arrived at Ol Maisor rance by airplane from Ngurunit. He had be trying to figure out a way to pass through Maralal to see us and say goodbye to the kids before leaving Kenya the next Tuesday but called to say he just did not have time. He also informed me Reuben, whom we had been expecting the day before, would be late in his return as he wasn’t leaving Ngurunit until Sunday. So, being the often spontaneous person that I am, asked Jaco if by chance there was a place for us all to stay at the ranch and that as it was only 2 hours drive away, we would join him, as he couldn’t join us. Off we went on the adventure. The three kids, a driver in case of breakdowns, and myself. We had a blast. Spent last night with Jaco and his supervisor from Germany, Christian, whom I had really wanted to meet. In the evening, we got to visit the pet Cheetah on the ranch. The boys enjoyed petting her, though Naiboku definitely decided she did not like cats bigger than herself. Then we went to dinner with some other friends that I hadn’t seen for a while. Another enjoyable time sitting in front of the fire. Then, on the way home this morning, we decided to stop by Mugie ranch and see another friend and try our luck to see what wildlife we could find. We were very lucky. Besides finding our friend and her daughter home and joining them for lunch, we saw very close to the road at various places, a giraffe drinking water, a herd of Eland and two elephants having a rub on the trees. One had beautiful tusks. Along with those ‘special treats’ we saw the usual baboons, zebras, dikdiks and rabbits. Naiboku can never forget to include the rabbits in her lift of wildlife seen. It makes me remember not to forget the small things in life as well. It is important to notice in life not only the elephants and giraffes, but also the rabbits.
The one sad thing about the last week is that from Friday morning our kitten, Supati, has been missing. She is only about 4 ½ months and was starting to wander outside by herself. All day Friday, her mother, Buro, called to her but I didn’t really notice till evening that she was no where to be found. We hoped that by the time we came back today she would have turned up. But still no sign. Kids are sad. I am sad. Mother cat is sad. Probably eaten by some hyena or killed by a dog. We will probably never know as I have lost cats before with no trace.
June 04, 2004
June 4, 2004
I have started to settle into the regular routines of life in Maralal again. Sleeping in my own bed. Waking early to get the kids ready for school. Sitting for a moment over breakfast reading the latest good book. Then launching into the tasks of the day in terms of work, household duties and trying to put some organization into all the things that have been not given full attention for the last couple months. Maralal is always my place of ‘office’ work. Paper shuffling and reports. Proposal writing and finances. I find it really hard to sit down and get a handle on all these ‘office’ things after spending a lot of time in hands-on activities in Ngurunit or the transient life of human interaction in Nairobi, marketing products and meeting interested donors. But this Maralal life is also an important part of making my efforts in development work effective and efficient. So, I make myself sit down at my desk and start sorting through the incredible mountain of books, notes and debris that have settled onto it.
One activity that I am very keen on doing during my time in Maralal over the next couple months is to get our fledgling Rotary Club going strong. It is about 4 months now that Reuben and I have been trying to get people interested and motivated in this club. Yesterday’s meeting was encouraging. A core group of people have been established who are keen to see our club registered with Rotary International as soon as possible. One main constraint our new club has faced is the mobile nature of so many of the potential club members’ work life. In trying to get people together for a meeting once a week, it has become very evident that not only Reuben and I end up traveling a lot around the country for our work. Maralal is the district center of Samburu. Those who work in development fields, both government and non-government, often use Maralal only as a base and travel a lot to the other district communities. Also, Nairobi, though very far away, is the hub of many things required for many people’s work. Materials, funds, licenses, registration, head offices. So much of that is only available in Nairobi. So people are always having to travel down country to find the things they need for their work. These factors mean that every week, no matter which day we have tried to set as the Rotary club meeting day, a significant number of the members are often not even in Maralal. Despite this, we are seeing a steady growth of the membership and an increasing determination to attend the weekly meetings. I am excited to see a growing commitment to community service among the educated of Maralal and am confident that by the end of June, our club will be going strong and in the process of gaining its Rotary International Charter. That will be cool.
June 02, 2004
May 26, 2004
I am on my way to Nairobi as I write this. Lap tops are wonderful inventions. I have a driver and we have hit the tarmac road so it is reasonably smooth. So I decided to pass the hours by writing a bit. My plan of staying in one place for a while didn’t work out for very long. We are on our way to Nairobi because of a tooth problem Loiweti is having. One big difficulty we have living in Northern Kenya is regular access to a dentist for the kids. In fact, Loiweti is 6 ½ years old and has never been to a dentist before. Which is good as far as that goes because it means he hasn’t had a problem yet. But if he had access to regular checkups, maybe he wouldn’t have this problem. Oh well. That is part of life when we choose to live 7 hours drive from the nearest effective health care. When the problem first started a couple days ago, I asked the doctor if there was anyone at the district hospital who could help. He said there is someone who pulls teeth but he certainly would not recommend him. Scary. Now we are on a 7 hour journey to someone safe.
A couple hours south of Maralal, we saw 8 elephants at a pond near the road. Amazing. One very big elephant, probably the matriarch, and the others ranging in size down to quite a young baby. Loiweti was impressed. We went all the way to Marsabit in April specifically to see elephants and were defeated to find any. Now we are just driving down the road on our way to Nairobi and there are a bunch of elephants just walking along beside. I wish Naiboku had been with us. Next time.
I have an appointment for Loiweti tomorrow to see about his tooth. I hope to get it fixed quickly and then back to Maralal again. I will stop writing now and enjoy the scenery again for a while. Still about 2 hours left before we arrive in Nairobi. Long drive. Uggh.
|
