2 months in the life of GC

so a thousand apologies for not writing for about two months.  i figured that i actually owed it to people that helped me get here to write updates about life and such.  back in mid-january, once all the groups and visitors had left, i jetted out with my buddy/boss A.B. to Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania for 5 days. It was super chill, and way more beautiful than the beaches in thailand.  Got back to Kenya, and then everybody left, and it was just me in the house for about a week.  It was a good time to reflect, come up with my own schedule and sift through the bullcrap from Iris, which I found myself shoveling through a lot. That first week was full of meetings, learning to drive stick on the other side of the road, getting groceries, getting to know the names of the kids at the center, etc.  One night I got an emergency call saying that Patrick (the head of the Limuru Children's Center) and I needed to take a child to the hospital the next day.  he had been born without a penis, and there were all these complications, so we drove him and his mom to the hospital.  Turns out it wasn't as bad as we thought.  But sitting there, in the kids wing, with a little girl whose legs were broken because someone in a Matatu (public transport buses/the bane of my existence) had moved their seat back and crushed her legs, and then some kid with just tubes and blood just gushing out of his head...i told God, i have to believe in a God that is good, i have to, because the world is so rotten.  

The next day I went with Duncan and Cornell, two kenyans who run a program called Care for AIDS, to Jamii Bora, a micro-credit organization in Nairobi.  Care for AIDS helps medically and spiritually with AIDS patients in Limuru, who are cast out from their communities, shunned by their churches, and treated almost as lepers. A lot of stigma's like that going around.  Care for AIDS has the desire to seek out micro-credit loans for their clients, empowering them financially to start small businesses in their community, such as grocers, charcoal sellers, shop owners, tailors, donkey cart operators, etc.  The meeting was fruitful and the conclusion was that CFA clients would partner with Jamii Bora to help them receive loans and start small businesses.  We've spent time as an organization thinking about ways to assist the poor without undermining them, or treating them as inferior and helpless.  Never give anyone anything that they can get for themselves, and empower them to feel ownership, aka provdie them a loan so they can work for the money to buy their food, don't just give them free food or money, which creates dependency and entitlement.  Allow ownership, pride and self-worth to grow.  

I've hung out with Patrick and his family at their farm, milking the cows, running around the fields with his daughter, nieces and nephews, and taking many dinners at his house, cooked by his darling and sassy wife, Annastasia.  One day the kids at the LCC all came to our farm, and spent the day plucking weeds, pulling their own beans, playing games, and running away from the dogs, haha.

We're also working on building a school in Kibera, an enormous slum in Nairobi, nearly a million people in a square mile, but it's more of a big snake, not a square.  Anyways, so we're working on building a secondary school there, and getting prices for the building materials, labor, administrative costs, etc.  We stopped by the school the other day, and they were having parent-teacher day, and they kinda plopped us in front of some 100 parents, and had us say hi and such.  It was actually kinda cool, definitely very Kenyan with the white folks on display, but we got a chance to share our heart and vision to partner with this school, and provide for the students here, in front of all their parents.  I think it was good for them to see the white man as not exploiting them, or taking anything from them, but that we were there because of a mandate of love, and we were spending our lives and time to empower and give their children access to a better life, through an education rooted in the knowledge of Christ (horrible run on sentence, sorry, too lazy to fix it).

The next day we had a birthday party at the LCC, played techno music and ate biscuits and chocolate.  We are also working on having a talent competition with other children's schools in the area and having a youth symposium in which we will talk about pressing issues, AIDS, the environment, micro-finance with the youth of limuru. (thanks and acknowledgments to War/Dance and CG for the previous ideas.)  Our little group is called the Mustard Seed Revolution, and I'm the only white fella for miles, brillant.  We're also looking to buy bibles for the kids at the center, buy some cows for a partner of ours who is opening a home for street boys, and just living life in this crazy country of Kenya.  So, there it is....

Oh, and all of this takes money, so if you've got some quid lying around that you want to put to good use, many good options, haha.

Much Peace...