My trip to Kenya

Dago Dala Hera Orphanage
Alex Salkin
Sunday, March 1, 2009

I’m currently staying on a farm with the Odoyo Family, who are basically the patrons of the Dala Hera Orphanage. The farm is about a 5-minute walk away from the Dago Kogelo Primary school, and the Orphanage is another 3 minutes beyond that. There are about 55 orphans in all, all supported by a feeding program ran by the Odoyos and a Canadian sponsor. The Orphanage is basically a girls dorm, housing about 20 girls at night. The building itself was made possible from a donation from a Peace Corps volunteer in July 2002. While they would have liked to house both the boys and the girls, the government here makes it illegal to house both sexes in the same building, so the executive decision was made to house the girls while they wait to raise the money build a boy’s dorm.

The kids there are some of the sweetest you will ever meet. Most of them are shy around white people (Mazungus) because they see so few of them, but also I don’t think they get much personal attention from many adults. Sarah, the Canadian volunteer, while she was here was great with the kids, teaching them duck, duck, goose (which they call “Dok dok dok”) and playing with the skipping ropes and listening to them sing. I have been spending most of my time elsewhere with Edwin Odoyo, but the times I’ve been over at the orphanage while they’re playing I taught them how to use a Frisbee and recorded some of their songs with my digital voice recorder. They had never seen either of those things, so when I first threw the Frisbee or played back one of their songs they all burst out laughing.

The kids are taken care of by 8 different volunteer mothers, who rotate throughout the week with the cooking and supervising of the children at night. They do it completely without pay except for eating some of the meals they cook.

But through talking with Edwin the program always seems to be in jeopardy. “If our donor stopped paying for the feeding program we would have enough money and food saved up for about five weeks” after that, they wouldn’t be sure what to do. His ultimate dream is to buy an eleven-acre piece of land right next to the farm. By doing this, the whole program may one day be completely self-sufficient, with them growing their own food, and even selling any excess they may grow back into the community. At this point the land is full of sugarcane.

But at this point there are always ways to help the program even in small ways.

Did you know that for 10,500 shillings (135 dollars) you could bring a mobile clinic here every three months for a whole year and immunize all 55 orphans from malaria? For an additional 15,500 shillings (200 dollars) you could provide all the orphans with medicated skin cream (for ringworm and scabies, which almost all of them have) for the entire year?

You would be surprised at how much a little donation of just about ANYTHING helps someone here. An old pair of shoes can go to someone who has never owned shoes. A package of pens could go to a school that can’t afford them, ten dollars could feed a child for weeks.

Sometimes it’s hard to look at what some of these kids have to go through every day.

But when you see something really appreciated, it’ll touch your heart. A donor in the states sent me along with reading glasses to give to each village I go to while I’m here, and the first people I brought them to were the teachers at the Dago Kogelo Primary School.

One teacher admitted he had problems seeing the words on the pages of his student’s homework, and when he put on a pair of glasses he exclaimed, “I can see!”

Here’s an excerpt from the thank you letter from the headmistress of the school: “To Whom It May Concern: May I take this time on behalf of the Dago-Kogelo Primary staff, through the hands of Brother Alex to thank you very much for having donated to us very good glasses for reading. This will enable us to cope up with the present dynamic in Kenya which is always exhaustive to the bare eyes.”

I just have to smile when I read that.

Helping out at Namunyak Maasai Welfare
Sunday, March 22, 2009

My host Emmanuel Tasur and his wife, Lillian, run the volunteer program here about half an hour drive from Kilgoris (Should show up on Google maps) and 50 km from Maasai Mara game reserve, near the “Oloololo” entrance gate. Their house is in an area where nature is more abundant than houses, and our closest neighbors are Emmanuel’s sister, Georgina, and her family. She has two boys and one girl. Larry, her middle son, is 7 years old and incredibly smart. He speaks English better than most adults here and even figured out how to use my digital camera without any input from me (his artistic talents, however, leave much to be desired). I recently taught him and some of his friends how to play the card game “War,” and when Larry is on a hot streak he tends to say, “Tonight I will eat goat!”

Emmanuel’s school is already showing a great deal of progress, even in the short time I’ve been here. Three classrooms have been cemented and they’ve begun on the administration offices. The walls need to cure for 7 days, then they’ll be painted and other finishing touches will be added. Even though I’ll be gone when they start painting, I’m glad to know that the students here will soon be able to learn in permanent buildings.

When Emmanuel got the idea for his school, he had some requirements that he wanted to meet. First, a quality education for everyone. When he went to school as a child, there were too many students and too few teachers, so he made sure that his school would have a good student/teacher ratio. He also has a few mentally handicapped students in some of the early classes, which is almost unheard of here.

Second, cultural preservation. The school is in Maasai land, so he wants to preserve the “good parts of Maasai culture” (don’t ask me to define them). There is a rich history and strong traditions here, and what he sees as a loss of his culture worries him. However, when he hired the teachers and staff, he made sure that there was a good mix of the different tribes represented.

Third, environmental sustainability. He plans on using organic farming methods to grow crops, and wants to teach to his students the importance of the environment to their community. I’d say that’s pretty respectable, yeah?

A few weeks ago he got a letter from the Minister of Education letting him know that he’d been appointed to the “board of governors” of a local high school. He hadn’t applied to the position- he didn’t even know that there was an opening. But his reputation preceded him and at his first board meeting was elected chairman. Laughing, he said to me “I told them that I wasn’t going to serve unless certain things were met, including me being chairman of the board, so they elected me!” Everything was going according to plan, until he found out that the principal and the old chairman had been funneling funds meant to go towards building a new dorm into their personal bank accounts. He tried to stop them, but most of the power lies with the principal, so Emmanuel stepped down from the position instead. The other board members talked him into staying on the board, though. That is just one of the parts of Kenya I can’t stand. It’s so corrupt here. Even though the board knows about the money, there’s nothing they can do about it, and the principal knows that everyone knows about the money, but he does it anyway because he can. Screw everyone else.

So that’s why Emmanuel is a breath of fresh air. I envy the honesty, focus, and drive he has when it comes to his project. Basically everything goes towards the school. While the classrooms are almost finished, he still needs about 65,000 dollars to build the two dorms. (about 33k per dorm, but he may be able to get that down to 25,000 per dorm) He plans on building a public library and a clinic available to the whole community on the school property, and needs money for that. He still needs to build a permanent kitchen and living quarters for the staff, which will cost even more money. And also, to sponsor a child at his school costs 365 dollars for the whole year. That includes books, food, uniform, school fees, everything. All for a dollar a day. Just remember that even a few dollars goes a long way in this country. If you want to donate, go to www.villagevolunteers.org.

I asked what Emmanuel wants to do when he’s done building his school. He replied with a smile, “Build more schools, of course!”
If he’s the person in charge, than I know it will get done.

Alex Salkin is a 24 year old graduate of Willamette University with a B.A. in Anthropology. He just returned from a 6 week trip to Kenya through the Village Volunteer program (www.villagevolunteers.com). If you have questions or comments, please contact Alex.Salkin@gmail.com