Help Kandice Help Africa: The Orphanage in Kitale

NAIROBI TO KITALE

On our way to Kitale we got to experience the morning traffic of Nairobi and holy moly is it the craziest thing I have ever seen!! Not only are there cars everywhere piled in with people, but tons of vans and buses jam packed with people along with motorcycles carrying three at a time with jugs of water on their shoulders and people just walking everywhere along with donkeys and zebras and even baboons running across the roads!! It was the craziest funnest thing I may have ever experienced!

the crazy traffic EVERYWHERE!

people everywhere making their living

As you breath in the air it is very polluted and made me greatful that we have to do emisions testing here in the US & I will never complain about doing it again! It was very interesting to notice that most all their billboards and signs for anything were written in English! I guess Swahili (plus their tribal language) is their primary language, however if you have been thru any sort of schooling English is a tight runner up as also being their primary language.

There were people walking aroung everywhere and they were all dressed up as best they could be. I mean, they may not have had shoes on but they had suites and dresses just walking aorund to do nothing for the day. Most all the children we say were dressed in uniforms and they waved and smiled at us for the entire 9 hour drive as all I did was stare out the window at the prettiest sites and admiring all the people and this very busy city!

Kenya has rainbow trees (which we have here in Maui) and Jakarandas along with 'taro chips' but there they are called "arrow chips" HA! The landscape for the 9 hour trek was ever changing with some of the greenest greens and red and purples with the nicest manicured gardens you could see outlined for miles and miles. As you drive along the road, you see many little "towns" with their "strip malls" made of tin store fronts and hand painted signs for "hotel" which means restaurant and "charging station" for their cell phones (which I thougt was crazy they all had cell phones!) On the entire 9 hour drive as I watched and took in everything out the windows, there was not a single white person seen and everytime a group of kids would go by, they would stare and then wave and try to chase our van! It was too cute! We came across multiple police check points which we learned were to monitor for bombs and drunk driving. Our driver carries 100 schillings with him to try and bribe the police at times when he is in a hurry. We learned that nobody is allowed to drive after 6 pm at night unless given special permission. The reason for this was because these roads are just dangerous during the day light, so imagine night time with no street lights and lots of drunk drivers with people walking the streets all hours all night long...so the government restricts driving from sun up till sun down only!

the amazing landscape leaving nairobi

fav ginger drink..helps car sickness!

we traveled in two of these with all our stuff!

my favorite trees that will forever remind me of Kenya!

Along our trek to Kitale, we passed the EQUATOR line and I of course had to take the opportunity to take a piss on the equator! HA HA!! Seeing as that peeing along the side of the road was our only option pretty much the entire trip! 9 hours later we arrived at our place to unpack and eat and sleep to prepare for work at the orphanage.

Had to pee on the equator line!!

When I arrived there in my room, I immediately became a spoiled homesick American girl....my 'bed' was made of 4x4 wood beams and a very old thin dirt mattress and the bathroom shared by all was a hole in the ground and no lights to shower except for the moon light and the coldest trickeling water from a shower head.....I was so jet lagged, car sick... first time I ate 'mutten' for dinner and wanted to vomit along with rice and beans that tasted so different, I was very sad and remember thinking to myself "What have I gotten myself into? Can't I just get a flight home????" and I put up my bug tent over the mattress ontop of the 4x4's and used my neck pillow and my own sheet in my bug tent while I teared up and wrote in my journal. Little would I learn weeks later that this place would seem like a palace!!

my first time!

our bathroom lit by the moonlight with trickling cold water that made me so homesick...but on the way back, this place felt like a palace to me!! Crazy how a few little wakes will change your outlook on everything!!

The next few days we worked at an orphange in Kitale which started as a womans house and has grown into a very large home for orphaned children. We had allocated $500 to help Judith with whatever financial needs she deemed important for the orphanage. She gave us a list of building supplies they needed to expand their orphanage and make more room along with seperating the boys from the girls ;) Our leaders took our list to town and met us at the orphange with donkeys carrying all the supplies Judith needed to help finish building along with $80 to spare! We even bought some mattresses to leave at the orphange because these children literally slept on the dirt floors with blankets every night. We were able to see every child in the orphanage and 'de-worm' them ALL!! There were few very ill children, we did treat a child that tested positive for Malaria and there was a lot of skin rashes & respiratory problems. We did a lot of education to the kids and the staff about handwashing and cleanliness of themselves, their clothing and their blankets. There were lots of complaints from the children about "breathing problems" and "itchy eyes"...this was because they have nothing to sheild them from the Kitale wind that blows the dry dirt all around into their lungs and their eyes. They have nothing as far as baseball hats or sunglasses (none of the children have either) we did teach them to use their shirts to cover their nose & mouth when the wind pick up ..but it was very sad to walk away while we wear our own hats and sunglasses ... it made you sad to think we weren't doing enough, but really it was out of our control. Aside from helping with healthcare issues for the children, we also got to get down and dirty building more rooms to expand the orphanage so they can accept more children. Judith realized that it was about time to start separating the boys and the girls and starting back in December they began building the ‘boys only’ housing. The $500 we spent in town went to buy their “lumbar” which consists of tree branches, wheel barrels, buckets, doors, paint, padlocks and more necessities! The children (no adults) THE children have been building their own new rooms by themselves making walls of mud and beams of tree branches. This area was huge and they had built so many room in the two months since they had started and we were so happy to have purchased all the items they needed to finish it! We spent an entire afternoon carrying buckets of water to the mud and rolling mud bricks and slapping them up between tree branches! We painted doors to put on the rooms and roofs of tin! The children were so into it and never complained once working in the hottest heat all day dirty as could be! The people of Kenya, as poor as they are, they love to look their best! And we were surrounded by children in dresses and skirts and even the oldest kid wore a white suit and dress shoes in the blazing heat getting dirty in the mud – I could only imagine what they thought of us Americans dressed like slobs in our scrubs! The kids took to us very quickly and we all just broke into small groups and began talking while working! The children LOVE their schooling which goes from 5 am – 5pm and then from 7-9 pm is homework/study time and they wouldn’t want it any other way! I’ve never seen a group of kids have so much pride and dedication and love for school. They value their education and they know it is the most important and only thing they have. They all aspire to leave Kenya—well, not aspire (I don’t like that word) but you get the picture. The kids loved our cameras and would take them from us and go around taking photos of each other and then looking at the screen to see themselves which they hardly ever see! Some of the children had never seen a white person before and we had Lizzie, our very pale Londan gal whom many of the children were afraid of and would run from her!! Some of them loved my hair cause of the curls and how long it was! My nephew had made a few hundred bracelets for me to bring with and that afternoon I was able to pass out all my colorful bracelets to the children who absolutely loved them and will probably wear them forever! My heart might have melted, but all I felt was sadness. But then, these children for the most part were VERY happy. They would wave if you waved and smiled the biggest smiles. We had lunch with them and walked 45 minutes back to the orphanage thru the prettiest fields I have ever seen with the blue African sky and tall Eucalyptus trees and bright red blooms with tiny mud houses and families all around us. I had the honor of walking back the 45 minutes with Judith (the founder) and the conversation we had was one I wish I could have recorded for all to hear the beauty of her and the simpleness of how she defines happiness. We talked about their awful government and the politics and lack of money challenges they have faced forever. One thing that really stuck out to me was that Judith tells the children “close your eyes and imagine Kenya as the end of the world and decide what you want to pursue after college. Keep in mindAmerica is “America” but what if YOU could make Kenya our America!” And I really think these words put that pride & love in those children for their education and hopes for their futures. The children and Judith were so very grateful for everything we did and we had a bag full of adorable drawings and thank you cards they made us that day! All in all it was an insanely amazing first leg of this experience and of course I cried when we left the orphanage as all the children waved at us….truly the most beautiful woman and place of love I have ever witnessed.