Safely in Kenya
It took us a while thanks to the potholes and speed bumps, but we made it to the Kenyan border at Busia! All was going smoothly until when asked for my $50, I reached into my special-not-so-cool travel wallet and realised that all the ’$10’ notes were actually……$1 notes!!! I couldn’t believe my eyes – I was sure I had checked that the correct dollars had been exchanged, but sure enough instead of $100 in my not-so-cool travel wallet, there were 10! Luckily my wonderful travel companion (Send a Cow Fundraiser Clare) had some spare, as she is Irish – and they don’t make the Irish pay! So we just have to try and scrape together $50 for the return…that money exchange place is gunna get a polite piece of my mind!
Once the drama was over it was cool meeting the new crew for the week. The Send a Cow Kenya team are made up of 10 members, and we were able to meet them all and have a brief of what they do. We then jumped in the uber cool safari-type land cruiser and made our way to meet the first family. By this point we were very tired and had to dig deep to find that energy that was lurking about somewhere…
It was a very different atmosphere as soon as we left Uganda and our wonderful hosts/friends there. Send a Cow in Kenya is at a different stage, and many of the projects are in the very early stages. This means we will be seeing a lot of very difficult situations with a high level of need. This became a reality when we met our first family…
Husband and wife with 2 beautiful children, they live in a small hut, which looks the size of an average living room in England. They even squeeze a sister in there too. They struggle to grow/buy food from the months of January to June. Can you imagine struggling to eat for 6months and trying to support a family? It was hard to listen to their story and hard to suppress the feeling of guilt – as I have everything to be grateful for in my life.
As if this wasn’t enough Bernard, the husband, was involved in a horrific attack from a former employer. He was owed money from his boss and so went to ask for it, in return his hands were plunged into boiling oil. He now has terrible disfigured hands and face. Permanent damage, for the rest of his life. On top of this they stole some of his land, leaving him with little.
It was so shocking to find this out after we had met, and my mind cannot even comprehend an event like this taking place in REAL life.
So, in summary, I think this week will be a tough one. I will try not to write too many bleak blogs! But it’s good too to share what’s going on here, and also it’s pretty amazing being a witness to the good work of Send a Cow that is literally turning these people’s lives around 🙂
I’m in my 5th hotel room, have traveled for 38 hours in a car in 7 days, had some super vivid anti-malaria affected dreams, eaten a lot of carbs, sweated a lot of sweat, carried a lot of stuff, taken a lot of photo, hugged a lot of people and BOOM I’m ready for bed:)
Night!
Rx