Chickens & Mangoes: Gifts MC can't buy

Sharing the Road
Today I joined our OVC (Orphaned and Vulnerable Children) Coordinator, Jane Machira, on a monitoring visit with our partners, AED (Academy for Educational Development). We visited a community group called Ndimbukaki, located just beyond the vast pineapple plantations of Del Monte in the Central Highlands of Kenya. Passing through the fields, we saw huge stones painted with the number of the field, as well as men with poisoned arrows for any persons trying to steal the precious fruits. And let me tell you, Hawaiian pineapples have got nothing on their Kenyan cousins.

Visiting four villages, we were each time greeted by a group of singing and dancing women. I was taken aback yet again by the overwhelming hospitality of Kenyans wherever I go. After we met the group and discussed their progress in small-scale businesses like kitchen gardens, we made to home visits to young men my age. Both Peter Wambua and Francis Mativo were younger than me yet were supporting several siblings and Francis his grandmother. Through the kitchen garden training, they hope to generate some needed income and provide nutritious vegetables for their families.
Left: Group treks to homes.



I am.
On the last visit, we went to a school where a group of orphans and their grandparents performed a traditional dance for us. This dance troupe is one way the group transfers cultural knowledge as well as engages two generations divided by the absence of their fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. A drama group also performed a poem, with one of the lines saying, "The Third World War has begun," as an analogy to the destruction of AIDS. A choir also sung.


Going Childback

At the end of the cermony, 24 children lined the room and waited to receive school uniforms from our program. As I snapped a few photos, I was informed that these were all orphans. The experience was a beauty most humbling, realizing this presentation was all put on for us, and yet it also a testimony of their will to continue to live and flourish amidst such devastation.

Left: Peek-a-boo

Upon our departure, the community gave us chickens & mangoes. Let me clarify: LIVE chickens and FRESH mangoes. Unfortunately, no one asked me if I wanted to take home a live chicken for dinner, and we gave them to a nearby community. Andrew, our driver, didn't realize we had been given the chickens. He told me, "Next time, don't give them away. We go and slaughter."