Sister Freda's!!

I am now staying at Sister Freda's which is only about 30 ride from where I was staying before. So far I am the only volunteer here, but it is fine because I have Emily, pretty much my care taker. I also have the projects I was working on before with CommonGround so I am staying busy with that.After about 4 days of arriving I finally met with Sister Freda. She is one of the sweetest ladies and is so thankful for everything that she has. She has asked me to design some dorms for the nursing college a kitchen and dinning room and also a kitchen and dinning room for the high school. Currently she doesn't have any funds to go towards these projects she is just praying that God will help her. If I can figure out how to start a website I am going to try and get one started so more people can be aware of everything she is trying to do. Above is a picture of the hospital.

This is the Feeding program where young kids learn the basics like numbers and letters. It is basically a program to give kids food, but they only get the food if they come and stay for class. I think there are 3 classes all of them are pre kindergarden. Once they pass a test then they can go onto primary school.

This is my room that is very cozy. I have a bathroom connected which is really nice, but the shower is only cold water. I think they are going to have it fixed soon. But "soon" is probably on Kenyan time so my guess is that it will be fixed 3 weeks from now. I have a little porch outside where I take most of my meals with Emily. This weekend there are other volunteers coming so I will soon have more company to eat with!

This is a baby clinic that I went to. Here children under 5 could receive immunizations and pregnant women could get vitamins. my job for the day was to weigh the babies in the scale below. The clinic was set up in a church, so it was pretty dirty. I was expecting more women to show up, but only about 10 people came to get medicine which is surprising because the medicine was so cheap.

Here are some of the Women from the Kipsongo slum that we are working with. They are so much jewelry that we are going to sell online. We met with them today to figure out more things that they can make so sell. Coming soon are some stuffed animals, paintings, coasters, various products made of fabrics. hopefully shoes once we get investors to help pay for start up costs. The women were so excited so get started making stuff. They came with us to town so get supplies for them to begin their businesses. The women know how to make a  lot of products but the problem is have the supplies to make them.

Here is one of the homes of the women. Yes it is made of garbage bags.

For our online store we want to have a kids line too so here are some pictures of a photoshoot we were having! The girls are so cute... pretty much all of them are natural models. esp the one above!

This past week I went to Mombasa which is on the coast. We spent a day walking around old town to see the old buildings and shops. Behind me in the picture above is Fort Jesus where the military used to be. The next night we went down the coast more and stayed on Tiwi Beach. We literally camped right on the beach. It can't really get any better than that! It was so windy though that we had to move the tent back a bit to try and give us some cover... The tent blew away a few times.

The next day we headed to Diani beach which was even more beautiful than Tiwi. I don't know how the sand was even more white but it was. There were also so many Dhows (the boat behind me) that they use for fishing. I also took a camel ride! They said the camels walk all the way there from Ethiopia and it takes them about 4 months. As i was on the camel I have one of the guys walking with us take a picture, but naturally he didn't get the entire camel or show how tall it actually was. Camels are big animals, the one I am on is 11 years old and they can live to be 35-40.

The beach was SOO hard to leave esp because we had a 16 hr bus ride back to Kitale. Also the Mangoes on the coast are to die for! I miss them already!

LOVE YOU ALL!! MISS YOU

p.s. visit our website: www.sponsorshipkenya.org

My last few weeks at Common Ground for Africa

Sorry it has been so long since I have updated my blog! It takes so long to upload pictures that I may have to start posting without any pictures... Anyways, my past couple of weeks I have been working with some more women to teach them how to make donuts and crepes. There is a Co-op in Kiminini where we started making donuts and crepes to sell and then would use the money for buying more things for the womens groups. We also wanted to see if the goods would actually sell. We did some experimenting with different prices and sizes of things to get more to sell because the co-op is across from a public primary school where many of the kids don't have 10sh to buy anything. All of the food that we didn't end up selling in a day we would pick up and have one of Joshua's daughters go down to Pathfinders to sell and she always sold the entire plate of food we sent with her. 

Below is Lindsey and I with Margaret (on the far right) we went to teach her to make crepes because she lives off of 80sh (less than a dollar) a day and takes care of 6 kids which aren't  even hers. I think they are her sons but he and his wife can't take care of them. When we went she didn't have a pan to cook the crepes on so she borrowed one from a neighbor. The pan was so awful that we decided to buy her one if she actually went out and sold them. She is the sweetest lady, when we came she welcomed us by dancing and singing. The entire time she had a smile on her face and was so happy that we were teaching her. We came back 2 days later to see how she was doing and she actually had gone out and sold them! Hopefully we will be meeting with her soon to see if she has kept selling them. There was supposed to be a meeting today, but for some reason she couldn't meet.

Margaret's son who said he was a professional photographer took our picture... as you can see our heads are chopped off so i'm sure he is a wonderful photographer. 

 The power went out the other night while Marium (our cook) was trying to cook dinner so she had to make a make-shift oven. It consisted of placing a pan onto of a jiko (pretty much a fire pit) and then putting another pan on top of it. She is such a great cook, I think this was a mango pizza she was making.

 Here I am with Iman, the cutest girl ever! She is Marium's youngest daughter and is almost 3 but goes to school all day and come back and sings us songs she learned.

 

I went for a walk down by the river and of course there was a crowd of kids following us. They were really cute so I had to take a picture. The kids love to follow and copy the way I walk. I must walk funny to them.

 As I was walking back the sun was setting and it was so pretty out. I attempted to capture how gorgeous it was.

 So this is Monica and her family. I decided to teach her how to make crepes to and she was so excited! I also had given her a bunch of t-shirt I had brought with me. She is wearing a Kegs and Eggs shirt from our last batch of tshirts we had made. Monica didn't have a jiko to cook on so it was just a fire pit with a chapati pan placed on top. It was like standing inside a fireplace for an hour. It was so smoky in there I can't even explain. But Monica and the other ladies learned quickly how to make them and then they wanted to have a photoshoot before I left. Below is one of the many pictures we took. Once I took a picture with one lady I had to take another one with everyone else.

 

I went for a run one afternoon and a bunch of kids started running with me. I tried to race them but they were too fast and I was getting tired. A few days after this I went for a run in the morning and there were seriously 8 other kids running with me on their way to school. Ha it was so funny...

 

Lindsey and I were invited by Mariums older daughter to go to their schools Olympics they were having at school. It was the cutest thing because all of the kids were running relay races and potato sack races. They even had discus where they were just throwing a really big rock. But as we were watching kids just slowly started coming closer to us. They wouldn't say anything, but just sat there. One of the teachers asked them why they weren't going home for lunch and they didn't answer so she asked if they had any food to eat at home and they all said no. So instead they just sat by us. 

I have also been helping Lindsey with her website for CommonGround. We interviewed a bunch of 8th graders to try and find them sponsors for when they go to high school. The kids that we interviewed don't have a way to pay for school because their parents don't earn enough money. Others don't have parents and are living with either church members or some other family member. It is sad to hear their stories because you want to help them all so they can continue with their education instead of just going to start work right away.

The high school that I am designing for Joshua is going to be just for girls. He wants only girls because he said the boys have more opportunities if they don't go to school. The girls will probably just get married and start having kids right after 8th grade. So he is trying to get the girls to have a better chance of getting a real job or going to University. The website is www.sponsershipkenya.org and it talks all about all of the programs going on with Common Ground. There is a section where you can read the bios of the kids we interviewed. Feel free to sponsor a child!! If you let me know that you want to sponsor a child then I can tell you how to do it where 100% of the fund go to the child. I think right now the website goes through VillageVolunteers and they take 5% but Lindsey is trying to change the process so it doesn't go through them.

A few weekend ago I went to Kisumu to meet Colette. She is my friend Julie's Kenyan cousin from when she studied abroad in Kenya. So I went to hangout with her and we took a boat tour that brought us out to see hippos. The boat/ canoe with a motor on it seemed like is could have easily sank esp because there was a kid on board where his job was just to bail out water from the bottom of the boat. If he would have stopped bailing we probably would have been swimming with the hippos.

On Monday I left Common Ground. I was sad to go, but Sister Freda's is very close so I can go back and visit when ever. The day I go to sister Freda's one of the nurses from the hospital had died so everyone was kind of out of it. I met freda for a second, but i am supposed to meet with one of these days to find out what I will be doing. I was supposed to meet with her yesterday, but she never came. I was supposed to meet with her today and she didn't come. So they say maybe tomorrow I will meet with her. 

While I have been wondering around the compound I have seen the nurse who had died and I saw them carrying her body out to the car. I also saw a young girl being carried in while she was having a seizure. Emily, the women who is kind of looking after me has been showing me around and keeping me company. 

There are a bunch of orphans the sister freda has living at the compound. I think there are 10 of them and most of them have either been rescued from the slums or rescued from their parents who tried to kill them. In my next blog I will try and show pictures of all the kids. They can be a little crazy, but they are all very sweet. 

I can't believe how quickly this trip is going, I don't want it to end!

Miss you all!!!