A visit to the town council

Last night we slept at a host family up the hill, on the floor listening to the farm animals. Despite five of us being crowded into one tiny room, it wasn't too uncomfortable, just hot. The evening was spent chatting and eating and listening to Jethron sing with surprising enthusiasm. You just don't expect it from a guy who's strong enough to lift your dad... I learned quite a bit more about the situation here in Kima and in most of Kenya. When working with the street kids the other day I noticed that there was not a single girl to be found. When I asked Jethron about it he told us that it's because almost all of the street girls work as prostitutes (some as young as 12), so they hide during the day and come out at night to do their work. This doesn't come as a great surprise, it's a worldwide industry that we have back home, but the tender age of these girls (many of whom also have babies already) is quite depressing. Not to mention the handicapped women, who have no one to take care of them at all. They live in small rooms alone, with a guardian who comes in three times a month to make sure they're alive, but at any other time anyone can come in and abuse her as much as they want. It's sick.

We also visited another school yesterday where they are currently cementing the floor because the kids were suffering from jiggers. Jiggers are the larvae of fleas who penetrate the skin of your feet and start to eat at the flesh there...nice, right?

We had the pleasure of meeting a man called Dan this morning, who Dad and Uncle Paul met last time they came. He has been HIV positive for almost 15 years and when he first discovered he had the virus he went into the woods and dug a mass grave for himself, his wife, and their five children. His plan was to poison his family and then himself, to spare his family a slow death by starvation after he had died. When he returned from the bush almost two years later, he learned that a new drug had come out to combat the virus a bit and his hope was restored. He is now the region's leading advocate for education about HIV/AIDS and living with the virus.

Our less inspiring meeting today was with a few members of the town council. We had gone to visit one of the women, a social worker, who runs an orphanage with the hopes of visiting the children. However, we ended up spending our entire time being ushered into various offices talking with members of the town council. Self-important, overweight men who were far more interested in the fact that my dad is a business professor at a Canadian university than in the work that Kipepeo is doing for the community. It was quite disgusting, and we ended up having no time to visit the kids. We're now off to the market to do some shopping and have a look around.

Holly