Vision Materialized

All my international travels up until this point revolved around lots of time to read and lots of adventures. This one has revolved around insane ammounts of work. Yesterday I was stoked because I found, literally, five minutes to read as the sun was setting. Our existence has been consumed with meetings, planning, physical labor and lots of African food and smiles. Every day this place becomes more and more beautiful and sometimes we forget that we are not at home. Our headquarters (a house that we have completely taken over), is on the top of a hill with a beautiful view of rolling Kenyan landscape occupied by clusters of mud huts with tin roofs on one side and the engaging vista of peninsulas and islands reaching into Lake Victoria. God has been good to us. Everynight we are blessed with African Sunsets over the Lake and stars that shine for us with all their heart.

Our two main construction projects have been progressing steadily and should both be completed according to schedule. The community center is about to get a roof and we are pouring concrete at our landfill loactions today. I feel like my dad would be proud as I have luckily been able to pull out dormant construction/ foundation knowledge in order to prevent some major pitfalls.

On Sunday night we held a meeting that was heavily attended in order to begin the process of informing the community of our short term and long term objectives in Matoso. We also had in mind to recruit volunteers to help out our paid labor in order to expidite our projects. It has been really exciting to see a commuinty mobilize in support of something that they see value in. We have been working dilligently to teach and train those we have hired to be our teachers and have already recieved very signifiant interest in class enrollment.

Yesterday we held our first community meeting regardling the new waste management project and like our other initiatives have recievied excitiment and support. This Friday we will be mobilizing the entire community, picking up every piece of trash in site, and debuting our landfill and having several speaches to the whole community about the new program including public trash cans, an employed trash collector and new functional land fills.

In accordance to political protocall we set up an appointment with the chief over the region, West Kadem, about the size of San Diego county. He can to our site where we had tea and built some comrodery. We set up an appointment several days later to meet in his office. That meeting was perhaps the most interesting and simply coolest thing that I have ever done. We met with Cheif Dickens and his two asisstants. After humbly explaining our hopes and goals, of course contingent upon his support, he asked our organization to change our Kenyan name from SCHAP Matoso to SCHAP West Kadem. He asked us to come back and assist him in the development of his entire region utilizing similar community planning and development initiatives!

Earlier this week, and mom will be proud of this one, we held a seminar on oral hygene. We hoped to have ten or twenty and we ended up gathering over 150 people! We spoke on oral hygene for about an hour (thanks mom, I was listening...thankfully) and the clarification questions and the reception was phenominal. Maintaining our mandate that we are not here to give things away, but to assist in development, we offered to sell them the toothbrushes that we brought at a nominal cost rather than give them away. No matter how small the price, purchase prooves intent. We had about 150 toothbrushes and in minutes we sold out. We spent the next half hour having a toothbrushing party, young and old alike.

With several micsellaneous musts we also we able to schedule in tim to go on a mission to find Hippos, played an amazing game of soccer with the community and take time late at night to listen to the matriarchal twelve year old, who commands respect of all the children, tell stories in the dark to her yourger sibblins under the Kenyan stars.

It has been extremely rewarding working with Kris, Jill and Nichelle. Kris has been manning the technology education and preparing the computer teacher. He has also been working on filming, not to mention is the funniest person that I have ever spent time with. Jill has been rocking her accounting and detail management duties. She has been assisting in different effoprts accross the board, as well as spending time in many of the meeting and working with the children. Nichelle, who I name second in command, has been showing a tremendous ammount of proactive engament accross the board. She has been capturing some awesome photos and has lead the loan education and qualification process. This team has a very functional and enjoyable dynamic and I am honored and grateful and excited and proud of each of their attitude and commitment to activity and service.

Our project/ trip in nearing completion and we have and international flight home within sight. We can't wait to see all of you at home and we never want to leave this place... hopefully we will have the fortitude to get on the bus when the time comes. Thank you for each of your support that you have shown in so many different ways. We will be having pictures, videos and other forms of documentation available on www.schap.info asap, so please stay tuned. Jess and gang, we miss you. Oyaorya!