Yesterday (with a little foreshaddowing of today)

Hiiii.

A few days ago Dennis, Odu, Karongo (the group's youngest member), and I met with three French journalists. They are on the last few months of a year-long journey around the world, on which they are documenting interesting local cultural happenings and phenomena for a weekly column running back home. I'm sure if you know french and could find it online it would provide an enormous wealth of interesting leisure reading. Anyway, we met to discuss the work that REPACTED is doing, and by the end of the meeting the journalists had agreed to come on a special community outreach to take place Tuesday (yesterday). Actually, it wasn't quite that simple. In fact, it took quite a long time, since I often found myself translating "English with a Kenyan accent" into "English with a French accent" and back. It was a pretty amusing experience.

Anyway, we planned to meet in the morning and go from there. So we arrived at the theater after breakfast, and just hung around, waiting for them to call. At two o'clock we finally heard that they were going to be delayed a few hours more. We rescheduled for today (Wednesday). It was a whole day wasted, which was frustrating. But I suppose that's life. (I'm not going to make any snippy comments about French people: Tribalism here in Kenya has taught reminded me how stupid it is to stereotype based on ethnicity - more on that another time.)

So I left the theater, bought a few little gifts for people back home, and was on my way to the post office to purchase envelopes when I bumped into my host-mom. She was complaining again of aches in her knees and back, and I realized that it was here flat-bottomed sandals might be causing the problem. So I took her to a street market and bought her a pair of white sneakers (once again second-hand from America - the only sneakers available here) for like, $15. She put them on immediately, and even by this afternoon she is saying she feels much younger and hurts less. She said she had never owned shoes that nice before, and she can't stop thanking me for them. It was so easy and inexpensive for me, and yet it made such an impact.

Similarly, after we parted I stopped by the farm store and purchased a small packet of seeds for hot pepper plants (very popular here) and took them home with me that evening for Mothoni, the 17-year old hired house girl who makes something like $.50 a day. 60 cents worth of plant seeds could potentially bring her a regular and bountiful crop, and thus many months of sustainable income. 60 cents.

I'm not telling you all of this to boast about the meager assistance I've been able to give. I just can't think of any clearer illustration of how shockingly different life here is. I know it's nothing more than a well-worn cliche these days, but we take SO MUCH for granted in the US. There is so much that needs to be done in the world, and we can so easily do it, if only we have the right information and the opportunities.

Today I'm going on that outreach with the French journalists and REPACTED, and hopefully afterwards I'm going to meet with a member of a failed agricultural project to find out what went wrong. More on that tomorrow.

Thanks,
Chris