Table of Contents
Overview Nairobi Maseno Conclusion
Every three seconds a child dies of poverty related causes. Twenty a minute, 1,200 an hour, 28,800 a day, 201,600 a week, 10,483,200 a year. Every eight seconds it is from water borne diseases. That is just the death rate for children, the must vulnerable of the populations at risk. One sixth of the world’s population, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, lives in extreme poverty, on less than $1 a day.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that it is less than 20 years ago, much of the extreme poverty in South America and the Indian sub-continent has turned around, and, at least for economists like Jeffrey Sachs, the elimination of extreme poverty is possible within less than another twenty years.
The reasons for poverty like this are myriad and Sachs’ offers tools for diagnosing them in his book “The End of Poverty.” But the hopeful truth he has discovered is that once people get their first foot on the development ladder, moving from extreme poverty to “just” poverty, the engines of development and market kick in and growth continues. His book works through the examples he has personally worked on or consulted with over the past 25 years. It is fascinating reading in its entirety, but for our purposes here, it is enough to know that working with the poor to find the first rung on the ladder can be locally successful, is sustainable and repeatable.
To fund such an initiative would cost the developed nations about .7 of 1 percent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or about seven cents per one hundred dollars. The Developed nations actually promised that as early as 1970, but the US and others have never delivered. That figure is at the heart of the Millennium Development Goals of the UN, which are aimed at ameliorating a number of poverty related conditions by 2015. And while all this is fascinating for a discussion of how me could, and perhaps should, affect public policy it is not the central point here.
The beauty of Sachs’ analysis is that individuals and small groups can themselves move small groups onto the development ladder! We do not have to wait for national governments or churches we can do it ourselves. By partnering with responsible agents at the grassroots in other countries we can create engines of development however modest. Remember the story of the man throwing starfish back into the ocean. When told that there were thousands on the beach dying and that he could not make a difference he picked up a starfish, hurled it over the breakers and said, “It makes a difference to this one.”
For the past six years All Souls’ Episcopal Church has worked with two parish missioners, Nancy and Gerry Hardison, on several projects in Kenya. Nancy is a retired business professor from Point Loma Nazarene University and Gerry is a retired gastro-enterologist from the University of California, San Diego. Together they have worked on medical and business project in Nairobi and Maseno, Kenya. All Souls has been their sponsor with the Episcopal Volunteer Service and has been a financial conduit for delivering contributions safely to the projects. In addition we have committed portions of our central budget and other outreach monies to projects they have helped organize or connected with.
This fertile collaboration has not only changed people’s lives and expanded projects, it now offers All Souls and dioceses and parishes who wish to work with us the opportunity to deliver contributions directly to projects that will move people onto the development ladder. What follows are a short description of the projects with their current funding needs.
Nancy and Gerry worked in Nairobi with the Mercy Care Center, a primary and vocational school for some of Nairobi’s AIDs/HIV orphans. These children have been shunned by the larger community because of the circumstances of their orphaning. Our partner there is Patrick Lumumba and at the moment his school and vocational projects include 350+ children.
Mercy care Center was founded in 1989 by Mrs. Dorna Amimo the wife of the Vicar of St. Christopher’s Anglican Church of Kenya. It is organized as a Community Based Organization (CBO) under the laws of Kenya, our equivalent of a co-operative, but free of governmental control. They began with 6 children and now feed 350+ a day. The school funds itself with a mix of fees from families able to pay something, craft and vocational school sales, and contributions from All Souls’.
When the Hardisons first reported on his project it stalled because he did not have enough money to feed and educate the children and expand the vocational opportunities. All Souls agreed to fund the daily lunches for the children for about $8,000 a year. Patrick has leveraged this secure income into monies to move into the vocational area and further his larger dream of a farm/campus in the Rift Valley on land already owned. Money raised on pledges for All Souls’ Rector’s sabbatical bike ride (about $4,300) has been used to build a building for the vocational school. His success with these projects to date has also opened the door for these orphans to attend academic secondary schools, something impossible just two years ago.
Here are the projects that can use immediate assistance:
Completion of a Ground Water Project at the Farm: $26,000
Mercy Care owns 30 acres near Ngong Town just to the west of Nairobi. The overall goal is to make this a residential vocational school teaching farming and other trades crafts. One of the basic needs in Kenya is for clean water and so a centerpiece need for the farm is an industrial grade well-groundwater pumping station. It will not only provide water and irrigation for the school, but clean water for sale to local residents as an enterprise opportunity for the school.
The project has been started but stalled for lack of funds.
Carpentry Module for the Vocational School $8,000
Believe it or not, most woodworking in Kenya is done with hand tools in local market economies. Having a woodworking shop with electric tools would position his students well for the carpentry market. In addition other local woodworkers could be trained on them and pay for time on them.
Equipment is expensive in Kenya, about $1,500 for a compound miter saw. The money here would allow for several pieces of equipment as the core of a new enterprise.
Tailoring Shop $2,000
Mercy Care has set up a tailoring school/shop in the Mathare slum near the Center. I have proposed having them manufacture some simple skirts for sale in the US through partnering parishes. In the long run we will look at connecting the with the Fair Trade shops around the US which ensure adequate wages for developing country artisans.
Scholarships $700 x 28
Mercy Care Center currently has 28 students ready to move on to secondary education. The cost of tuition, books, uniforms, lab fees and incidentals is about $700 per student.
Information about making donations on-line
After two years in Nairobi Nancy and Gerry were invited to come work in the Diocese of Maseno North by Bishop Simon Oketch. Gerry was asked to help revitalize the Diocesan Hospital, Nancy to organize the Mothers’ Union Orphans Program. She was then asked to be come the Superintendent of St. Philips Theological School, where she and Gerry reside. In addition to these projects, she is working with other community development initiatives.
Orphan’s Program Food and Medicines $4,000 per parish
$56,000 for all 14
Maseno is one of the epicenters of the Aids/HIV pandemic in Africa. Tens of thousands of children have been orphaned as a result and many of these are HIV positive. They are shunned by the culture and cared fro by aging grandparents, usually widowed grandmothers. In response to this incredible devastation the Mothers’ Unions (an equivalent to the ECW her in the US) in the Maseno parishes have been organizing to support these children.
Each parish is presently serving about 500 orphans with a Saturday program and hot meal. Their best estimate is that his may only be one-third to one-half of the orphans in each parish’s territory. Most of the children are pre-school and elementary ages. The children have a series of classes, games and a hot lunch of maize and beans and Ugali. This may be the only hot meal they get each week. The Mothers Union members and the guardians of the children all volunteer their time, often causing friction at home and within the larger community. When asked how they found it in themselves to defy social convention they answered, “We are mothers.”
In addition the program provides vouchers to be used for medical care at the Maseno Hospital (see below). Once every five weeks at each parish the hospital runs a clinic, which will see hundreds of children, their guardians, and the volunteer workers. The $6,000 roughly covers the costs of food and medicine for a program for 500 children at one parish or $12 for a year of food, instruction and medical oversight and medicine for each child served.
At present there are orphan programs in five parishes, nine more are lined up hoping that additional funding can be found. While these programs require ongoing funding they are a huge investment in the future of Kenya because the orphans are being supported in becoming contributing members of society and not thieves or terrorists. The use of the vouchers has the added effect of making the hospital more and more a going enterprise, improving services and expanding capacity.
Orphans Medical Costs $7,000 per parish
$98,000 for all 14
In addition to the medicines and food, the Orphans program seeks to provide access to the Maseno Hospital for ongoing medical care for orphans, guardians and volunteer staff of the Orphans’ Programs. These people are given vouchers to spend at the hospital and pharmacy, which helps to improve the hospital and make it more attractive to people in the area that can afford medical care. In essence this part of the project creates a micro market around the hospital moving it toward sustainability.
Community Based Organization for Development $2,800
This is an auxiliary demonstration project at one parish in Maseno. 34 families, some of whom care for orphans, but all of whom are currently living at the edge of starvation will be provided with technical assistance, fertilizers, seeds, and some assistance with labor to turn their ¼ to 1/3 acre of land into a more productive farming enterprise. In addition to learning how to and improving soil quality the families will broaden the range of what they grow. Some of these new crops will then be purchased for feeding students at the Theological school or to feed orphans.
The hope is that one or two years of such help will move them to the bottom rung of the development ladder, which means they have some surplus to sell beyond their survival needs. By arranging the purchase of what they grow we have removed some of the risk of trying something new. In this way we create another market hub around which other development can happen. Once these 34 families complete the cycle of training we would see this project expanding to include more. The very feasible goal is to make each household self-sufficient in at least food and basic needs in one or two years.
The cost is about $84 a family.
Scholarships $500 x scores
Just like Nairobi there are children who need support for secondary education. The various parishes have several score of orphans in need of financial support for school.
St. Philips Theological College
Seminarian Scholarships $650
Rainwater collection tanks 10 x $300 $3,000
Bibles and BCPs in two languages $600
Although seminarians do much of the work maintaining the physical property of the school and working with its income producing farm and livestock, there is still a need for scholarships and other support.
Maseno Hospital Variety of funds for viability
Dr. Gerry Hardison has been working the last four years with a team of people to restore and expand the services of Maseno Hospital.
There is an active integration of the work of the Orphans program with the Hospital that can easily serve as a regional leader in medical care with sufficient investment to bring up the quality of the facility and its staff. They have a lengthy list of projects that are included as an appendix.
Information about making donations on-line
These are just the tip of the iceberg of what we might be doing. In Maseno and Nairobi there are any number of small enterprises that could be set up and flourish. Despite what we hear of corruption Kenya is an almost entirely unregulated free market at the moment. People are setting up enterprises everywhere. My favorite was watching a brick making enterprise develop. People picked a place along the side of a road and began to make bricks from the clay soil there. As they dug out the side of the road they made space and built a kiln. This happened in several places just in the 4 weeks I was there.
People are out selling and hustling everywhere. The explosion of cell phone availability is reshaping enterprise. So for small, innovative ideas, there are almost no barriers to starting and very low costs for most in doing so. Think of our west in the 1840’s –1890’s.
Sachs points out that development today is as much fired by good ideas as by traditional assemblage of resources. Ideas flow freely across borders and cannot be hoarded or monopolized. Thus the hope in Africa is that new ideas (like cell phones) and lots of freedom to experiment with micro-market formation will lead to improvement of lives. New ideas are what people share with each other. Ideas and enthusiasm can make new things happen.
So the final contribution we could make is to go there ourselves and pitch in. People with medical, educational, farming, business, experience, practitioners and students in these areas can all add in. There is work to be done even in painting and renewing mud homes.
But most important is the resource no one else can provide, but which we all have: the capacity to sit and visit with someone so they know they are not alone. Every soul that visits there will come back transformed, and every soul they meet there will be too. There is an abundance of thanksgiving in meeting and working with our sisters and brothers in Kenya.