A little about geography and its effect on people

Lolwe from five miles away; Kisumu town in the distance on the extreme left of the picture.



Kisumu is a port on Lake Victoria which compared to many of the great lakes of central Africa is relatively shallow. Much of the margins of the lake are reed and papyrus swamps, with occasional sandy beaches kept clear by local fishermen for launching small fishing boats and canoes.

If you look carefully at the above photos, you can see small islands in the lake ... but these are not true islands - they float ! Storms in the rainy season cause huge 'lumps' of papyrus to tear away from the margins and float away, complete with nesting birds and even canoes that have been left tied up to the reeds. On occasions (certainly in the past when I lived there) huge 'islands' a mile or more in lengths blocked the port and had to be blown up to clear them !

(My apologies for the poor quality of photo's ... they are pre-digital era scanned colour slides - many have faded and are dusty so I have had to work on them).

Some of the Luo people are traditionally (in the past) fishermen. They lived in villages around the lake (as in the picture on the blog title). Living so close to the lake brought its own problems - millions of mosquitoes and thus malaria, and in the lake water, snails which carried bilharzia. Dysentery, diarrohea, tuberculosis, leprosy, elephantiasis were all major problems of the past ... and maybe still ... I will be researching this further. Now the main health issues are HIV/Aids (which killed my 'son' Joseph) and the problems associated with over-population, poor health facilities and poverty ... and those created by homelessness, over-crowding, unemployment ... Hands Around the World, other charities and NGO's are working to try and alleviate some of these, but its a monumental task.

We have to start somewhere ...

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A simple story:-
A boy and his father were walking along a beach by the sea. Rough seas had left stranded thousands and thousands of star-fish along the edge of the waves. The boy walked along picking them up one by one, tossing them back into the sea, but his father stopped him, saying 'What's the point of that ? It'll make no difference to them; they'll all die soon'. But the boy continued, saying as he threw each one back into the sea, 'It'll make a difference to that one ... and a difference to that one ...'

The work of charities and volunteers may only make a difference to a few among the millions all over the world who need help, but it DOES make a difference.