Motivation

I've been asked several times lately WHY I'm doing this ... one person even added 'at your age' !!    I wrote my thoughts about this when I started this blog, but it never hurts to re-visit thoughts and ideas, to see if one still thinks the same.

Yesterday, I visited a school in Hereford to see a nativity play.   The children were delightful, the school was warm, clean, well-equipped, comfortable.  The children were obviously well cared for and happy, and appeared to have everything a child could want to eventually grow into a well rounded and carefree young adult.

Children in Kisumu who had all that the Hereford children had would definitely be in a small minority, from very priviledged families, maybe with parents who were government ministers or well paid surgeons.   There are a huge number of AIDS/HIV orphans in Kisumu, either totally family-less, or cast out onto the streets by the remaining relatives they do have, for lack of money, housing, clothes, and the ability to care for them.    Maybe an extended African family has lost all working adults and only very frail grandparents are left, with perhaps 20 children to look after.  How can they ?  So children as young as four or five have to manage to survive on the streets.

When I see and think about my own priviledged grand-children, this knowledge of Kisumu children touches me deeply.   What can I do ?  Well, in the long term, perhaps nothing ... but this project WILL help just a few of them, some of the teenagers anyway, to learn a simple trade which will ultimately get them off the streets and into employment.   My father, himself a disabled orphan,  had to work hard to be able to buy carpentry tools, which earned him money, so his tools will be going to Kenya with me, to give to the carpentry workshop for the boys to use.  And I will tell them the story of the tools and my father ... that they CAN make their lives better ...

Remember the story of the starfish I related here at the end of this entry ...

http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2010/07/little-about-geography-and-its-effect.html

I doubt that being a Christian makes much difference to my motivation ... many, many good people feel like I do about third world issues and the problems that AIDS/HIV has brought to developing countries ... but I do have to admit that my faith does have something to do with my motives.   Perhaps its that which made me get off my backside and DO something to help ... or perhaps if I'm honest its also the fact that I know Kisumu and the Luo people and something of the language.   I never thought I'd go back to Africa again, so when this opportunity came up, I grabbed it; it seemed like it was meant to be ... that the project was in the part of Africa that I love so much.