A Stop in Marigat

(Written Tuesday May 1, 18:05 Kenya time)

We left Nakuru this afternoon to head back to Pokot, and are currently stopped in Marigat. We're trying to get in touch with Moses, who is supposed to be here buying some more supplies for another famine feed tomorrow, but so far we haven't reached him. I think we're about to go wandering around town looking for him. It's a small place.

This morning Carol and Tim had to meet for a long while, and then I spent some time with Tim identifying each of the children in the portrait series I did. We copied tiny versions of the files (320x280… their bandwidth is so slow for sending email that he didn't want any bigger) to his computer, and he then went off to the Internet Cafe to email the sponsors. The point here is that each child's sponsor gets a thank you letter (handwritten, then scanned) along with a photo of them. This goes for all IHF children around the globe. However the Kenyan IHF has been so very far behind that they've been losing sponsors. People who don't believe that the children are real; an easy thing to understand. So I did the portrait series of the kids so they had nice photos to attach to the letters. Those letters are being emailed today. In fact, I have Sh 15,000 in my pocket that I'm supposed to hand over to Moses, but not until we have confirmation that the thank you letters have been sent. That's how far behind Kenya is. The region is literally on the verge of being dropped because of this problem!

So now I'm heading back to Pokot, but without Carol or Tim. They still have more business in Nakuru regarding the lawsuit, but I need to get more pictures of more kids for more letters. The disorganization of the council here is so bad that tomorrow I'm going back to some places we've already been, but when we visited before no one thought to organize the children for the pictures. This is a problem mainly because of cost. Petrol is very expensive here (it just cost Sh 5,000 to fill up the van), and these are not short drives we're going on tomorrow.

In fact tomorrow night I'll be sleeping in another village, because early in the morning I need to head into one of the most remote Pokot villages – on motorbike. It's somewhere where the van simply can not access. This ought to be interesting.

Well, let's go find Moses