Many Miles Away...Yet still so close to home
BY DAVID SAUNDERS
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I was three miles into a four-mile run. The long flat of Kenyatta Avenue, then the gradual incline of State House Road. This is where it started for me.
A week before the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar e Salaam. I had wound through City Center, the Terminal, the Simba Mbili, Uhuru Park, the Masai Market, and now out and back up the hill to the Milimani Hotel. He was at my hip before I saw him, nine or ten, but small, like most street kids. He had ragged shorts with the green-black sheen of material never washed, wide, bare, serviceable feet, and a perfect running stride. He smiled. We ran and sprinted the last uphill stretch and arrived at the guarded hotel gate together.
The eskari waggled his club at the boy and spat out, “Hapana” – nothing – there’s nothing here for you. Street kids are always dodging a beating so he moved off. I took out the folded Kenya shilling notes I had tucked in my sock... an old habit... gave them to him and said, apropos of nothing, in a language he understood dimly if at all, “Keep on running.” It was just a different kind of hapana, because like everyone else, I had nothing for him.
Later that night Greg Traverso, the founder of the Red Rhino Orphanage Project, and I went looking for him. I never saw him again, and I’ve never been able to outrun him.
Now eleven years later, here we are, just below the equator at about 5000 feet, southeast of Nairobi off the Mombasa Road, where the Kapiti plain lies down and spreads out and gradually upward to meet the Lukenya hills. It’s dry much of the year, but after the spring and fall rains, now less regular than before, the grasses return, green, knee-high. The wildebeests who live here time their calving cycle to it. Their young need young grasses. It’s also the fastest growing area in Kenya, but for a while longer the giraffe and eland, zebra and baboon, impala and gazelle are neighbors at our eight-acre plot.
I’ve been here for most of the last three years, an in-person extension of Greg and Susan, and the rest of the Board of Directors and supporters of Red Rhino. Learning, planning, making mistakes, fixing most of them, and now constructing a place for orphans to live, safely, and be fed and educated and loved. Kenya has about the same population as California, thirty-some million. But there are about two million orphans here, one out of every seven or eight kids or so, and the government is a long way from taking up the task with any success. Ours is a grassroots effort, and most of the roots are deep in the good Delta dirt, in Stockton, where people have planned and worked, and given and prayed, and taken the project and the children it will help to their hearts.
The days here have a steady rhythm; one you can settle in to. Cool early mornings, hot afternoons, good hard work: digging, welding, cutting stone, mixing concrete, plumbing trusses. The work crew – carpenters, masons, welders, laborers – are a grab bag of guys from different tribes. Luo, Luyah, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kisii, Kalingen, and some others I’m probably forgetting. And while the scars of the recent post-election/intertribal violence are still raised and raw, we manage to raise straight walls together, and have a pretty good time doing it.
Five is quitting time here, and the next two hours are the day’s best here. No cars and commuter madness, no rushing away. Just a wash, a walk up to the dukas (small open air shops) on the Daystar Road, sitting, talking, strolling, joking. A neighborhood gathering in the last, dusty light.
We have partnered with and support a rescued baby center in Machakos, a town about thirty kilometers from here, founded and run by a Kenyan woman named Mary who has become a dear friend.These are the discarded ones, some abandoned at birth in ditches, trash piles, bus stops, and some have fared even worse. Now they are safe and thriving at Springs of Hope with Mary.As the kids become school-aged, they will come into our care, and live and grow and be loved and educated through primary and secondary school, and on to university for those that are able.
We also deliver a thousand pounds of donated fresh produce every week to Machakos, which provides an invaluable addition to the diets of the children at Spring of Hope, and another three hundred or so orphans in the area.
So we find ourselves here, now, after many struggles, unforeseen twists and turns, and a good deal of unexpected hilarity, plowing ahead. Our goal is to be operational early next year, to have built a place where some of the most disadvantaged children on the planet can gain the advantage of safety and love and education and a bright future.
In doing this, we will have helped to create a bond, between Stockton, the city most of us call home, and an eight-acre patch of ground outside of Nairobi, and some of the children of Kenya who will know it as the home of their new lives.
If you’d like to see more, come along for the ride or help with the work,you can contact the Red Rhino Orphanage Project at contact@rrop.orgor call 209-483-1227.
A week before the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar e Salaam. I had wound through City Center, the Terminal, the Simba Mbili, Uhuru Park, the Masai Market, and now out and back up the hill to the Milimani Hotel. He was at my hip before I saw him, nine or ten, but small, like most street kids. He had ragged shorts with the green-black sheen of material never washed, wide, bare, serviceable feet, and a perfect running stride. He smiled. We ran and sprinted the last uphill stretch and arrived at the guarded hotel gate together.
The eskari waggled his club at the boy and spat out, “Hapana” – nothing – there’s nothing here for you. Street kids are always dodging a beating so he moved off. I took out the folded Kenya shilling notes I had tucked in my sock... an old habit... gave them to him and said, apropos of nothing, in a language he understood dimly if at all, “Keep on running.” It was just a different kind of hapana, because like everyone else, I had nothing for him.
Later that night Greg Traverso, the founder of the Red Rhino Orphanage Project, and I went looking for him. I never saw him again, and I’ve never been able to outrun him.
Now eleven years later, here we are, just below the equator at about 5000 feet, southeast of Nairobi off the Mombasa Road, where the Kapiti plain lies down and spreads out and gradually upward to meet the Lukenya hills. It’s dry much of the year, but after the spring and fall rains, now less regular than before, the grasses return, green, knee-high. The wildebeests who live here time their calving cycle to it. Their young need young grasses. It’s also the fastest growing area in Kenya, but for a while longer the giraffe and eland, zebra and baboon, impala and gazelle are neighbors at our eight-acre plot.
I’ve been here for most of the last three years, an in-person extension of Greg and Susan, and the rest of the Board of Directors and supporters of Red Rhino. Learning, planning, making mistakes, fixing most of them, and now constructing a place for orphans to live, safely, and be fed and educated and loved. Kenya has about the same population as California, thirty-some million. But there are about two million orphans here, one out of every seven or eight kids or so, and the government is a long way from taking up the task with any success. Ours is a grassroots effort, and most of the roots are deep in the good Delta dirt, in Stockton, where people have planned and worked, and given and prayed, and taken the project and the children it will help to their hearts.
The days here have a steady rhythm; one you can settle in to. Cool early mornings, hot afternoons, good hard work: digging, welding, cutting stone, mixing concrete, plumbing trusses. The work crew – carpenters, masons, welders, laborers – are a grab bag of guys from different tribes. Luo, Luyah, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kisii, Kalingen, and some others I’m probably forgetting. And while the scars of the recent post-election/intertribal violence are still raised and raw, we manage to raise straight walls together, and have a pretty good time doing it.
Five is quitting time here, and the next two hours are the day’s best here. No cars and commuter madness, no rushing away. Just a wash, a walk up to the dukas (small open air shops) on the Daystar Road, sitting, talking, strolling, joking. A neighborhood gathering in the last, dusty light.
We have partnered with and support a rescued baby center in Machakos, a town about thirty kilometers from here, founded and run by a Kenyan woman named Mary who has become a dear friend.These are the discarded ones, some abandoned at birth in ditches, trash piles, bus stops, and some have fared even worse. Now they are safe and thriving at Springs of Hope with Mary.As the kids become school-aged, they will come into our care, and live and grow and be loved and educated through primary and secondary school, and on to university for those that are able.
We also deliver a thousand pounds of donated fresh produce every week to Machakos, which provides an invaluable addition to the diets of the children at Spring of Hope, and another three hundred or so orphans in the area.
So we find ourselves here, now, after many struggles, unforeseen twists and turns, and a good deal of unexpected hilarity, plowing ahead. Our goal is to be operational early next year, to have built a place where some of the most disadvantaged children on the planet can gain the advantage of safety and love and education and a bright future.
In doing this, we will have helped to create a bond, between Stockton, the city most of us call home, and an eight-acre patch of ground outside of Nairobi, and some of the children of Kenya who will know it as the home of their new lives.
If you’d like to see more, come along for the ride or help with the work,you can contact the Red Rhino Orphanage Project at contact@rrop.orgor call 209-483-1227.