No water for 4 months....its a REALLY tough life in Olrongai!!

Sunday was another busy day, church in Miti Mingi, then lunch in the village at Paul and Martha's beautiful new house.

Then we had a surprise visit from the Voluntary Community Health Care (CHC) Team I started whilst working for Links International, many years ago. It was so great to catch up with them. Grace was able to share how she has had so much promotion in Social Services thanks to the training and certificates. The number of lives this group of people have saved can't be counted, but there are many! We love them. They encouraged and inspired us so much as we start to build a CHC team in Olrongai.

Teaching in Olrongai

Today (Monday) we have been teaching in Olrongai.....the welcome we received was overwhelming.

The businesses they started following the training are doing really well. One group of 10, now have a local goat each, and five of these goats have had kids. The plan is to rear the kids and eventually sell them so that the group can start to buy pedigree goats, which have about 8 times the milk yield over the local goats. At this point the group will start to sell the milk.

4 Months of Drought Takes its Toll....

Life is very tough in Olrongai at the best of times....but right now, when they've had no rain for 4 months...its tougher than ever.....

It's 5 km walk to the bore hole...and when they get there the water is 15 Kenyan shillings for a 20 Litre barrel.

Each family needs 4 x 20 litres every day....plus another 4 barrels if they have a cow!

At the moment the queue to collect the water is very long....and sometimes when they get to the front there is no water....or its rationed!

As I've said before, most families are living on £1.00 per day or less. And when I say 'less'... for many there are times when they go weeks with no money at all! In rural Kenya, if you can't grow it and sell it...there quite simply is no money. You don't need to be a mathematical genius to see that life is very hard!!

It just breaks my heart...nobody should have to live without access to clean water. And here we are in 2017 sitting with people whose daily life revolves around trying to get water, and finding the money to buy it.

We were teaching on hygiene today. Imagine trying to keep your family clean when everywhere, including all the floors in your hut, are dusty mud? In a few weeks when the rain comes it will be equally heartbreaking to see gallons of water fall onto the mud and be soaked away. No one has the money to buy guttering and tanks to harvest the water.

We are trying hard to be focussed and put all the money PottersHeart has raised with your support, towards buying the land and building the training centre.... but this situation is desperate!!

Seeing the children at Olrongai school begging us for bottles of water, we made the decision to buy new guttering to put round the school. At least now when the rains come the big tanks at the school will fill up. But they really need a bore hole. There are 5000 people in this village with no proper water supply.

Teaching the young men through football in Olrongai

John, Darren and Bill starting teaching with the Olrongai Stars, the football team that John started last time we were here. All sorts of teaching, lots of 'man to man' stuff.

This is both hard and helpful for the boys, culturally none of these topics are ever spoken about at home, so most of them learned such a lot today.