What's Essential to You?
Hi folks sorry I haven’t written since we got back from Kenya. We arrived back into Heathrow to find a very strange scene…… an almost empty airport! Never the less we decided to go into self isolation for seven days just because we had been exposed to lots of people on an aeroplane…….. little did we know that nearly four weeks later we would still be in isolation. We found ourselves at least 2 hours away from family, over 70 years old and asthmatic. Bit of a challenge, as we had been away for nearly three weeks the cupboard was bare! Not even a dried up piece of cheese in the fridge. We tried to do our first ever supermarket shop on line, easy to shop, not easy to get a slot. We reached the stage where we had to let people help us, not a place we had ever been before. Thankfully eventually Waitrose came up trumps, and the exciting day dawned when food would be delivered. I was so looking forward to cheese on toast….. no cheese! John was looking forward to a lager in the garden…… no lager!
Why am I telling you all of this, well because it is in such stark contrast to what our beautiful friends in the rural Kenyan villages are experiencing. For two weeks we had been teaching in three different villages. All three are experiencing poverty that makes you weep, children are malnourished, families are too poor to send them to school, the clinic facilities are at least two hours walk away. Even if you can get to the clinic the nurse won’t be able to give you any medicines, she doesn’t have any. Lots of people have respiratory disease, not helped by the climate, or the cooking on a wood fire in enclosed spaces. The only things you have to eat are what you can grow, and you know that the locust swarms are in the area.
My scene of empty food cupboards and an empty fridge is not like theirs is it. I have money so I can via telephone or online, order food and many other things. I can turn a tap on and drink water. I can safely use a toilet which is in my own house, and I can easily wash my hands. I don’t have to collect wood for a fire, I just turn the cooker on. So if authority or common sense tells me I need to isolate, it will be to keep me safe.
In Kenya as they are told to isolate, to practice social distancing, life becomes even more fragile. If they go out and catch the disease there will be no, or very little hope of a hospital bed, never mind a ventilator……. if they stay in many will starve to death. It puts me missing cheese into perspective doesn’t it.
How can we help? We can send money to enable families to buy bags of maize and beans, this will keep them alive. John & I usually love to go into a cafe for a latte and maybe a cheeky piece of cake…… even if we only donated what we would spend on that a month it would feed a family. On http://www.pottersheart.org we have a donate button anything you can give will help.
Thank you so much
Linden & John xx
