Frustration

I may have decided that 2009 is going to be THE year for KCIS, but it hasn't started well.

My plan was to visit Kenya at the beginning of this year, and had set the departure date at 6th January.

It is now the 8th, and I am still in a cold, wet, foggy UK, and the prospects of travelling to Kenya are not good in the short term.

This has been brought about by the economic downturn/the UK Government totally trashing the UK economy [delete, one, depending upon your point of view], which caused my son (he with 5 dependent children) to lose his job, just before Christmas.

So, I have had to bail him out with money that had been put aside for my trip.

On top of this, work has been a bit slow for me too, so cash flow is almost stagnant.

Not a good start to the year, but I am still feeling positive. After all, it is only the 8th January. We still have 357 days for things to go right!

Feed the Orphans

It is about time to start an appeal again. The last one asked people to donate their old mobile phones, digital cameras and any other old, high tech gadgets that are lying around in the back of a drawer.

I took all this "rubbish" to Kenya and we sold it on the local market. Every child at the Mercy Gate orphanage, that is 38 kids, got a new pair of black leather school shoes - success!

So I think I will do it again. Maybe the village has now off-loaded their old phones to us already, but I bet there are still a lot out there, gathering dust. So it is worth a try.

This time, I hope that I will be able to raise enough to start a health fund, a pot of money set aside to treat kids when they are ill. Malaria, chiggers and intestinal parasites seem to be the main ailments. They are all treatable, as long as the money is available.

It would be such a relief to be able to take a child to the hospital without wondering who is going to go without what to pay for the treatment.

-oOo-

On another tack, I was reading somewhere that there is a World Blog Day, where people get together to do their bit to help others - or something like that.

This got me thinking. All those in Kenya who write blogs, and all those Kenyans overseas who also write blogs (and all us non-Kenyans who have an interest in Kenya), if we all got together and donated a bit of time [or money] to a central blog-pot, I wonder how much of a change we could make?