Video on YouTube

One of our many projects in Kenya was to make a vegetable plot for the Twiga kids (orphaned and abandoned children). This we have now done, or rather, the kids did it under our supervision, and to find more enthusiasm would be difficult!

Many photos and some video were taken and have been compiled into a video, posted on YouTube.

Take a look here

Catch-up

I have just spent a few weeks at Kisii, with a few visits to the site that will, one day, be the site of our orphanage.

At the moment, it is just a plot on the wooded side of a hill, very pleasant, with a little hut on the site. This will serve as the start of our project to build a home for about 40 to 50 children in need. We presently have 37 children on the register, but not all need residential help.

But, as ever with children, our first priority is food. So we have prepared an area of our land for growing vegetables. I say we, the kids did most of the hard work, and I have never seen so much enthusiasm, bearing in mind that some of these children have to cultivate their own little plots to grow their food just to survive.

Over the space of one weekend, a couple of hours each day, the plot was cleared of weed, tilled, and sifted by hand. Then seeds for nine different vegetables were sowed.

The following weekend, we visited the site, hoping that the seed had sprouted and we were not disappointed. We also sowed the seed from a butternut squash on this second weekend and I have been told that they have also taken.

The kids then built a fence around the seed beds to protect their seedlings from marauding chickens, goats, etc.

Since I have returned to the UK, I have been told that the butternut squash has sprouted and the other seedlings are being transplanted to grow.

So, phase 1 of our children's home project is off the ground, or rather, in the ground.

Now we need to rasie the money to build the residential block.

Twiga Children's Centre

On my recent trip to Kisii, I visited the houses where some of our kids live.

Aloys (13) and Nyachuba (10)

These brave kids lost their mother a while ago. Their father remarried and moved out of the area, leaving them to fend for themselves.

They live in a two-room hut, living room and bedrom. Thre is a smaller hut which serves as the kitchen.

Aloys, the boy in this pair, milks his cow and sells the milk to buy food for the two of them. He cooks over an open grate in the kitchen. There are few utensils and some of those he has, he made himslf.

Both children attend school, and despite their desparately hard life, they both attain good marks.

Aloys, at 13 years old, has to act as father and mother to Nyachuba, administering medication if she needs it, etc.

I was astounded, when he was at the centre, preparing the soil for the vegetable patch. He was the hardest worker there. He stripped off his shirt and his hard life can be seen in his thin, sinewy body. He has muscles that many twice his age could only dream of.

But why should a kid have to work so hard that he has the body of a fully developed athlete?

Both kids are very cheerful, always helpful and rarely without a smile. In the case of Aloys, he also has a very cheeky disposition.

Their dream? To help build the Twiga centre so that they can move in and enjoy a little comfort.

Edwin (14) and Dennis (12)

Cousins to Aloys and Nyachuba, these brothers had a similar fate when their mother died. Luckily, they have an older sister who took them in, despite the fact that she is a teeneage single mother of two very small children.

Edwin is open, cheerful, helpful, and ready for hard work. Dennis is more withdrawn, but once he comes out of his shell, his rare smile lights up his usually serious face.

Edwin and Dennis put in more than their fair share of work to prepare the vegetable plot, working very hard to clear the weeds, prepare the soil and build the animal-proof fence.

They also want to help to build the Twiga centre so that they can move in and benefit.

Normal Service will be resumed ...

I am in Kenya at the moment (until 19 June) and my Internet connection is such that I will only be updating Baba Mzungu until I get back to the UK.

http://dadmzungu.blogspot.com/ is being updated daily (more or less) with everything that is going on here in Kisii.

Hip, Hip Hooray - I'm On My Way!

After several aborted attempts to arrange my next trip to Kenya, it looks as if I have finally nailed a date to the calendar.

It has been difficult. I have to consider my aged mother, who I look after when I am in the UK. Then, although this is a working trip, I want to be able to see my girlfriend, who is presently abroad in Tanzania on business. Then, of course, I have to make sure I have enough money to do what I want to do when I get to Kenya.

So, Mum is sorted, my girlfriend will have returned home by mid-May and I have an, albeit small, pot of money, which should get me through a month in Kenya as long as I am very careful and don't spoil the kids at the orphanage. But there won't be enough to hire even a small car, so it will be matatu from Nairobi to Kisii, coach from Kisii to Malindi and another coach from Malindi to Nairobi - a nice round trip!

It is a shame, because taking interesting photos en route when using public transport is not easy. they will not stop the bus just so that I can take a picture of a giraffe or something - never mind, this is a working trip.

I hope to spend a few days in Nairobi so that I can visit a client, Rhino Ark, to discuss the way forward for their website, but this is their silly season, with the Rhino Charge taking place at the end of May. Maybe I could get to see that? No, probably not.

I have made many contacts in Kenya on various social networking sites and if I accept all invitations, I will also be visiting Homa Bay, Kisumu, Kericho, Machakos, Mombasa, ... etc.

That should be a lot of fun without a car! Oh well, maybe fate will smile upon me and provide me with one when I get there - somehow.

So, the 2nd weekend of May should find me at JKIA, loaded down with bags of toys, laptops, cameras, oh, and a few clothes, I suppose.

Fighting Malaria

Having carried out as much desk-bound research as is possible on MMS (see previous post), I have now found that the wormwood tree can also be used to treat malaria.

Apparently - and I have not tried it - an infusion made with the leaves of the wormwood can cure malaria, and that propriety drugs are only synthetic versions of this natural remedy.

If anyone has documented proof (not anecdotes, please) that wormwood is effective against malaria, please contact me at david@kcisupport.plus.com

Thank you.

MMS - What is it?

Now, I may be a bit cynical, or I maybe I am very cynical. That is not for me to say, but when I see a product with the word "Miracle" in its title, my suspicions are raised.

And when a product with "miracle" in its name comes out of the USA, I just think, "Yeah! Another wind-up!".

But MMS has got me thinking. MMS is Miracle Mineral Supplement, which doesn't really explain anything. It was discovered by an American, Jim Humble, a few years ago while he was traipsing through the South American jungle, prospecting for gold or oil or something. Two of his colleagues went down with malaria and they had no medication.

So Mr. Humble made up a solution using his water purification tablets, thinking that if they could kill pathogens in the water, maybe they could kill pathogens in the body - and it worked. It worked surprisingly quickly, so, when he got back home, he started on his long path of research into the effects of the purification tablets (sodium chlorite) on pathogens in the body.

The long and short of it is that Jim found that mixing sodium chlorite with citric acid makes chlorine dioxide, a disinfectant used in swimming pools, abattoirs, meat cleaning, etc. However, this compound is, to say the least, unstable and has to be made up at the time it is needed.

He has carried out extensive trials in East Africa and South America, in areas where malaria is rife and has found that ClO2, or MMS is very efficient. As an aside, he also found that it would attack other pathogens and viruses in the body, whilst leaving "friendly" bacteria alone.

I had to try this for myself, not because I have any known dangerous pathogens in my own body, but i needed to know if it did any harm.

I can say with authority that the compound tastes awful - no, it is worse than that. Imagine drinking bleach. Yes, that's what it tastes like. But it is not chlorine and does not harm the body in the way that chlorine would.

But apart from that, it did me no harm. And I found that instead of using water to dilute the compound, using apple juice, as recommended by Mr. Humble, takes some of the awful taste away.

Now, as I said, I didn't have any particular illness I wanted to cure. However, I did suffer with chronic back pain, caused by two damaged disks just above the pelvis. I got sciatica on a regular basis and I was in constant pain.

This next bit is stupid, ridiculous, but true. After a week of a low dosage course of MMS, the back pain eased and then disappeared altogether. I cannot explain it, but after15 years of constant pain, I was pain-free.

That was at the end of last year (2008). I stopped taking MMS just before Christmas and now, in March 2009, the pain is just beginning to return, so I will put myself on the same low dose course and will report what happens in this blog.

Now, about Jim Humble. Jim has not made any real money out of MMS. He has written a couple of books which he sells for profit, but he will give anyone who wants it instruction on how to make and use MMS - for free. He wants MMS to be used to eradicate malaria. Why?

He says that thousands of work days are lost through malaria. If MMS can get workers back to work within a couple of days instead of a week, people will lose less of their earnings and African countries will benefit.

This is a bit simplistic, but in essence, true.

So where do we go from here? There are a couple of organisations that I know of in Kenya that promote MMS, under different names, and from what I can gather, the results are good. But these are very small organisations working in small communities. If this stuff works, and I believe it does, it needs to be produced locally and distributed as far and as wide as possible.