Blood:Water Wells

After visiting Lwala, the three of us headed up to Kisumu to meet up with Benjamin and visit some of the new Blood:Water wells. Iain too footage for us and Barry will be doing a story on Blood:Water and Jars with Channel 5 News. The visit was SO short, but it was wonderful.

Our first visit was to St. Catherine's Village. Here's a new well, thanks to the generosity of so many Americans.



For those of you who read my Relevant article from Nov/Dec, you may remember the boy I talked about, Joseph Otieno. Well, this is the new well for his community. And Joseph was there, wearing the same exact shirt that I met him in 9 months ago. I brought him the Relevant article and his community about died seeing his face on a magazine. By the way, the sores on his legs are gone since the well came in. Here he is:



We then visited Nyamonge Village. Here are all the kids in front of the well (you can barely see the well). Again, this has only been made possible because of generous people here in the States. It's so humbling to stand there and see the physical results of people's love and kindness.



Even though there is so much reason to celebrate for the well. Half of these children are AIDS orphans. There are 300 children in this village. 100 of them are total orphans. Another 50 of them have lost at least one parent to AIDS. It's a daunting reality.

Here's our third site we visited, Atemo Ugwe (which means "We are trying." The well wasn't completely done when we visited. Yesterday, they completed it and had water pumping out. This village has been here for 100 years, and nobody has ever experienced clean water from a pump. It's unbelievable. Here are me, Iain and Barry standing in front of the soon-to-be completed well. Check out the ladies on the side carrying all the pipes!!! They were the ones who truly got this well in the community.



Here are some of the kids from the village by the well.



Some other pictures...(I LOVE goats!)



Iain got an awesome shot, but we were pushing it because of the storm. Yeah, it came. Heavily.



A typical Kenyan meal in Benjamin's home.



Here's Benjamin, Barry, Iain and me on my last day in Kisumu. The guys are staying out for another couple of weeks. I had to get home for a board meeting.



I'm in Amsterdam now. Getting ready to head back to DC for a quick meeting and then finally home to Nashville. It's been a good 10 days. I am so thankful for these opportunities. So thankful.

Jena