ET come back later

I had to take a trip up to Kosele this afternoon to see the local Children’s Officer, accompanied by Mary our manager. It was the first time I have really left our place since arriving a week ago so it was nice to get out for a bit. The visit to the Children’s Officer went well, if a little unpredictably. While we were waiting for our appointment we noticed a couple of young girls, also waiting, without an accompanying adult. The Children’s Department in Kosele has the unenviable task of protecting children from all sorts of threats to their health and welfare on a miniscule budget. If I was the Children’s Officer in Kosele I would either spend a great deal of time ‘in the field’, (ideally a very big, isolated field somewhere), or barricade myself into my office so that none of the pressing demands in the community could make their way in. It turned out that the girls were sisters and had run away from home, for very understandable reasons. The oldest was probably 9 or 10. The Children’s Officer found out more about their case though a couple of phone calls and, in the absence of any other suitable provision, asked if we could care for them until they could be returned home. What can you say? The girls came back to our home and will probably spend a couple of days with us while the Children’s Officer chases up the case. Children do, of course, run away from home in the West, but I would be surprised if they did so as frequently, or at as young an age as they do in Kenya. The current dry, hot spell is adding to the burdens of our already overstretched community. The Children’s Officer told us that the increasing hardship brought on by the weather will add to the number of cases presenting themselves at his office each day. It’s hard to imagine living like the people in our community do. The closest I can get to understanding it some days is to compare it with the rural tragedy that Thomas Hardy wrote about so often and the grim social problems that Charles Dickens catalogued. It really is another world. People shouldn’t have to live like this.

Today has been another classic ‘one extreme to another’ kind of day. Having left the Children’s Department with our two new guests we had to stop in Kosele to do some photocopying. We drove across the ‘village square’, (managing to avoid the bicycle repair business located under a tree), and parked up outside the photocopying shop. From the front passenger seat, looking to the left, I saw a largish room containing a pool table. The room had obviously been provided to serve some useful social purpose. There were an interesting collection of posters on the wall advertising local community projects. Inside the room two youngish men were playing pool. Community development has many strands in most parts of the world, but I wondered, as I waited for Mary to bring the photocopying back to the Landrover, what the two little girls in the back made of it all.

From a ‘getting things done’ point of view it’s actually been a good day today. We employed a new teacher to replace last year’s Standard 8 teacher, who has found another job in Kisumu, (the largest town that is anywhere near us).  The only blip on the horizon came in a text from our friend who had travelled to Nairobi this morning to pursue our applications for work permits. I’m afraid our initial optimism, (see yesterday’s post), has faded somewhat as it would appear that our file has been ‘misplaced’. Our friend said that he will contact us in a couple of weeks when he hopes to have better news. Guess I will just have to wait patiently for final confirmation of my alien status.