Among the Pokot

Well, we made it.  I apologize for the lateness of this blog, but exhaustion overcame me last night and I just couldn’t get it done.  We have had an amazing couple of days, an adventure that I’ll always remember.

We left the Sirikwa Hotel in Eldoret early, for the long drive to the Kinyach Feeding Station in the Pokot tribal region.  We actually have two feeding stations here, Kinyach and Kipnai, but we just call them both “Pokot.”  The drive is a study in contrasts.  Leaving Eldoret to the northeast, we pass through Iten, home of 800 meter Olympic champion David Rudisha.  Leaving Iten, we begin a 3,000ft decent into the Kerio Valley.  The views on the road are spectacular, as you can see from the pictures on Facbook.  We stopped at the overlook site and took a break and dozens of pictures.  The road condition here is excellent for Kenya with good pavement and striping, even a few guardrails.

At the end of the decent, you make a hard left turn onto a very bad road.  What makes this road so hard is not just its bad condition, there are worse in Kenya, it’s just that it is so very long.  3 hours on this road, with a stop just to stretch your legs is a very hard ride indead.  I’m driving one of the LandCruuisers, so I can tell you It’s quite a workout.

When we arrived at Kinyach about one o’clock, the entire village came out to greet us.  Never in anyone’s memory have so many white people visited their town.  Of course many of them want to see the doctor or dentist, but we made sure that the children of the feeding stations were our top priority.  We unloaded and set up clinic in the smallish dining hall of the Feeding Station.  Our team has now had three days of practice, so they went a break neck speed.  We ran through the orphans and widows of Kinyach very quickly. 

The dentist did a few extractions and fillings, but overall they were impressed with the teeth of the kids.  The water here is has a lot of Fluoride, which stains the teeth but makes them quite strong as well.  I taught Wilson and another man how to build a tippy-tap for hand washing.  Dr. Cochran identified one girl with a cyst on the back of her head and near the end of the day, he successfully removed it.  There were a lot of flies, so I stood over him fanning the area with a dental tray to keep the flies away.

We worked until dusk and then walked over to a recently built community center building that the government had put up.  It was nicer accommodations that we expected, though we did have to hang our own mosquito nets, which was a good team building experience.  The locals had setup up temporary “showers” on each end of the building for us, which was greatly appreciated.  Overall, it was like a camping experience, and not as rough as many I have had.

Dinner was brought to us, and afterwards Cherie and I with the help of Mauryn, sat down for a visit with the local church elders.  Recently KWO has been given a large donation for the conversion of one of our feeding stations into a full orphanage.  I sent Thomas and Alfayo to three places to determine their suitability.  Kinyach stood out as a strong church with a great need and so after much prayer, I selected this site.  We discussed at length what responsibilities the church would have with the new orphanage, and what KWO would do.  They were very pleased and so were we.  So there you have it, orphanage number 14.  We started the year with 10 and God has continued to bless us beyond belief.

The next morning, we returned to the clinic to finish up those orphans and widows from the area.  We were able to squeeze in a couple of church members as well.  There were a few more extractions and a mother with a new baby with Cerebral Palsy, nothing we can do for that even in the U.S.  We were able to wrap up and get loaded by noon.  After a brief sendoff we were on our way back down the long road.  This time we took a different route out of the valley, since we needed to arrive at Nakuru instead of Eldoret.  The road this way was in great shape with light traffic and we made Nakuru by dusk.

Tomorrow we will visit our friends at Kikitemo (formerly IDP camp) Feeding Station and head into Nairobi for a day of shopping before some of our team departs for the US.  Many are staying a few more days to go on Safari at the Masi Mara.  Be blessed.