October 1, 2012 Kakamega

Greetings

I want to wish all of you a happy October.  Usually I recover much faster from my first case of food poisoning.  Usually it is only a day or so but come on five days now enough already.  Food poisoning here in Kenya is not always a bad thing.  Personally I could use to shed a few pounds and during my ten week stay last summer I lost twenty pounds on my Kenyan diet.  I feel lighter already.

Last year it rained every day.  This year it seems to rain every day.  Last year I wrote my blogs in the dark.  I am writing this blog in the dark.  We plant six thousand passion fruit seedlings and it stops raining for months.  Thank God the rain came back this spring and those surviving passion fruit seedlings are now bearing fruit.

Today I spent the day here at the Sheywe Guest House relaxing anticipating our journey to the Elgon region tomorrow.  Yesterday Bishop Hezron, Pastor Robert, and Morris the General Secretary of Freedom International Ministry spent the afternoon with me discussing how we are going to move forward with the micro-finance venture.  But before I go further on where we are going with the micro-finance venture I would like to spend some more time discussing the challenges to making this venture a success.

Yesterday in my blog we discussed integrity and the differences between our two cultures when entrusted with sums of money.  Today I want to discuss what Joe describes as keeping the door closed and floating.  On my very first visit three years ago I went around for a month preaching self sufficiency.  I also said I wanted to come back to help my new friends here in East Africa.  I told them that I wanted to bridge that gap between the aid and the need.  I wanted to be an Advocate, an Ambassador, but more to the point to tell their story.  Instead of a bridge Joe uses a tunnel with doors on each side that just so happen to be kept closed by both the Here (Aid) and There (Need) sides.

As you know I have been gone for about eleven months and during that time my blogs were much less frequent.  I stated many times that information just did not seem to be flowing properly.  I would wait weeks upon weeks for news of our projects.  It is obvious that we have a communication problem in the spoken word.  Children in East Africa are taught English in schools however it is not American English and their choices of words to use are limited.  We just have too many words and too many ways to use them.  Confusion and misunderstanding is going to happen.  What I would like to discuss is the other communication problem and why our friends here in East Africa keep the door closed.

All of us have issues of some kind and most of us have been in situations where money just did not seem to be there.  There are only a very small fraction and I mean a really small fraction of people that can’t relate to money problems.  Our children today grow up believing that we only need to go to that machine that says ATM and presto money.  Our Kenyan friends believe the same thing to an extent.  We are that ATM machine.  In America most of us figure out a way through our vast resources to get out of our problems with some success.  Here in Kenya the resources to get themselves out of a bind are not that easy to obtain.  Many people have found themselves in front of the loan shark or that one person they can go to for a quick fix.  However it is not uncommon to borrow money at rates that would make us think twice about taking it.  Depending on how desperate someone is the more willing they are to agree to rates in the hundreds of percent.  It is not uncommon for someone to ask for a loan on 5000 shillings and the shark asking for 10,000, 15,000, or even more upon repayment.  Before you know it you are taking out loans to repay other loans.  How many times have you done that with a credit card?

Well it appears that is what happened to one of our loans and the door was kept closed so I would not find out about it.  The payments were made for a while and then they were discontinued for a lengthy period of time so he could pay off another loan.  Since he knew that we had donated the money to the ministry he felt that he did not really have to pay it back since it was a gift.  Even though I stated that the gift is to the ministry he still had to pay back the ministry in the form of a loan.  We came last summer to provide a few loans to experiment with our micro-finance venture.  He has since been run through the grinder and is in the process of repaying his loan.  One of the other problems was that no one understood that if he could not pay his full payment he could have paid at least a little until he could get caught up with both loans.  I never said that he could pay partial payments and the assumption was he had to pay his full payment.  He felt he did not have the full payment so he did not pay anything.  To us partial payments are one of our resources to get us out of a bind.  Partial payments were never discussed so it was not an option.  Please do not think that anyone or everyone should have known that he could have paid partial payments.  What we take for granted and what we know is light years ahead of my friends here in Kenya.  They only know what they know or have been told.  I can’t stress this enough.  I believe I have mentioned it before and I will mention it again because it is very important to helping understand the forces at work here.  These people are ignorant to our ways and to what we know.  I do not say this in a bad way because they truly admit their ignorance and want so desperately to be taught how to fish.

Joe describes this behavior as the float.  Yesterday we had a certain amount of money to build a church and some of it was skimmed off to pay for a dying wife and other issues in the community.  Our pastor or project guy is not only working with us but others that he has connected with.  Some times multiple avenues of money or aid is coming in and it is not uncommon for our people here on the ground to take money from this project to pay for another project.  I have talked at length about being transparent with everything we do.  This is going to be a tall order for my friends here in Kenya.

It is an understatement to say that my friends here in Kenya have no problems with money.  Let’s face it they do and their resources are not as readily available as ours.  Part of our micro-finance venture has to incorporate discipleship.  My friend Aaron mentioned this three years ago along with training.  Yesterday during our discussions on the micro-finance venture training and discipleship were brought up.  We have to incorporate both of them into the program or we will fail.  One of our benefactors had a problem that he did not share for fear of not getting his loan.  The opportunity was too great for him to pass up.  However what he probably did not know was that with a little more discussion and transparency everyone around him would have tried to come up with a solution to help him.  I think the result would have been the same and he would have still got the loan however it would have been in a way that he could manage. 

In order to reach those Orphans in the shadows we have to help the church community and every one in it to become self sufficient.  There is no way we can truly reach the “Ones” if there is not a micro-finance and or some sort of saving scheme incorporated into the project.  With out this we are just another entity providing funds to help people without really ever getting to those at the end of the line.

Tomorrow Hezron, Robert and I along with a new driver will be heading up to visit the orchards north of Bungoma near the base of Mt. Elgon.  It does not look like we will be able to visit our friends on the mountain this trip.

Take care and God bless

Dave