The Board, and Visiting Nyumbani Children's Home

Today I sat in on the Hekima Place Kenyan board meeting. They were meeting to discuss which land should be pursued to purchase as a permanent home for the Hekima Place family.

The Kenyan board is currently only an advisory board, but Kate wants it to be a governing board eventually. Lindsey filmed the meeting for her so that she could show the footage to the American board to show how competent the Kenyan board is. Right now, the American board is the governing board, and Kate would like it to focus just on fundraising--which is quite a task in itself.

The Kenyan board was comprised of mostly women and two men. They were teachers, professors, lawyers, business-people, entrepreneurs, and jacks-of-all-trades. They were all Kenyan and very aware of how business and education and politics and building work in Kenya. They knew things about different types of soil that only a Kenyan would know. They knew things about how the owners of the land would act because of Kenyan and tribal traditions, which only a Kenyan would know. I realized, as Kate has said to me before, that there really is so much that a Kenyan board is capable of doing and understanding that an American board--or any foreign board--would not be able to understand. And I realized how important it is to have local knowledge and understanding no matter what you’re doing. Even something that seems cross-cultural or culturally neutral--like buying land or constructing a building--requires a lot more local considerations than I would have thought.

Also, just a note, the Kenyan board operates on “African time”, meaning that it was scheduled at 1 so that they could eat lunch and start the meeting by about 2, because that’s when they could expect everyone to actually be there. And even still, one man didn’t arrive til about 2:30. But when that’s what you expect, it doesn’t frustrate you.

I was touched by how much the members understood what Kate was doing here--they understood that she didn’t want an institutional orphanage, but that she needed to create a family for these girls. So throughout the discussion, a member would bring that up and remind the board how that was related to their decision.

Kate told the members about her meeting with the Ministry of Children, Gender, and ____ where she learned that nonprofits, government organizations, etc. will not give money to buy land. However, donors should be very willing to fund buildings on land that has already been purchased. So hopefully they can pay out of their savings for the land and then get donors and grants to construct the buildings.

Enough business.

Later that afternoon, we went to Nyumbani (which means “Home” in Swahili), a children’s home for orphans who have HIV/AIDS. Mum Kate had worked there for 2 years before she realized there were very few, if any, homes for the orphans who did not have HIV/AIDS and who would not be accepted at a place like Nyumbani and thus decided to start Hekima Place. Nyumbani is set up with a similar notion of family settings with about 12 children to each mother. Each “family” lives in a house with 2 bedrooms, a small living/eating area, and a kitchen area. Most of the children weren’t there, though, because they were either at school or off at boarding school.

I had a strange feeling while we were there, maybe because I knew that all of the children were fighting against an indomitable disease. The volunteer who toured us around the compound, introducing us to some of the children and moms and showing us the homes and the small cemetery where they used to bury children who had died before they had medicines when they were still just a hospice, told us that some of the older children resisted medication at times and struggled with depression. Most of the kids were not there--they were still at school or away at boarding school--but the youngest ones who did not attend school as well as an older child here or there were still around. From what I understand, being on ARVs is kind of like going through chemotherapy. They’re not easy on your body, particularly if you don’t eat enough. Fortunately, the kids here DO eat enough. But still, these are powerful drugs that can destroy your liver, affect your mental stability (and that’s on top of the emotionally draining feat of someone who is still a child coping with the loss of their parents and family and with having such a disease), and goodness knows what other side-effects. This isn’t a fun disease. I don’t mean to imply that anyone reading this would think otherwise, but really, what are we doing to stop it? What are YOU doing to stop it? …and really, what am I doing to stop it? One and a half million orphans in one small country about one and a half times the size of California. 30 million people and there are one and a half million orphans. I feel like I’ve written this about 20 times now but no matter how many times I say it, it doesn’t seem real. Million. One and a half. 1500 thousands.

Anyway, the structure of Nyumbani is very similar to Hekima Place, although the houses are smaller because they’re home to about 10-12 kids and one mum and there are more houses. I think they have somewhere between 100 and 150 kids there--I can’t quite recall the exact number--and of course some are away at boarding school so they aren’t there most of the year. But these kids don’t have the same relationship with extended family that Hekima Place insists their kids maintain. Kate said that many kids left Nyumbani with no sense of identity or feeling of where they belonged or where they came from because they hadn’t had contact with any relatives. So that’s why Hekima Place has regular visiting times on certain Sundays and why they insist that the girls go to visit their aunts or grandmothers or sisters or cousins when they have holidays from school. Not all the girls have family that is willing or capable of supporting them in this way, but most of them do, still, fortunately.

When we were at Nyumbani, we learned that AIDS-infected children used to not be allowed in schools here. Hekima Elementary, as a private school, was one of first to allow them to come, but when they did their enrollment dropped from the hundreds down to about 80. Father D’Agostino, the founder of Nyumbani, went to court to force the public schools to accept his and other infected children. He had called all the newspapers around the world and brought the kids in to the court room--and with the whole world watching, the Kenyan courts had no other option but to rule in his favor! There was a whole lot of praise for Father Dag, as he was fondly known, and we could see why.