Happy Madaraka Day, Happy Fourth of July, a Great Safari with Friends, and Other Assorted Tallman news

Hi everyone. We apologize again for our tardiness with blog entries. I just noticed that we didn't submit any blogs in June. In our defense, the month of June was absolutely bonkers, with a little fun in the middle, but enough about excuses, and our schedules are only going to get busier in July and August, so we best be writing this blog.

June started out with Madaraka Day, which commemorates the independence of Kenya. We went to a local celebration of the event on Tuesday, June 1st. Matt got to give a brief speech to the community about his thoughts on Madaraka Day. It was a fun event for the community, but they love their celebrations, and sometimes they can drag on for hours (this celebration lasted about 4 or 5 hours). Just the other night I was reminded once again of our own independence day, when I sat around the dinner table with quite a few friends from the UK and reminded them purposefully of how I was celebrating our 234th anniversary from the shackles of British oppression. Other than that, our 4th of July here was uneventful since the only place you can go to watch fireworks or celebrate the 4th in Kenya is at the US Embassy in Nairobi (I've been told that every US Embassy in the world offers a celebration for any US residents living abroad who want to participate.

At the village, things have been progressing at a fairly busy pace. The farm is going nicely. The egg production is going well and Matt has been busy with egg sales in town. In addition, the milk production at the village has increased significantly with the introduction of one Fresian/Holstein cow named Mama Rubina. Matt has already been involved in milk sales in town but with the recent addition of another Holstein named Tina who will give birth to a calf in October, the village should be positively swimming in milk. One other cow is expecting to deliver at that time, and another cow will be expecting next Spring. At this rate, I think the village will need to start a cheese and yogurt shop before too long. We have also had some wonderful donated computers at the Open Arms Academy that the children have been thoroughly enjoying.

Matt has had the opportunity to speak at a few churches in the past two months that could be described as memorable. Matt and Cheryl were invited by one of the houseparents at the village to speak at their home church in a rural area about 50 kilometers from the village (nevertheless, it took over 3 hours to drive there). The church was an Anglican church that had gathered three congregations inside a small church with over 200 people that normally would fit less than 100. As Matt began to preach, he heard the sound of sheep, goats, chickens, roosters, and other assorted livestock but this didn't surprise Matt since they were next to a farm. However, when roosters began clucking in front of the pulpit and a sheep walked right in front of Matt he began to wonder what was going on until the church offering began. Since many people in this rural area had very little or no money, they brought rice, beans, corn, chickens, sheep, potatoes, and whatever they had to give to the church. In addition, Matt received an honorarium of one healthy rooster which he promptly donated to the Open Arms Village farm on his return to town. Rooster Cogburn is doing quite well on the farm with his small following of local hens.

A few weeks ago, Matt and Cheryl had to say goodbye to Baby Diana as it was decided that after she turned two years old, it would be best for her to be integrated into one of the houses at the village. It has been a little less noisy around the house in Eldoret without feeding Diana or changing her diapers, but since Matt and Cheryl are moving out to the village tomorrow as we are writing this blog, we will get to see a lot more of Diana once again.

A few weeks after the Madaraka Day celebration in Mlango, about 200 people from the area came to the Open Arms Village to join us for a Baraza on Friday, June 11, which is basically like a local town hall meeting. Open Arms staff came and shared about current progress and future plans for the Open Arms Village, and local village elders and residents asked questions and make remarks about Open Arms and how we can best serve the community. It was a productive day, but we were ready for a little bit of a break.

That weekend, some old university friends of Matt, who now live in Oklahoma, came out for a visit. Randy serves as a pathologist in Oklahoma but every two or three years he comes out to volunteer for a month at a hospital in Kijabe, Kenya. This summer he brought his whole family and it was really great to see he and Luann and their children all grown up. They got to see the village and spend a little time in Eldoret, but we decided it would be great if we were able to spend the next weekend with them at Lake Nakuru National Park.

Cheryl and Matt had already been in Nakuru once before, but we had never been able to spend any time inside the park. We stayed two nights at an amazing lodge inside the park called Sarova Lion Hill Lodge, and we had three of the most spectacular days in our lives. We were greeted outside of the gate by monkeys that tried their best to steal or collect food from us. As we entered the park we were greeted by baboons, then zebras, water buffaloes, and over a million pink flamingoes (the flamingoes flying over Lake Nakuru have been one of the most photographed areas in Africa).

That evening we went on a game drive and saw our first rhinos, and our first lions in the wild. Reportedly, the park has more rhinos, both black and white, than any other park in the world, and we saw about 50 of them including a mama and baby rhino. The second evening we also got to see a whole pride of lions including three baby cubs that literally walked right by

our vehicle within six feet of our faces. We also saw two male impalas charge each other over territorial rights, saw two dozen giraffe, over one thousand water buffalo and zebra (not exaggerating) jackals, hyenas carrying away a carcass, all kinds of birds. The only two down sides of the park are that it is too small for elephants since they like to migrate a bit, and also the fact that the local university tried an experiment to release millions of mosquitos to counteract malaria bearing mosquitos. Wherever Matt and Cheryl walked around the lodge during the morning and evening, they were swarmed by thousands of mosquitos.

The food was marvellous that weekend at the lodge, and Matt and Cheryl enjoyed the company of Randy and Luann and their children. Matt managed to gain a few pounds with all that wonderful food. The upside/downside was that one week later Matt got an intestinal bug that left him frequenting the bathroom for the next three days, and enabled him to lose all the weight he gained on the safari and probably ten more pounds on top of that.

Matt and Cheryl came back to Eldoret refreshed and plunged right into busy work preparing for the summer volunteer teams that will be arriving beginning July 13 and trying to get a lot of last minute work done at the village to prepare for those teams to stay at the village. In addition, they, mostly Cheryl, have been working hard at preparing to move to the village tomorrow.

Probably the only other significant thing we have encountered in the past week in Eldoret has been in regards to the treatment of street children. It has been a subject that has grieved our hearts ever since Cheryl and I have been living here. We have seen street children in Portland sometimes when we have gone downtown, often children who have been abused or simply run away from home, but never to this magnitude. Some of these children as well have run away from home and others have run away from abusive situations. Some are forced onto the streets by their parents to beg because they have no money to eat at home. Many others are true orphans who have lost their parents to AIDS or other diseases or perhaps they have been displaced because of the political violence that erupted here two and a half years ago.

On the streets they face more abuse, poverty, disease, starvation, addiction to glue sniffing (the drug of choice here, to forget the pain of loss or hunger) and they are often forced into prostitution or street gangs. In addition, they are stigmatized and ignored by society, and unfortunately, the solution that the police have is to make the problem of street children disappear any way they can. They often round up the street children with whips, dogs, guns, and sticks forcing them out of the city, or rounding them up and putting them in prison, once again subjecting them to rape and drug addiction. Many of these children are younger than 10 years old, some only 5 years old. A few are born on the streets like Beatrice who now lives at our village and is thriving (if you want to learn more about the street children of Eldoret and see Beatrice before she came to the Open Arms Village Google Ross Kemp's documentary on the street children of Eldoret which has been featured on the BBC and other networks - Beatrice is prominently displayed with a shaved head, almost unrecognizeable, in the first video)

This crisis with street children came to a head this week when one of the street children was shot in the back of the head by a policeman. A few nights ago, one of our volunteers went out with Morris Mordecai, our Open Arms staff member working with the street children, to see how the children were doing. They couldn't be found anywhere, so Morris and Anna went to the city jail, and found 130 street children there sitting in their own feces and urine, in a small hall with no bed to sleep on except the cold, concrete urine soaked floor.

The next morning, Matt, Rachel, and Morris went to speak to the chief of police about all of this and proceeded to endure a one hour lecture in which he explained this wasn't his problem, that the policeman who shot the boy in the back of the head was acting in self defense, and that he was dismissing our claims and said we knew nothing about the problem of the street children of Eldoret. We went downstairs to give the street children in jail some bread and milk, and as we came outside we saw 30 more street children being unloaded from a truck, and prodded into the inhumanely overcrowded jail cell by police. (I am normally never this critical of police, but after watching police collecting bribes everyday on the streets of Eldoret and then nationally claiming that they do not accept bribes, while the United Nations ranks Kenyan police as the most corrupt police force in the world, I suppose I have become a little jaded. The experience with the chief of police yesterday only reinforced that criticism).

I know ending this blog with such a depressing and seemingly hopeless problem might be a little discouraging but I thought I should share it with those of you who read this. The good news is that Rachel has talked with the head of the Remand Center where most of the children have now been taken (our version of a Juvenile Detention Center) and she said we want to take the youngest 8 street children from the Remand Center and bring them to the Open Arms Village (that is all we have room for right now at the Village). It might only make a small difference in the challenges hundreds of street children face everyday in Eldoret, and we fear, after meeting with the chief of police, that the police may resort to a more permanent solution to the "problem" of street children by continuing to round them up and even kill them (it has happened here before on a small scale and most notoriously with the street children of Brazil two or three decades ago), but this will make a world of difference for eight street children who have no future right now. We will keep you updated.

Blessings,

Matt and Cheryl Tallman