Thursday 14 June 2012

Practical Giving - Pay back time, my last days in Kenya

Practical Giving – Pay back time, my last days in Kenya
Practical giving takes on a whole new meaning in Kenya.  Sometimes on a bad day I want to put my fingers in my ears when someone tells me a really awful story so that I don’t hear the need; so I don’t have to worry about it and I don’t have to feel convicted. Does that make me a really bad person or just very honest!
 Other days I feel privileged to be in a position to make a difference. Where else can you help someone and in the process change their whole way of living. In the UK many of us give money to charity not really knowing where it will end up and have no warm fuzzy feeling about giving. Perhaps that again is the wrong attitude – shouldn’t we give without expecting anything back?
Well yes but it is still nice to know that you have had a positive effect. I certainly wouldn’t  get a warm fuzzy feeling throwing pens or sweets out the car window to children (not that I do that at all as I am so paranoid with encouraging dependency!) or signing a sponsorship form for a complete stranger (you often see people wondering around the streets in Nairobi with these forms asking for money for school fees).
I was privileged to give practically the other day. My house help told me about a girl in her church. As she started to talk about her, my usual initial reaction started to creep in my mind – “Oh no! Please don’t expect me to do anything!” But then as I heard more I felt so sad and so mad! How could she let this happen? 
The girl was an orphan and had gone to stay with her brother. The brother left her on her own in his house and basically had nothing to do with her. She got pregnant. She just had her baby in a local hospital and had no money for the hospital fees so the church congregation clubbed together to pay the 4,000ksh. Bear in mind that the people we are talking about live in a slum so also basically have nothing.
She is at home now with nothing. Her milk for some reason has not come in and she is feeding the baby porridge (AHHHH!!). She has no bottles so not sure how they did that? She has no nappies so she tore up pillow cases in strips to use. The baby has no clothes so is being wrapped in blankets.
Wow!!
In some ways she couldn’t have come to a better person – I have just had a baby, and am leaving the country. It reminded me that everything I had for my baby I was given – so I got to play ‘pay back ‘
I got a bag and filled it with cloth nappies (that I hadn’t actually used), feeding bottles (which I only used a few times), blankets, picture leaflets on breastfeeding and the icing on the cake....... 90mls of expressed breast milk.....wow horror of horrors it dawned on me -  I had become a wet nurse!!!

No comments:

Post a Comment