A Father's Playground

Tomorrow will be our last day in paradise. Lou and I have fallen in love with Vipingo, the people, the incredible view, the cool north breeze that blows all day, our walks on the beach, and the Tuskers beside the pool. We will truly miss the wonderful friends we have made here. Tonight I haven't been able to sleep at all, my has been racing with thoughts about the day, the places and the people (Lois and Ernie have been amazing.

Here I sit in the dark laying down my thoughts in the blog so I won’t lose them. I’m so glad that I learned to type on a keyboard in high school by feel and not by sight. Our typing class had those old clanky typewriters where you felt like you were pushing stones through the floor to get the key to strike the paper. Clank, clank, clank and a zip at the end of the line as you whipped the carriage return back to start a new line. Some of those early lessons come in handy throughout your life.

I sit up at night with a new kind of stress, a feeling that somehow I can fix the world’s problems. It’s a guy thing, when we see a problem we try to fix it unfortunately we screw it up more times then not.

When you see what we have seen, you know something is broken, so much poverty, so much pain inflicted on children, so many people dying of treatable illnesses. One of the major killers in this country is due to dehydration from diarrhea.

Today we took the first school pictures for the Future Hope Nursery School. Another one of my bright ideas; that we could take individual school pictures of each child in the nursery school, we would upload the pictures onto the internet and Carol could print them giving these children their first school picture, a permanent record of their childhood and for many the first time they have seen their own image.

Carol and Peter could also use the photos to put faces with the kid’s stories too help in fundraising for the Vipingo Village Project. By the way I was a little early in publicizing their website, they should have the website up in a week or so. Lou and I intend to put this on our list of worth charities, Carol and Peter are doing wonderful work.

We headed over to the school for our photo project. The kids were out doing there physical education (PE as we used to call it). Most of these children get no physical exercise at home, they have no toys, no balls no bats. Since there is no electricity the day ends when the sun goes down. Most parents do not engage or teach their children anything but survival.

After a short wait, here came the troops, 35 cute little faces walking down the street. The first order of business was to feed them breakfast, they get two meals a day at the school because for many it is the only food they will get all day.

The children were herded into a small mud hut, with two grass mats on the floor, “the school cafeteria”. The meal was being prepared in the backroom, a grey type of porage. Each child was given a cup of water that they downed and then their cup was filled with porage. Breakfast lasted a few short minutes and then it was back to the classroom.

Carol and I set up a makeshift photo studio beside the road as Lou brought the children two at a time. I don’t think the kids had any idea what we were doing. It was my Carol’s job to make them smile while I took their picture.

First we had to get them to sit in the chair which wasn’t easy for all. One little girl just started to cry when we sat her in the chair. As hard as we tried we couldn’t get her to stop crying. You can’t take a school picture of a crying kid, can you? Well we did, but we got another one later once she calmed down.

Carol would stand behind me saying, checker, checker (which means smile in Swahili). Most of these children did not or would not smile. I understand, they had nothing to smile about, a short life of pain and misery and a future full of more of the same. We settled on getting them to say banana which at least got them to open their mouths. Occasionally we would get a smile which was rewarding.

After our school adventure we had delicious lunch at Peter and Carol’s home and then back to our little paradise. When we got back I wanted to do the one thing that was still on my list while here, to go snorkeling off the beach. Wow!

I have strapped on scuba gear all over the world, paid big bucks to have a boat take me miles out to sea to see a fraction of the undersea beauty that is right off the coast of Vipingo. The water was only two to three feet deep but in a matter of minutes I had seen eels, parrot fish, butterfly angel fish, starfish, and sea urchins. I have only seen this kind of sea life in two other places, the Great Barrier Reef and the Red Sea. The Red Sea will not last long since families and children play right on the reef, slowly killing their golden egg.

I applaud the homeowners in Vipingo for creating their own marine sanctuary because without it the local population would do the same here. It never ceases to amaze me how the local authorities and population will squander their wildlife for a few shillings when tourists would pay big dollars to see the wonders in their backyard.

For years Africans hunted or allowed whites to kill their big game. Only in recent years have they figured out the game is worth more through the sight of a lens then the sight of a gun. Now if they could figure out the same is true in the sea, they would preserve another one of the natural wonders of the world.

We had another wonderful meal at Lois and Ernie’s. This time crab, lobster and shrimp wrapped in filo paper. I wish we could pack them both up and bring them back to America but I know they are very happy where they are. We will settle for a visit in the near future so all of our American friends can meet two absolutely wonderful people.