Kenya: Third Report
We are learning... a Week on our Work Site in Kenya...
In the past days we have started a real work site, digging down into the earth body and creating the first pond while beginning the first community building, a natural “peace hut”. Two builders from Meru who trained with Beyond Boundaries (friends of Tamera) arrived on Monday and on Tuesday when we began the foundation.
Monday we visited the local school, and were packed into a small hall with 600 hundered school children and 30 community members, plus all of OTEPIC. While Martin Funk created an extension cord to bring electricity from a neighboring house and hooked up the projector, members of OTEPIC entertained the children with jokes and impressions. Philip showed a video of the project and spoke, the biogas got a lot of ressonance.
We have been meeting with the co-workers in the afternoons, witnessing how they express themselves, make decisions and what is important to them. One afternoon we had a question circle, we heard a lot of curiosity about the hut process and Philip's ideas of how the visioning and planning process for the new land will continue.
Meanwhile the rain has increased, and often our work is halted in the middle of the day. Yesterday was our first rainy morning, and we had a well deserved rest. We came together in our “community space” and met, and it felt as if we have reached a new level of listening together and our co-creative potential.
The rains make the roads slippery and sticky, and now we know why so many people have asked us “are you here to fix the roads?” Poor land and water management creates a real problem on these rural dirt roads, and we begin to see how things might be different when we understand the cycles of nature and invite the water to “slow down, spread out and sink”.
Yesterday, after the rains stopped, some of us went back out to the land, and Marcus gave a talk about water, starting with the global situation and zooming into the situation right here on the new land in Biddi, Kitale, Kenya. The neighbors of the land, farmers living in simple conditions, asked good questions which showed their real need. They have too much water in the rainy season, and too little in the dry season. How will the ponds, like the one they are tirelessly digging by hand, help this situtation? They are so willing to work, and there is also a readiness to learn.
The women come everyday, and several have opened up their homes to become our temporary kitchen to feed lunch to the 40 or 50 volunteers that show up each day. Community happens on its own, with women offering sugar cane, children flirting with the muzungu (white people), and slowly we get to know each other.
After creating a strong foundation, we have begun to build the hut with the earth bags. We slow down to learn why we are doing what we do, and then the eager builders jump in and practice the new techniques. It is exciting, this coupling of the earth building going up, built with the soil that has just been shoveled out of the earth some meters away, creating a pond that looks so different than the square shaped fish ponds of the region. “Everything we do, we do in a natural way” Marcus said in his talk yesterday, and, we are learning.
