Brooks
Finally after five weeks of traveling in East Africa we had arrived in familiar territory, Kitale town, in the mountainous region of western Kenya. I could hardly wait to get here since leaving last March. That’s when my Kenyan friend Elizabeth and I had been stranded in a broken down vehicle and had been given an extra hour’s visit. This unscheduled time was all the two of us needed to share our hearts and what we dreamed could happen in the lives of a few African women.
Here, there are many widows and so many women who are left abandoned either by HIV-AIDS or divorce or young girls who had to drop out of school because of lack of school fees and now find themselves destitute and single moms themselves. They are left thinking their life is over; there is nothing left to live for, so they give up. They are looked down on and rejected by others, so not only are they poor physically, they are poor in spirit as well. “But, do they have to stay that way?” Elizabeth and I asked each other. “Why can’t we do something to help lift them up? Why couldn’t we give them a hand out of the gutter into the mainstream of life as the beautiful, intelligent, lovely women they are.” They no longer need to walk in shame; they are entitled to walk in grace and beauty and all they are meant to. What could we do to help? We didn’t want to give them “fish to eat for today”, we wanted to “teach them to fish for a lifetime”. We wanted to start a school, a school that would teach them tailoring, sewing….well, to start with. Eventually we dreamed of a school that would include computer training, secretarial training, poultry farming, beauty school training and English. If you’re going to dream, dream big, right?
So after seven months of Elizabeth working on the logistics here in Kenya and me working on the financial end in America and maybe a hundred emails flying back and forth, here I was. I had told the plight of the Kenyan women to hundreds of people in as many places as I could think of through internet, phone, mail, person-to-person trying to raise the funds to launch the school. So many people, especially women, had responded and given hundreds of dollars joining us in this cause. Liz had gotten figures, bought sewing machines, scissors, materials, interviewed students, found our temporary space. She had also brought together women to work with her, to teach, to be on the Board, to help and support. It really felt like a small army of American women joining with their Kenyan sisters in an effort to fight not only the poverty, but everything that goes along with it to keep women oppressed and living in shame. It had been amazing to see the women (and men) who were now standing with us and now I could hardly contain myself waiting to see Liz and The Women’s Vocational Training Center: Dorcas Hands.
As we flew over Kitale I could see the beautiful, lush mountainous countryside below me, with the bright orange of the dirt roads below. It must have just been harvesting season as the maize was still standing but in long rows of dry husks now. The last two years had been such a season of drought, I prayed this season had been better. Our tiny plane finally circled and bump, bump, bumped it’s way onto the one lane landing strip and we were here. Finally!
Elizabeth and her husband Dawson and John, a friend of theirs and now ours, too, were all there waiting, big smiles, open arms. We gathered up our things and crammed everything and everybody into the familiar, worn out, grey van and drove into town. Kitale is a town of 500,000 people, but its downtown area is quite small by American standards. It’s an agricultural town, so lots of feed stores and one main store called Transmatt (Walmart) and then the typical markets of Africa all alongside and in all of the neighborhoods of people in their outside shops selling their various wares of shoes or clothes or vegetables.
Finally the time had come. We walked through the busy town, avoiding cars, bikes, or anything else that might be coming, as pedestrians never have the right of way and then walked into a storefront cement building. There was a long narrow dark hallway I had been in once before when we had to visit the lab to take someone for a malaria test. There at the end Elizabeth turned. She had secured a donation of temporary space for us in one room in an office for now so the school can be started.
There they were. Two little rows of sewing machines: four of them, and against the wall an overlock machine, and standing proudly on a table was the knitting machine that would be used to make the required school uniform sweaters. Sitting shyly behind each sewing machine were four women: Christine, Janet, Bilha and Lucy. There were two other women there. The teachers. One to teach sewing; the other to teach embroidery and rug-making. Each of the teachers grabbed my hand and in typical Kenyan fashion said, “Karibuni!” (Very Welcome!) I reached over to the students who couldn’t believe the mazungu (white person) would touch them and speak with them, and shook their hands in the tiny space. But what I really wanted to do was grab each one of them to me and hold them in my arms. I wanted to tell them, “You are safe now, it’s going to be alright. You’re scared and lonely and desperate right now, but your life is never going to be the same from this moment on.” It was all I could do not to burst into tears as I saw what God had done in a few short months and what He was going to do in the lives of these four women, and hopefully many more in the days to come.
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