Last week I wrote about seeing my daughter off to Africa. She boarded the plane at 11 PM on Tuesday, and was picked up on Thursday in Nairobi by Joshua Machinga who said he had just finished reading my article. I was flabbergasted.
Then came the emails. Shana Greene, the Executive Director of Village Volunteers, who helped organize Lauren’s trip wrote
to congratulate me for raising a child with a heart so big, she leaves the comfort of a life full of promise to expand her awareness to those in immense poverty. She said in each village Lauren will stay in traditional huts, using a pit latrine and a basin to bathe. She will never again take for granted turning a tap for clean water or taking a hot shower. And… Lauren will find joy and inner strength in everyone she meets, like the amazing Masaba Widow’s Group who break into dance seemingly for no reason, and youth groups who have formed a cooperative to run chicken and bee keeping projects to pay for their school.
Karen Kotoske, the founder of Amistad International wrote with the inside scoop on Joshua Machinga, founder of Common Ground in Kitale, an amazing man and one of the best community organizers in Kenya, helping change the world farmer by farmer. Amistad funds a small business loan program which enables the poor in Joshua’s community to obtain start-up capital for small business enterprise.
Betsy from Ecology Action in Northern California wrote to talk about her daughter who grew up exposed to the work in sustainable agriculture. She chose to become a nurse practitioner and work in places like Liberia as the war was ending there, Sri Lanka right after the tsunami, and a violent mining camp in Venezuela where she needed an armed guard. Why, Betsy wondered, did she choose impoverished dangerous places when she could have worked in the safety of the U.S.? Yet, she too is proud of her daughter for the generous, intelligent gift she chooses to give to the world.
In Kitale I am told women’s hearts break from the pain of a home with no food. Hunger and poverty turn their husbands away; their children cry wanting food which is not there. HIV/AIDS lives among them like a giant dragon gulping up its victims, leaving orphans, widows and widowers in its path. I am told the training the women receive in bio-intensive farming techniques is the only lasting solution they see to reverse the trend. I am told of a restored hope and bright future for their families, where their children will soon have food and attend school like children elsewhere in the world.
So, through that article in our local paper I received thanks from around the world for sharing Lauren with their friends in Kitale, and for sharing my parental story. I’m still in awe of it all.
– Lauren Nagler’s Dad