Kenya - Her Second Home - Val's Story, Chapter 10

No matter what adventures in employment, living arrangements, or relationships she became embroiled in, Val held onto her love of Kenya from that first trip in 2006.

A year after she flunked out of college, the African continent began calling her. She found an organization online which would set her up to volunteer in various places throughout Kenya for as long as she wanted.

          I was apprehensive. Reviews on this outfit were generally positive, but who knew how reliable they were. I found a number for this place, and they sounded reputable enough on the phone. But again, lies can flow as smoothly as a river in the springtime.

March 29, 2010, her stepfather and I watched Val’s plane take off from a local airport. I studied that plane until it was less than a speck in the sky, my heart filled with such a mix of emotions that I felt frozen in place. And time. She’d be gone for six months.

          We stayed connected mostly through random texts. For years, I had watched with an evil eye as co-workers constantly checked their cell phones throughout their workday. Now I was one of them. Living seven time zones away, Val could text me at one in the afternoon to tell me how her day had been.

          She worked at an orphanage in Thika and a clinic in Saikeri. She learned about the camps for internally displaced persons, where hundreds of families had to relocate after losing their homes due to post-election violence. While there, she met a young Kenyan who was starting his own non-profit organization to help these people. She stayed in touch with him for nearly fifteen years.

          But she felt most at home in the tiny Maasai village of Saikeri. The local people she cared for at the clinic were kind and good-natured. 

         The scenery was magnificent. Wide open spaces where bony cattle grazed and skittish gazelles warily watched for predators. Even herds of zebra or occasional giraffes would wander across the plain near the small brick room she called home.

          Towards the end of her six-month stay, Val rode a crowded bus to the coast of the Indian Ocean. She volunteered for a while at an even more crowded orphanage, and then she and another volunteer took a break to stay at a house on Diani Beach, with its white sand and laid-back atmosphere.

          She came home in October, safe, sound and tan. Three years later, she talked me into returning to Kenya with her.

~~~

As I write this, I’ve been to Africa eight times, each time for about two weeks. Val? I think she’s taken seven trips, but if you total her time there, it’s much longer, close to a year altogether.

          When Val and I traveled to Kenya in 2013, we planned to start our own non-profit organization to work with schools and orphanages, improving the lives and futures of those children and their families.

          It was an uphill battle from the start, but Val dug in her heels, spending hours researching how to apply for tax-exempt status, how to host fundraisers and recruit volunteers, and what projects would work best in the country she loved.

          I took a friend of mine to Kenya a few times, and Val took her husband, her brother, and several friends on different trips. Every time either one of us came home, we were filled with stories and memories. And dreams of when we could go back.

          Unfortunately, after ten years of working on our own nonprofit, we had to let it go. All the time, money, and effort we put into it wasn’t paying off. Prospective donors preferred to give their money to an organization that helped local people, and we ran out of people willing to make the trip themselves to work on one of our projects.

          But Val never stopped loving Kenya. The chaos of the streets of Nairobi, filled with motorbikes, matatus, and trucks carrying loads piled unbelievably high, hearing shouts of mzungu when anyone saw us pasty white foreigners. The combined smells of diesel fuel, sweat, and burning charcoal that filled our nostrils daily. The children with their faces and clothes covered in dirt, but with toothy smiles and waving hands whenever we looked their way.

Those children! Whenever any of the boys or girls at the schools, orphanages, and villages we visited spied Val, they would gravitate towards her, grabbing her hands. She would pick up the littlest one, and the child’s fingers would run through Val’s long hair. Val would make a goofy face, and they would all laugh.

She loved them all and loved their home. She carried them on her back and in her heart. If she could make the life of just one of them better, she would cherish that.