Cow carcasses scatter the land--this is what Maasai land looks like right now. I saw my first Kenyan cow die this week. Thursday I passed a man feeding a cow lying on a trash heap; you could tell the cow was weak. Friday I passed again and the cow wasn't alive anymore.
I went with some friends to visit Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya and there was a stench of dead animals in the air--zebra, gazelle, buffalo and even elephant carcasses were everywhere.
OUR RESPONSE
It's been quite a month:
nov 11 Request made to IDES
nov 21 Notification of $85,000 received; largest grant ever given by IDES
dec 8 Food distributions began
It began with a conversation with 2 of my co-workers about how desperate people were getting now that the rains have still not arrived and their promised time has passed. It's been about 2 years since most communities in our ministry area have received significant rains. We talked and prayed about what our response should be, knowing that the problem is too big and the suffering too vast for us to have much of an impact without God's power and direction behind our actions. We're not a relief or crisis organization and we want what we do to empower the people, not enable them to depend on us or foreign funding. We decided, though, that it was time for us as Christians to take action.
We ended up requesting a grant from IDES an organization that raises funds from American churches and then is ready to immediately respond to emergency situations around the world when they happen. They have given us small grants in the past, so they were the first name that came to our minds when we thought about the situation at hand.
We crunched the numbers to see how much many people we could serve, how much it would cost per person per day, etc., in order to know how much funding to request. The evening we were putting the proposal together the electricity went out, so we worked in my office by the light of my 2 small scented candles! One challenge after another came (like no electricity the following morning, both generators not working and then my computer battery dying at the moment I was ready to send the request email!) but God made the way for the request to be sent.
Shortly after we made the request we received news that IDES had not only approved our request, but we received the largest single grant ever given out by IDES!!
After visiting each of the 26 recipient communities to put together a list of potential households to receive food and give word that we would be coming to distribute food, researching food prices, and then purchasing the tons of food and arranging transportation, we finally began the first distribution on Tuesday. It was an awesome day that turned into a two day adventure... that story to come!
Day 1 of distribution: We were able to give out maize flour, cooking fat and beans to each household.
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