Alfonso and Alale Calling for Harambee!

Dear Friends of Daylight ,

Greetings from Daylight, Pokot, Kenya! The Children and Staff at Daylight are doing great. My family and I too are doing terrific by God’s grace and providence. Indeed, we all sing in joy and gratitude an “Amazing grace”! – This far the lord has been faithful in watching over us…

Likewise I hope you are doing good, and that the good lord has seeing you through the year, 2011.

Alsonso Keliman at his homestead

Anyway, I write to convey greetings and message from your long time friend from Alale, Pokot, Kenya - Alfonso Keliman whose picture is shown alongside.

Some of you ( ie Rachel Finsaas, Nathan Roberts, Leah Welch, Samantha Webster, David Maus, Megan Green, Michael McCranie and Lauren Loderstrom) have met him and hang out/visited with him at Alale/Kapenguria. Those of you who will be visiting Daylight sometime soon or in the future will certainly not miss you have a day with Alfonso. He is one fun guy to be around with. He is always full of life... smiling and so inviting. 

Rachel Finsaas, U of M grad Student, trying a hand at milking a camel

Alfonso is a community leader. In Alale village, Alfonso is more than willing to get Daylight friends around, and often times he would slaughter a goat or let friends try out milking one or two of his camels. As a leader he is the one who speaks on behalf of the community. When Daylight was receiving the first batch of Students, Alfonso was the one who offered a big goat for the children. And he always stayed close with the Daylight Kids ministry. He has so much love children and he also  believes life at the villages can improve for the better in the years ahead. 

One of the Harambee invitation card send out

Currently, he is involved in some big initiative at the village, an endeavor that might revolutionize how the villagers go about their daily chores! And he has asked me to share with you about that venture  – a fund raising event at his home village this Saturday 19^th, November 2011 (See the  above invitation card send out).

Locally, this exercise is popularly known as an HARAMBEE (i.e. pulling together). It is a Kenyan way of getting things done by and through a network or cloud of friends and family.  In this event the aim is to aid in helping Alfonso's village get a tractor for plowing land for the purposes of growing crops/cereals. As you may be aware, the people in Alale are turning to crop growing since animal keeping has continued to become unsustainable due to cattle rustling and increasingly dwindling numbers of the animals over the years.

Feeding Daylight

A guest post from David Maus, following his visit to Daylight last week:

If you've been following the 1-minute updates, or have been very involved with Daylight in the

past year, you know that acquiring land for the school has been an ongoing struggle. Because we

believe it's important for Daylight to have uninhibited use of classrooms and school facilities and to be able to house children who have been orphaned or who come from faraway nomadic tribes, we have remained committed to acquiring land even as various obstacles have arisen. For those of us not from Pokot, this process has emphasized some interesting legal and cultural differences.

So it was very gratifying for me last week to be able to visit the land that Daylight has already acquired. The visit to Pokot, my first, provided plenty of material for reflection, but I want to focus a little bit on one of the objectives that the new land will hopefully allow Daylight to achieve: food self-sufficiency.

Being food self-sufficient would be no mean feat for Daylight. The school already has 140 students, and will grow as dormitories allow more students from further afield to attend. Moreover, Daylight is situated in a region that often struggles with food security. But the new land just might make this ambitious goal plausible.

First of all, much of the land is currently cultivated maize (or corn, if you prefer). Much of this will remain and provide a staple starch for the school. And as you may have read in a previous post on this blog, Daylight now has a cow which will provide milk. Michael also has plans to have a vegetable garden at the school.

But while I was at the new land, I had the opportunity to plant a variety of trees, including several fruit trees. This was especially rewarding as Kenyan Nobel laureate Wangaari Maathi had passed away that week, so planting trees in Kenya seemed a fitting tribute to the women who did so much to advance the cause of the natural environment in Africa.

But more to the point, producing fruit at the school will help to insure that students are not only getting enough calories, but also vitamins and nutrients.

Of course, these trees won't produce fruit for several years, but the goal of becoming sustainable and food self-sufficient is a long-term and ongoing process. And just like those trees, Daylight is a young and growing organism that will be bearing fruit long after the efforts we all put in today.

David Maus Visits Pokot, Daylight, Kenya

David and Faith Maus, members to the Daylight Center Board,  recently relcated to East Africa, Uganda. As they say, they will probably be in Uganda for a year or so helping out with the local organizations. Exciting. However, last week, David was here at Daylight Center, Kapenguria. During the visit, David was able to visit the kids at Daylight, went to the Daylight's new site, met with locals, and in addition, spent time with my family. The following pictorial sequence give an overview of the trip.....check this out:

David and Michael posing for a photo, with the nomad lowlands behind at the background

David meets the Daylight's kids at the schoolhouse compound

Big smiles of welcome, come on in, David!

David lighting up the faces of the kids with a candy or two to each one of them

....and more candies

A group photo with the kids against a thank you banner to the so many friends who helped out with the purchase of the new Daylight's site. David and Faith paid for an acre as a family....a big tribute to them for their love and generosity to the children 

See the "David and Faith Maus" on the banner? ....a big thank you to them for their BIG hearts

Check this out...

David has a word with Teacher Terry in one of the classrooms at Daylight

It is meal time, and David helps to serve the children with their meals.

A circle of friendship.... or a "Chain Of Grace" .... these dudes chose to dine together in style.

David and young China 

To cap it all, David planted a tree on the Daylight's new property site

And there was time to set out into the outlaying areas of Kapenguria. And in this picture, David joins local villagers in song and dance. Next to him, to the right, is the area Member of Parliament for Kapenguria District, Hon Julius Murgor. They were all in for it....and you bet, David made so many friends out there.