global village kenya

In retrospect, I’m more than pleased with the way my recent travels turned out. It has been less than a week since I returned from the Global Village project in Kisii and I have been thinking about it a lot. Mostly due to the high volume of questions from family and friends wanting to know every intimate detail, including the exact location of every malaria-ridden mosquito bite. I’ve been dodging the questions, working up the best way to put my thoughts and feelings together.

At this junction I’m going to refrain from gushing every detail about the trip. That goes to include those involving mosquito bites, wild malaria dreams and/or the screaming heard by my fellow team members one night at the hotel. I’ve already said too much and in this case, less is more and vague is the new vogue. So I’m guessing you’re ready to hear all about it? Shall we…

The project destination where I spent a large chunk of my time was in Kisii – a town in western Kenya approximately 6 hours outside of Nairobi. The drive into Kisii is both smooth, bumpy and simply awe-inspiring when passing through the Rift Valley. Dry dirt in various shades of yellow color the terrain and gradually evolve into a lusher, greener, tropical looking landscapes. Crops of all sorts dot the land and their rural keepers can be seen busy tending to them day in and day out. Hardly a day ever passes without a few hours rain in Kisii which helps to keep it looking so alive.

Kisii town is a busy place, but with nothing to totally captivate any particular visitor. It feels safe enough and the community as a whole is cool yet cordial to the stranger. Enter the Global Village…

We were originally slated to work on three houses for three different homeowners, but we ended up doing some pretty hard work on just two of the houses. Let me stop here to define hard work. Hard work – Digging up fresh earth, mixing mortar, and carting wheel barrows packed with fire bricks, stones and sand down muddy hillside slopes all in the name of volunteerism. I don’t think there is a village I’ve visited where the locals can’t get over the idea of a group of foreigners traveling from so far away to do construction work, for free.

The team really came together to make this a successful build for the two homeowners, Patrice and Mark, but we couldn’t have done it without the help of Mukanzi. Mukanzi, was the local HFH construction supervisor and it was easy to see his dedication in helping us to help the community. He taught us about ‘harambee,’ ‘mololongo’ and much more. The two homes were made of fire bricks and we did not complete one or the other, but there was definitely a lot of progress made due to our free unskilled labor.

As a volunteer and second-time team leader there were challenges. I am grateful for them all as I want to grow. I want to become a better volunteer team leader for future volunteer trips and as magical as last year’s project in Ethiopia may have been, it presented few challenges. I’ll summarize them so not to dwell. First off, I felt very alone on this project more so than ever before. This was a personal challenge and I didn’t want it to impact the others. There were some bumpy roads with the budget initially, but it was sorted out by the trip end. Three volunteers got pretty sick and unfortunately one had to make a trip to Hema Hospital. The hospital trip took me a way from the team for about a half day and I nearly had to throw blows to get my poor guy out of the corrupted facility. Some people felt the work load was too heavy and others were simply happy to be there helping with whatever was thrown in our direction. In my eyes, it was a pretty mixed bag.

All that being said, we gave it everything we had and more. It always blows me away to see a grassy lot transformed into a ditch, filled with rocks and cement and built upward by bricks into the walls. Although we didn’t complete the two houses we saw the fruits of our labor and I can only imagine that the future should be much, much brighter for our friends or ‘rafiki’ in Kisii.

Click here to learn more about building in Kenya with Habitat for Humanity. To learn more about Global Village and get involved you can find everything you need to know and more by visiting Habitat for Humanity International. To see more pictures from this trip visit the gallery found here.