March 11, 2004

Dear Friends,

I arrived back in the United States yesterday, after a long final week shooting in Kenya.

Last weekend, I spent three days visiting Chalo at his new boarding school near his uncle's rural home. The school is markedly different than his previous school near Mathare. There is lots of grass and plenty of trees, and outside the school gates are small farms instead of the cacophony of Mathare. And Chalo is doing much better. He now has time to finish all his studies, and participate in the drama club, which had a competition while I was visiting. Chalo had the 2nd leading part in two different skits, and since he had arrived at the school in January, he had become one of the most liked students with his teachers and his peers. He seemed very happy.

He even had found a girlfriend, Nancy, who very shyly told me how much she like Chalo. It was adorable.

After the drama competition, Chalo was on mid-term break and so came back to Nairobi with me to visit Good Samaritan for the first time since he had gone to the school. He was excited to see his old friends, particularly Boss. But when we arrived, Auntie told us that Boss had disappeared. He had gotten upset at a girl at the Home who was teasing him, and hit her in the chest and head. She fell into one of the open sewers, and was knocked out cold. She was rushed to the hospital, and took a few days to recover. Auntie says Boss nearly killed the girl.

Boss panicked, grabbed his things, and fled Good Samaritan. When Chalo and I arrived Auntie hadn't seen him in a few days. Later that week, Auntie went to his work to confront him. She demanded that he pay the medical bill and apologize. He seemed to realize he had made a mistake, and agreed to save money and eventually pay Auntie back. Later, Boss came by the Home and sort of apologized to the girl, but it was clear he was no longer welcome at Good Samaritan. He has been living with his brother in a very rough part of the slum, and also been staying with friends in an area of Mathare known as "Kosovo" because of the amount of violence. The social worker and I went to visit him there, where he told us he was also saving money to rent a little room of his own. He is preparing to move out into Mathare on his own.

Thanks to your support of the Good Samaritan Education Fund, last Tuesday, 26 students from Good Samaritan started their first year of secondary school. Auntie was able to convince the principal of one of the local schools to take all of the qualified students, even though there only was money to pay for one third of them. (A group from the Netherlands had raised enough money to pay for the school uniforms and some books.) The school will need more money at the beginning of next term, in May, so all the students can remain in class. A $50 contribution (combined with the bursary fee Auntie secures from the government) will keep a student in school for the rest of the year. If you can, please help keep these children in school by making a donation to the Good Samaritan Education Fund. For information how, please visit www.orphansofmathare.com/howtohelp.html

Much of the rest of the time on the trip I spent with Auntie and the social worker doing field work. We visited Lucy's HIV positive mother, who works planting vegetables on the outskirts of Nairobi. She works for one week, then rests for the next, and can barely pay for her food. In front of her daughter she would not say she was HIV positive, but she described the overwhelming pains she is in much of the time. Mary, who was one of the students who started school on Tuesday, was very happy to see her mother for the first time since she came to Good Samaritan in January.

We went far out into the countryside with Njeri, the HIV-positive mother who had shown up at Good Samaritan the previous week saying that her family had disowned her and she couldn't take care of her children. Auntie convinced the family, who are very poor sustenance farmers to accept their daughter, and recognize their responsibility for her two children Kennedy and Anthony. When she gets too sick to care for herself, Auntie will bring Njeri out to her family home to die. The children will live at Good Samaritan but visit the family and eventually go to secondary school in that area.

And we went to visit Chalo at school. Auntie wanted to see the school, and make sure Chalo was doing well. She was very impressed, and happy that he was so successful. The Home hopes to move as many children to boarding schools outside of Nairobi, near extended families if they exist, as they can. The environment at these schools is tremendously better than that of Mathare.

Finally, we spent many hours wandering the streets looking Mary, the 11-year old girl who had been raped. We learned from the woman who we thought had taken Mary to another slum that in fact Mary had run away and gone back to the street. Some of the street boys who Auntie knows claim to have seen Mary, but we were not able to find her. She only had taken a few days of her anti-retroviral drugs, and on Tuesday missed her 21-day checkup with the doctor. Living on the street and sniffing glue, chances are Mary will probably be attacked again. I hope the Home will be able to find her, but on the street when a child doesn't want to be found, it is very easy to hide.

Thank you for your continued interest and support.

Best,
Randy