In October 1995 two members of Emmanuel flew to Kisumu and with the help of a local Kenyan pastor purchased a plot of land close to Lake Victoria.  Employing local builders two mud huts were erected and “The Cwm Rhondda Village Project” had begun.

In 1996 a widow with her son became the first house-mother to three other orphans and since then the project has continued to grow and now with more people joining the project both at home and in Kenya it looks set to continue meeting the needs of many underprivileged children.

Poverty and disease and especially aids accounts for the high fatality rate in and around Kisumu.  Whole generations have been wiped out in recent years leaving the very young without a ‘providing’ generation.  Medication and hygiene are beyond the pocket of these people.  When a boy reaches puberty he is expected to provide for himself and has to move out into a different building from his family.

We are appealing for sponsors so that more children can be given a home and also to assist in their education and if you are interested in helping or finding out more about the project then please don’t hesitate to contact us.

(Registered with the Ministry of Culture and Social Services as a self-help group.  Reg. No. S/E 2910)

Each year the trustees travel to Kenya to visit the children and to provide answers to some of their concerns and difficulties and this year Diane, Pat and Andrew took the trip and below is a report of what they got up to while they were there.

NEWSLETTER

Our recent visit to Kenya was a busy one!  You’ll be pleased to know that the children are well and growing fast as you can see from some of the photos included in this letter.

Here are the boys on a walk down to the lakeside with Andrew.

Left to right they are - Enos, Joseph, Brian ( a local friend), Bernard, Paul, Gordon and Daniel.

The older girls are young ladies now as you can see from their photo.  They are, from left to right, Julian, Judy, Little Rose in the middle, Vandora and Magdelen - all in their new outfits bought at the Somalian market in Kisumu.  The two girls missing from the photo are Dorothy and Mary.

It’s amusing that the children all think having their photographs taken is a formal thing and so they don’t really smile, but I can assure you that they all have wonderful, gleaming white teeth due to the lack of sweets in their diet.

There were lots of building repair works to be undertaken which included replacing roof timbers, which had been eaten by termites, in the house where the boys sleep as well as replacing doors and windows and re plastering the internal walls.

The other main building job was the replacement of the kitchen building which has subsided.  The plan was to build a new kitchen for Lillian on the end of her house and similarly to build a new kitchen for Yuanita near to her house.

The work was in progress when we left and our new helper at Cwm Rhondda named Ronald Ogada will oversee the rest of the work.

Another exciting development at Cwm Rhondda is that we found a local man who can dig deep-water wells. We were able to visit a recently completed well 72 feet deep and it really was a work of art as it had been manually excavated setting lots of individual rings of concrete as he dug deeper and deeper.

There are many shallow wells in the community but the water is not clean enough to drink but the deeper the well, the cleaner the water! Needless to say we asked him to dig a well at Cwm Rhondda and look forward to seeing the well on a future visit.

It was good to see a large crop of maize doing well on the site and two of the Paw- Paw trees planted by Care International are flourishing and bearing lots of fruit.

We visited the clinic at Nyelanda with medication from the UK. Pat had been donated a Sonicaid for checking unborn babies heart beats much to the delight of the clinic’s midwife. While Pat was demonstrating the Sonicaid, Andrew and Diane went to the Milimani Hospital and again the doctor-in-charge was delighted and grateful for the medication, stethoscopes and blood pressure monitors brought from home.

The Headteacher at Lisuka Primary School informed us on our visit that he hoped to have electricity in the not to distant future as surveyors for the electric company had been in the area.

We also visited the pupils and teachers at the Luisa Primary School where we had a rapturous welcome from the children. We had been invited to visit by a friend to see the work of this Community Project that is helping AIDS orphans, something very close to our own hearts and people living with HIV.

As you are no doubt aware AIDS is a huge problem in Africa and this local project is doing a great job alongside other organizations of helping some of the most vulnerable people in the Community.

The final photo above is of Pat and Diane with the Sunday School Teacher and Church Secretary from the church attended by the children from Cwm Rhondda.

We hope you have found the Newsletter of interest and may we take this opportunity of thanking everyone for their continued support of the Cwm Rhondda Village Project.

If you would like to know more about this project or if you would like to become a sponsor or just give a donation then please contact Diane and she’ll be more than happy to enlighten you.