On the road with the team!

Hi everyone!
Good news, Nikki and Kathy from Australia have arrived safe and sound and we are preparing to hit the road and head for Pipeline camp with Irene (VICDA Director and Project Manager) this morning. We are all very excited! Plus we have a few more additions to the team. Chris, a GVN volunteer who has been in Kenya for 5 months will be traveling with us and he is planning to volunteer at Pipeline IDP Camp for the next month. Chris will be joining two other volunteers, Bryan and Scott, who are already at the camp. From what I hear, the boys have been doing lots of work with the community and assisting Moses (Camp Secretary) and Paul (Camp Chairmen) – teaching them computer skills and sending emails to NGO’s requesting assistance. Awesome work guys!

Plus I also met an interesting fellow at my local coffee house this week, Bo from Texas! Bo is passionate about saving children from deadly malaria and has developed a solar powered mosquito control system called Zuba Mist which can be installed around villages, schools and is environmentally safe. Malaria is a growing problem at the IDP camps so I am keen to see if Bo thinks his system is something that could be potentially installed at the camp. We are happy to have him onboard and I just love bringing visitors to the camp too.

There have been a few interesting developments over the last couple of weeks that had the potential to change our building design. The Kenya Government has promised the IDP’s at Pipeline 23 iron sheets per family to assist them build houses. These sheets were donated by China. If this delivery goes ahead it would be fantastic for our project and the community as it would mean we could afford to use cement blocks, however it has been difficult to obtain a delivery date. It could be days, weeks, months! We had a meeting with the community and they have requested that we go ahead as planned. So we will stick with building houses made of iron sheets until the situation changes. The community have decided to go with iron sheet walls rather than the mud.

Ok, so I will try send daily updates from the camp. We are planning to spend today preparing and ordering materials and Friday and Saturday building. We are aiming to build four houses. I daresay we will face many challenges but its all part of the fun and adventure!

Thank you so much everyone for all the support and encouragement and especially the first group pf sponsors – Paul Fletcher, Paul Ridley, Hamish Roberts, Sarah McNamara, Ben Seidel and their family and friends, and Nikki Best!

Stay tuned!

Lauren xo