All eighteen children who live in the home called Saint Vincent’s in Kiminini, to varying degrees, are physically handicapped. Some are confined to wheelchairs, some have no fingers, others walk with wooden prosthetics or on crutches. Naomi is blind yet she pushes Siphros’s contorted body around in a wheelchair. They are good pals those two. Mackenzie has graduated now, but I’ll never forget the day he blasted a soccer ball past me, twice, with such ferocity that I was glad not to have been in the direct flight of the ball as I kept goal that day. Yet Mackenzie’s arms and upper body is perpetually twisted and stiff, as if a constant current of electricity is rushing through him. It was to Mackenzie’s obvious delight that he scored the two goals that day, but come to think of it, I don’t think I ever saw Mackenzie not laughing.

        I’ve learned at lot from the kids at Saint Vincent’s over the years. I’ve watched some of them grow from being kids to entering adolescence and youth and I’ve become very fond of them, it’s hard to have a bad day when you’re around those kids. So it particularly guiles me when they are exploited.

Shower stall

        I was ‘volunteered’ to sit on the committee of the Saint Vincent’s Home for Physically Handicapped Children, more affectionately known as ‘the small home’. Sat in a dimly lit, poorly ventilated, grubby room for several hours listening to seemingly endless circular debate is not an activity I would have willingly volunteered to take part in but some how my name appeared on the list of members. It seems to me the only firm decision made in such assemblies is the date that the next meeting will be held and I therefore try to avoid them. But in February this year it was impressed upon me that the next meeting was of particular importance and that my presence would be appreciated so I reluctantly attended.

        At issue was the condition of the boy’s shower and toilet block. Now compared to most of the facilities I’ve seen in Africa the stalls were adequate although in need of some simple repairs and improvement. They consisted of a concrete slab covering a deep pit onto which six good size stalls were constructed from brick and plaster, with wash basins being located at one end. Unfortunately unchanneled rainwater had eroded a hole below the structures foundation and had begun to undermine it.

The boys of Saint Vincent’s

        But the proposal to rectify the problem astounded me. Demolish the entire structure and build a new one. And as the same situation may be occurring with the girl’s facility, since a slight crack had appeared in a wall, deem that unsafe and demolish it too. It was announced that the estimated cost to replace the two structures was 680,000ksh (about $9000) of which only 320,000ksh had been raised, (meaning donated). I suddenly realized why my presence had been so urgently requested.

        “Why can the foundation not be repaired?” I protested, “It would appear from my point of view, being experienced in construction, that a fix could be made at considerably less cost than the proposal being offered. In fact, I would guess that a remedy could be found that would cost less than a quarter of that being offered.”

        Various excuses were made and concerns raised but I offered to meet with the contractor on the following Monday morning to examine more closely an alternative to the destruction of the facilities and my offer was agreed upon.

Hold it, not finished yet

        The following day was a Friday and that was the day the wrecking crew showed up and completely demolished the boy’s toilet and shower block, filling in the pit below with the rubble. The girls facilities where cordoned off and slated for the same fate. In the interim, in an adjacent field, four posts stuck in the ground with rails between them supporting black plastic sheets were hastily fashioned. This was to be the temporary bathing facility. Two, single stall, pit latrines nearby were to be used as toilets although access by wheelchair is something a kin to negotiating an army obstacle course.

        Shocked and infuriated I at least managed to protest enough to postpone the imminent destruction of the girl’s facilities although they were barred from use. Within a few days the same workers returned and began to dig a pit, perhaps thirty feet deep, onto which new shower and toilet stalls were to be erected. Eventually a new concrete slab was fashioned over the pit but it was only half the size of the original one. Then, as the outline of the stalls became evident it became obvious that they too would be only about half the size, perhaps being the size of a kitchen table. How does a child in a wheelchair maneuver in a 3’ x 5’ space? They don’t. Even the doors opened inward, (until I tore them off), and the ‘toilet’ was nothing more than a hole in the floor over which the crippled child was expected to squat.

Finishing touches

        Then the final straw, the construction stopped, without even one of the stalls being put into use. The money had been ‘used up’ so the workers packed up and left.

        My anger turned into disgust and contempt for the people behind this sham and I tried to distance myself from the whole issue but I couldn’t. “Who would be the spokes person for those kids?” I asked myself.  Those who oppose would be intimidated and threatened, that’s how the ugly head of corruption works here. I looked around for an answer to the problem but then began to realize I was the answer. I offered all the usual excuses about lack of funds, and it’s not really my business but the issue didn’t go away and began to burn in my chest. Suddenly verses I read from the bible, talking about injustice and the oppressed, jumped off the page. So three months later I offered what little I had and began to construct one toilet and one shower stall. But the vision I had in my head was of a bathroom with a flushing toilet, a shower stall with actual running water, not just a washbasin and all finished with white tile. And the water was to be warmed with solar power.

        In the whole of Kiminini there isn’t such a facility, what could I be thinking. But I set to work and began to build. I bought some bricks and cement and hired a couple of skilled masons. By the end of my stay here in August the walls were erected and plastered and a concrete slab was formed on top, which in turn supported a large plastic water tank. I still had no idea how the tank would be supplied with water though. It’s funny how the answer to one problem is often found while solving another. During the construction I was reminded that it’s tough to mix concrete when you don’t have any water. Rose, the lady who takes care of the kids at the small home, came up with an answer. For 7ksh (about 10c) per 20 liter jerry can, there are guys who would fetch water from the river on bicycles. No brainer, problem solved. It was only later, much later, that I realized that two problems had been solved that day. My plan now is to have about 10 jerry cans of water brought by bicycle each day costing about $1/day. Why would I go to the trouble of buying expensive pumps and all the necessary pipes and wiring when I could resolve the problem for so little and employ someone at the same time? I don’t know where the buck will come from but I didn’t know where any of it would come from when I started.

        Now that I have returned to Kenya the work is underway again and within a week the new shower/toilet facility should be in use. It’s even going to be tiled. It seemed so trivial a task to have to travel 10,000 miles to complete. What would I tell people who asked me the inevitable question of what I was going back to do. Build a toilet? I guess so, that’s what I’m doing, (although other interesting opportunities are now coming to view also). But it’s not too trivial a task, God cares that much about those exploited kids. He cares about all of us that way. So though often times things don’t make sense, it doesn’t matter, so long as I remain in His grasp.