Rotary Club of Letchworth Garden City

Sarah and Nigel Carrick gave up the comfortable life to spend two years working in Kenya with Voluntary Service Overseas. Letchworth Garden City Rotary Club were among their sponsors. They sent us this report:

Greetings from the Carricks in
Kakamega, Western Province, Kenya

We are now six months into our two-year placement with Community Action for Rural Development (CARD). It has given us time to review life here and to begin to appreciate the difficulties under which most people live and work. Compared with the rest of Kenya, this is a fertile and apparently productive region, yet it also suffers some of the worst poverty. The main problem is that Kakamega has one of the highest rural populations in Africa, with no sign of growth slowing down, and a consequent, relentless pressure on land.

Besides the struggle for food, families also have a hard time in meeting the cost of education and medical treatment. In Kenya the Government provides school buildings and teachers but everything else has to be paid for by parents. The biggest financial strain on families occurs in January and February, when school fees are due and just when the family's store of maize and beans runs out, so that they also have to find money for food.

This is followed in March by a higher incidence of malaria and other, water-borne, diseases, as the long rains set in, and payment for treatment and drugs poses yet another burden. With the average family income of less than a dollar a day (68p), the families of at least 4 children, minimum school costs for one child of about £18 a year, and a course of treatment for malaria costing anything from £2 upwards, you can begin to see that life is very difficult and that people are always trying to find someone who can help them.

The other awful burden here is, of course, AIDS and its prevalence particularly in the 25-35 age group. We heard from a woman from the Rotary Club in, Kisumu, which fundraises for orphan children, that in one village of 6000 people, there were 400 AIDS orphans! But it seems that the messages about the causes and effects of HIV are gradually beginning to get through.

Our work over the past few months has concentrated on setting up the organisational groundwork for some of the agricultural improvements and income-generating schemes, which we hope, will carry on after we have left. These include the increasingly popular beekeeping scheme (one day, we hope that you may be able to buy Kakamega Forest honey from a UK supermarket), the promotion of soya as a cash crop, for domestic consumption as a rich source of protein and as an excellent nitrogen fixer for the soil, and most recently a seed and fertilizer bulk buying project.

Our 'office' general space is piled high with bright yellow beehives waiting to be put up in the field, sacks of soya and maize and bicycles (donated by another NGO to help our, at present fairly limited, AIDS support work) and visited frequently by pigeons and chickens looking for a free meal from the spilt seed and beans.

We also get the occasional invasion of bees trying to set up home in the hives. Much of our time in the past three months has been spent delivering goods to inaccessible villages in our project area, setting up apiaries, selling seed and collecting in soya harvests. On top of this, we have to try to ensure that the record keeping is up to scratch; we are dealing with
so many people and so many small, but vital, sums of money.

On the whole, this is very satisfying. The people are fun to work with and we get to sample the wonderful honey! But there are times when everything seems to go wrong: when our pick-up breaks down, yet again, in the middle of the forest, a few beehive owners decide that they want us to move their hives because they have fallen out with the owner of the shamba where they are sited, or, as yesterday, we get a visit from the 'heavies' from Kenya Seed
who threaten to sue us because we are selling seed - not theirs - without authorisation (actually, we see this as a sign of success, that they think that we are a challenge to their monopoly, even though we are only supplying to our members, and at no profit).

Now that we have got some experience under our belts we would really like to concentrate over the next period on reaching out to the poorest members of the community, particularly through our beekeeping project. CARD's aim is to encourage self-sufficiency by requiring that members pay the full costs of any scheme which they take part in. However, we are trying to help by giving loans that are then paid back from the harvest. The members each pay a small annual subscription, which is very slowly building up an Endowment Fund. This, together with a few outside donations, has helped provide a revolving loan fund, for the purchase of beehives. However, we have now reached a point where we can make no more loans until we get further funds.

A £250 donation would provide loans for one hive for each of 12 widow's groups. (They are often dispossessed on the death of their husbands and are consequently very poor.) They would be asked to pay a deposit of £7, and would repay the loan over several harvests. Each hive produces around 50 kg of honey a year, selling to a guaranteed buyer for £40, so groups will generally start out with one hive and buy more from their harvest payments - a steady means of producing more income for all. And we are assured that the demand for honey is growing faster than the supply.

If anybody feels they would like to support this, they can send their contributions, made payable to DN & SFJ Carrick, to our neighbour Pat Walker, 18 Sollershott East, Letchworth. She will then pay it into our bank account and we can get it transferred to our Kakamega Bank. So far this arrangement has worked without a hitch! We really do appreciate your
efforts on our behalf.

On a more personal note, we are both very well, steering clear of malaria and tummy bugs, even though Nigel has lost a lot of weight - apparently, for some reason, quite common for European men living here. We eat a good diet with plenty of fresh vegetables, even though the variety is limited. Meat is cheap and fruit is plentiful.

Very good wishes to you all.

Sarah & Nigel Carrick
3rd April 2001