The July 11th Post with the video and the music is a particularly moving piece. It is hard to watch and yet it is inspiring as well. All that water and possibly more on the way is stunning. I have talked to people in Minnesota who say that they have never seen as much water in and around the lakes as there has been this year. I met a man at the gas station who had driven here from Texas and he said they are undergoing a drought and he saw more farm land in the Dakotas under water than under cultivation.
I have wanted to write a post called “one disaster after another” but haven’t had the energy. Disasters tend to suck the energy and life out of you. We have seen so many in recent years that it really is one disaster after another. While we sit here with so much water our partners in Kenya are struggling with not enough. We are trying to drain water from our fields and they are trying to dig wells to find some. Roger Weinlaeder one of the Project 24 guys spent a month in Kenya a year ago and on that trip he reported that the drought was so severe in the North of the country that elephants were coming into the villages at night scrounging for food and people would try and chase them away with flares. The world is starting to take note of the problem in East Africa finally. LCMS World Relief and Human Care has been aware and has been sending food aid money for quite some time now. Our partner church the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Kenya has been responding as best they can but they have few resources. In our trip in February we saw the dry conditions first hand.
At a place called Taita Taveta on the shoulders of Mt. Kilimanjaro a site has been purchased for a Project 24 center. The village was dealing with water shortages and trying to find ways to get more water. As you can see from this picture there wasn’t a blade of grass any where.
What was obviously a popular watering hole is drying up
A watering hole in the Tsavo
These two calves weren’t very old. The mother had obviously died because she was no where to be seen. These little guys weren’t old enough to make it on there own and they seemed to be the only livestock the widow we visited had.
Twins that probably didn't make it.
The worst drought in 60 years is visiting Africa while we struggle with more water that anyone can remember. Tens of thousands of people are walking for 15 days, by foot, to seek refuge at the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya. But the camps were only built for 90,000 people. Right now, more than 370,000 people are living in Dadaab with 1,300 new arrivals each day. LCMS World Relief and Human Care has send aid because of the generosity of people like us. People who make the “good stuff” happen. We are people that believe that even in the midst of our own personal “disasters”, we have been blessed to bless others.
We’ll write more about this later, but in the meantime check out that July 11th post.
