The Construction Program

The construction program includes a variety of projects that have been undertaken for various reasons:

• Playgrounds When Play Source International first began assisting the Oyugis community, its emphasis was on constructing community playgrounds. This project was not intended to meet the most critical needs, but it provided a tangible benefit while enabling the volunteers to build the relationships that are a crucial prelude to building a co-op. It also provided a positive activity that promoted an important need to give children positive and constructive outlets and development, while separately promoting community acceptance.
  
  
• Churches The churches in Oyugis are important not only as places of worship, but also as meeting places and monuments to local pride. One of Hearts for Kenya’s early activities was to replace three crumbling sticks-and-mud churches with bricks-and-lumber structures. Pews were also built. Although the significance of these physical improvements should not be diminished, some equally important aspects of this project are that it provided wages to local laborers, and it built bonds of mutual trust and understanding as the volunteers and their hosts worked side by side.
  
  
• Rongo orphanage The construction of a building at the Rongo orphanage was accomplished in order to take advantage of an opportunity to gain two free acres of land for the orphanage. The land was given by the government of Kenya, conditioned on the orphanage erecting a building on the land within a short time.
  
  
• Amani Retreat Center The Center at Amani houses the volunteers when they come to work in Oyugis. The original dormitories had fallen into a state of disrepair making them uninhabitable. Hearts for Kenya repaired and rebuilt them to make them again usable.
  
  
• Community center With funding provided by Hearts for Kenya, a community center was build in Oyugis. It provides a large meeting space, a small medical facility, and several rooms for orphans and battered women who need temporary shelter.
  
  
• Utility infrastructure When John Willingham first arrived in Oyugis, there was no running water, no sanitary water, no irrigation and no electrical power. In response to some of these deficits, Hearts for Kenya funded a hand-dug water well and a small, solar-powered generator for the Wire Clinic, a medical clinic serving the community. It has also installed two water purification systems that serve about 800 people each.
  
  
• Storage facility Once the co-op farmers began growing more maize than their families consumed, they needed a way of preserving the excess. To begin to meet this need, Hearts for Kenya built a small (200 gal.) silo for storing the maize.

The construction programs have required adjustments to the decision-making process. Hearts for Kenya has had to continually learn more about the workings and values of Oyugis. To cross the cultural gap, Hearts for Kenya volunteers have had to shed many pre-conceived notions about what people need in a foreign, destitute land. This challenge is magnified in the construction program.

In Nairobi, a first-time visitor to Kenya finds a modern city. But as the visitor travels west to Oyugis, the differences in the surroundings are striking. The most striking differences are in the buildings – homes, churches, schools and businesses. Ubiquitous conditions that might surprise affluent visitors include dirt floors, cramped space, an absence of electricity, artificial lights and running water, a scarcity of clean water, door-less entrances, pane-less windows, and a lack of furniture. Inside a school the visitor is struck by the difficulty of hearing the teacher above the roar of the frequent rains pounding on the metal roof. The next day the visitor may see classes postponed while the students busy themselves collecting mud and packing it into the rain-pocked schoolhouse walls.

The instinctive desire is to place a high priority on improving or replacing these buildings. For their Oyugis hosts in the throes of poverty, however, building construction is usually a much lower priority, and with good reason. The buildings they do have are functional in that they do provide shelter. The quality of these shelters is not a major roadblock to their survival. The main threats to their survival are hunger and disease. The Oyugans understand well that to combat these threats they need food, disease prevention and healthcare far more urgently than nicer buildings.

Pertinent to the construction program, the Hearts for Kenya volunteers voice these lessons:

• that visitors in a poor land must vigilantly guard against the impulse to make construction too high a priority
• that devoting resources to construction instead of farming, for example, can diminish the chance of survival by those being helped
• that construction projects should be chosen very carefully
• and that construction should be allowed to consume the visitor’s resources only when it will, in some crucial way, empower the hosts to fight hunger and disease

After construction of the Oyugis community center, there are presently no construction projects identified as crucial to the Hearts for Kenya mission. That may change. For example, it may prove necessary to install additional irrigation and water purification systems. It may also be worthwhile to build a structure for the co-op that could house an office and serve as a storage and marketing facility. If soybeans are ultimately chosen as the niche crop, it may be helpful to build a small, soybean processing facility. A canning facility could be another useful construction project. These ideas are under consideration, but Hearts for Kenya has not yet been funded on a level that allows a decision on any of them. Ultimately it may be best to implement some of these ideas after a second or third co-op is established. By that time, the co-ops may be able to undertake the construction with little or no assistance. Any such projects, however, would be undertaken only when it appears to be instrumental to the advancing of the Hearts for Kenya ultimate mission of self sufficiency. For now, at least, it appears that Hearts for Kenya’s goals for the construction program have been met.