Hi..great news!! the LAND for the site of a new ORPHANAGE was legally approved this morning in a little circle of us perched on hard wooden chairs around two desks pushed together in the middle of a field at the local village office: Charles, me, Juliette and a director of the Orphanage meeting with the village ward officer, a land officer and a community liaison person of this region. Everyone knows everyone, knows what land issues are under dispute, court, fightings, or not. And this one is clean! The last two plots we looked into were flagrantly up for sale and being sold quickly, both by people who officially owned the land but on paper and legally, had absolutely no rights to it! No wonder they were putting the pressure on, take the money and run! The next step is drawing up the Agreement to Purchase and await the donation funding soon to be confirmed from our Australian contacts! Keep your fingers crossed!! After that, i will be gone...someone connected with the Australian group will oversee the project, the design, engineering, water, electricals, permits and approvals and the actual building of this little dream which just may come true!
We shall see!

Just learned that the boy who robbed has been taken into the local jail for questioning - i don't know the process, would like to get repaid for the gear he bought and then let him run away; i am sure he has been through enough - my feelings, but that is my opinion only and certainly out of my hands.

Tonight, this afternoon, armed with fresh vegetables, tea, sugar, art supplies and a big bottle of local Scotch for the Chief's aging father who sits all day under a big tree greeting various members of his huge family: his 8 wives and 40 children or so with their offspring, our Chief, his two wives and 5 children, and so it goes... the rickity drive out to the Masai Chief's boma this little compound of cow dung, ash, stone and sticks, fences of protection created from thorn trees and inundated with the infestation of millions and millions of flies, everywhere i remember, in your face, nose, mouth, under your watchband, inside your shoes and sleeves- because of cows and goats living inside the boma... a ceremony of honour while Sierra will choose her very own goat, a leg of lamb followed by the dreaded by me sleepover. Tomorrow, after a breakfast of goat pieces and banana we traverse the tundra a mile or so to catch the back of an open Land Rover on the wily path to slowly pole pole wend our way back to Mto Wa Mbu.........I am apprehensive about this experience which usually i would be beside myself with. Spoke at great lengths with a doctor who treats and visits Masai bomas regularily who refuses the sleepover, his one and only time spent sitting up all night around an embering fire, so knowledgeable and terrified was he to rest his body full length out upon the bug and tic infested cowhide bed provided. Baby calves and goats with tics jumping, roaming the mud floor at his side.
I am taking my video camera, with lots of pics!
To be continued!!!