Fighting back from the brink

Fishing boats on the shores of Kolunga Beach village

( Alexandra Wexler / )

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KOLUNGA BEACH, Kenya — Less than 10 years ago, Kolunga Beach was struggling on the verge of non-existence.

The ravages of HIV/AIDS and a lack of educational opportunities had devastated the population of able working adults in Kolunga Beach, located on the shores of Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria, Kenya.

However, residents like Alphonce Okuku, who started small community initiatives after finishing school, are working hard to bring hope back to their struggling communities.

 “I missed several of my friends who had disappeared or died from HIV/ AIDS,” Okuku said.

In 2003, Okuku’s original, disparate initiatives were reorganized into a single multifaceted, holistic approach to helping the community and renamed Kageno, literally meaning “a place of hope” in the local dialect. Since then, there have been many positive changes in the community, including the reduction of the percentage of people with HIV/AIDS from over 42 percent to just 17 percent.

The Plasse Family Health Clinic, which opened in 2004, now provides an array of services to the community: voluntary counseling and testing, treatment of diseases, immunizations of children, family planning services, prenatal and postnatal care, school health programs and mental and physical care for those who are infected with HIV/AIDS.

Joseph Odiri Ogwela, runs the environmental programs at Kageno and recently sold approximately 50,000 seedlings to the to the Kenyan Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, and several other organizations.

Not only has Ogwela’s tree nursery program reintroduced trees to a once barren village, it also employs local women who receive the proceeds of the sales.

“The women that I work with here, they are very old women, and some of them have lost their children and they are left with some young children to take care of,” said Ogwela. “This little bit of money is very important for them.”

Ogwela also manages a dairy goat program, which loans milk-producing goats to local families so that they can get healthy nourishment and sell the excess until they have made enough to purchase the goat. The goats are also bred, and female kids are passed to other families to continue to benefit the community at large.

Despite these many positive developments, though, the upward trend at Kolunga Beach is stalling.

“Some of the services were not being utilized properly,” said Frank Andolino, the executive director and president of the board of Kageno, which now works with two villages in Kenya (including Kolunga Beach) and one in Rwanda.

In response, Okuku and the rest of the community have decided to begin charging for some of the services that were previously provided for free. These would include nominal fees for sanitized water and the nursery school (except for orphans).

Originally, it was thought that the money coming from the sponsorship of about 40 orphans would be enough to maintain and run the school for all 200 children who attend, but due to the global economic downturn, many people have stopped their orphan sponsorships.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/study-abroad/100830/kenya-rural-urban-hiv-aids