27^th of May:

We visited the slum of Jamanoor again today but this time we went to have a meeting which we organised with the people living there. We met with the village elders and they outlined the main obstacles that they are facing and the problems that arise from these. They split these problems into four main categories which I will explain below.

 Education:

Almost nobody in Jamanoor has formal education. There is one woman who is a secretary and has graduated secondary school but apart from here nobody has graduated. One man made it to second class, another to fourth class and a third to eighth class but none of these men made it further. Therefore the chances of any of the people living here getting satisfactory jobs are near to impossible. Because of this lack of education they also lack a lot of basic knowledge such as simple hygiene and ways to improve their living situation.

Health:

On the 26^th of May a necessary pump in the well for the village broke. Therefore the people have had no water since then. They had been going into the forest which is beside their village to get water from a reservoir there. Elderly people cannot make the journey to this water source so they were left without water. Even the water that is here is not clean or healthy because mud seeps into it and animals such as cows use it as well.

                                                                                                                                        There are no toilets in the village so people must relieve themselves on the ground. Many of them go into the forest to do this and then when there are heavy rains and it floods with excrement is added to the water source that they drink from. Some have described this water to be a brown/red colour. Drinking this water has caused for many people to suffer from stomach ages, cholera and diarrhoea. Not having any toilets has also attracted many insects to the village.

Housing:

The people are living in the houses which are made by digging a hole in a circle and then placing sticks in this hole which then bend towards themselves which makes a dome shape. This is then covered with rubbish bags and plastic sheets. These houses cannot keep insect out therefore one of the biggest problems in Jamanoor are jiggers, which I have preiously talked about.

                         These houses do not have proper protection against the rain so when the rain is very heavy the water gathers on the floor and this flows into their house and gathers there on the floor where people sleep. This is a huge factor to the spread of malaria. Some people then try to sleep outside but because of the excrement in the area it attracts termites and these bite the people when they try to sleep outside. Bed bugs and flees also live in the houses because of the dirt and mosquitoes are a problem and people don’t have protective nets.

                                     Because of the water that flows into people’s houses pneumonia has become a problem because they are very cold. Their clothes are wet almost all of the time. People have tried to put up newspaper to keep out the rain but this hasn’t worked.

Land Rights:

Even though the people living here have lived here for over 50 years they don’t actually own the land. It is government land so it is owned by them and they are renting it out to another man. He grows maize on it but he allows the people to live there. Therefore we cannot actually start doing development work on it until we have been given the go ahead by the government.

                         We have been to the government about this but they have proved to be very uncooperative. They said that they cannot do any work here until they have a profile on the people who live here. They asked us asked us to first get many statistics for them before we can move any further such as the population of the village. This information they should already have because it is a community of people in the area that they are governing. We have gotten these and given it to them but since then they haven’t contacted us about making further progress.

                                             There is a strip of land running down Jamanoor which is no man’s land, nobody owns it. Therefore we can start building things on this land whenever we want because since nobody owns it then nobody will mind if we do what we want with it.

Income Source:

The people living here have no source of income. This is largely due to the fact that it is very for them to get a job since they have no education. Many of them get their income from begging in Kitale town but the little money they get from that must all go into food so they have no money surplus. They want to start small businesses which is similar to what we did in Kipsongo.

29^th of May:

We went to Jamanoor again today to have another meeting but this time the meeting was with the women of the village rather than the elders. We gave them a briefing on what we discussed during the last meeting. We then asked them what methods any of them have for earning an income apart from begging. Some of them collect firewood in the forest and sell it in the town. Two of them saved up some money from doing this. One of them travelled to Ludwa to sell fish but she had to come back to Kitale because she became sick. The other used the money to open up her own kiosk from where she sells brooms. Another woman helps farmers by digging for them and another went door to door cleaning clothes for people.

              We then split the women into three groups and asked them if they could come up with any businesses they could start. We explained that if they work together as a community they have a higher chance of being a successful business. None of them had thought of doing this before because they would get money on their own to spend on their family. They came up with businesses by selling soap, charcoal, fish, beads, plastic shoes, tomatoes and jelly. It is important that we get them to come up with the ideas themselves otherwise they would grow become empowered. We said we would think about the ideas they gave us and get back to them soon.

                                                                          We then went around the slum to cure the people there of jiggers. Some of these people we attended to last week and some were new people. It usually takes two sessions to fully sure a person so some of these people are now cleared of it. The man who I talked about last week who was very badly affected is now doing much better. He can walk fine now which he couldn’t do last week and most of the affected areas have cleared up very well. For him it will still take another session before he is fully cleared but he has made a huge improvement which is great to see