OUR COMMUNITY
Lomolo ‘A’ is a village on the border of the Nakuru and Baringo Counties in Mogotio, Kenya, about 210 kms north west of Nairobi. We felt led to join God in His transformational work among this Kalenjin tribe - an ethnic group of Nilotic origin.
Each one of the families in this community have been evicted from the Mau Forest, some as many as four times over many, many years. During the post-election violence in 2008 they got displaced again, until a few years ago when the Government issued each family with a two-and-a-quarter-acre piece of land.
Many of the people in this marginalized community are isolated, with limited access to basic needs like food and water. This lack of opportunities leads to cycles of poverty.
The more we interact with the people of this community, the more we came to see evidence of oppression of the poor, the slave, and the blind. However, God also opened our eyes to see the evidence of Him already at work. The process of building relationships with local change makers has helped us to identify where we should focus in the areas of Food, Freedom and Forgiveness.
Our main desire is for people to be discipled and learn the ways of God, so organic conversations as well as regular meetings, prayer walks and Bible Studies have been a huge part of our journey together and form the backbone of the integrated community development we so desire to see.
OUR WORK
With the help of Joseph Soi, the chairman of Lomolo, and Leonard Kipkoren, the Asst-Chief, we recognized a few areas where community development is desperately needed:
- Although there’s a borehole in Lomolo ‘A’, the people on the outskirts of the village still do not have access to it as it’s too far to walk. They therefore have to make use of public motorbikes ‘pikipiki’ to bring them water and this obviously works out very costly. The borehole also feeds members of neighboring villages, so we desperately need more solar-powered boreholes in the area as we still don’t have electricity.
- We have identified 84 vulnerable local farmers who do not have the means to utilize the 2-acre piece of land. For the past two years we’ve been working with One Collective to establish a farming cooperative scheme where local farmers would be assisted with maize and bean seeds as well as fertilizer and then give back 20% to help recycle the funds. The dream was that they would be self-sufficient within a period of three years. However, this initiative has not been successful due to numerous challenges … during both years late and little rain, army worms and other pests have destroyed most of the crops. Despite the fact that people suffered failed crops, they exceeded all expectations by still paying back the 20%. Although this is a huge sign and testimony of spiritual growth, it is still painful to observe as they only harvested 15% of what they potentially could get.
- Because of point no 2, we need to think outside of the box for sure and come up with a whole new strategy which can be implemented by the farmers in an arid land such like Lomolo. We see the need for a piece of land where we can experiment with different crops, fish farming, etc while providing work for locals.
- Due to a lack of water in the arid area people do not have gardens to plant basic vegetables. We have installed several drip-irrigation systems which proved somehow successful and has definitely helped. Families are joyfully building fences and buy buckets to show how they’re taking responsibility, but because they don’t have the means to fix proper fences that can keep out the animals, chickens, goats and sheep regularly break through and destroy their vegetables. We are thankful for lovely relationships that have been formed through this initiative.
