weekend in kakamega

Hello Friends!
Steven and I are happy to report we had a very productive and successful weekend, which was much needed after my spell of homesickness and demoralization :)
A little background: Steven is working on starting a small shop in Luwanda, a village near us, to sell Mother's Union crafts. The MU is a group of women volunteers that care for orphans (usually from AIDS) and they make and sell crafts to support themselves. The MU is overseen by the Anglican Church, so ultimately the Bishop is in charge. Now the Bishop is a pompous and condecsending man, but only slightly corrupt, which is a blessing I suppose. Anyway, when he heard about the store, he said we couldn't work on it until we fixed up the store in Kakamega first (which is his hometown). It's over an hour away, which is a long way on crater-filled roads. We found his "bookshop" with a small amount of dusty anglican church books spread across a large amount of shelf space, and then the beautiful mother's union crafts piled in the filthy corners. One third of the store was being used as junk storage, so we started with dragging a fridge, motorbike, stove, and ton of garbage out to the trash. It ended up turning out really nice though. We put the books in the back of the store, and the crafts in the front, so you had to walk through the crafts to get a book. We got the idea from milk placement in american grocery stores :)

While we were still setting up a woman walked in for a book and ended up buying a basket as well. The shopkeeper, Elizabeth, got a big smile on her face and gave me a thumbs up behind our shopper's back and whispered, "it's working!" When the bishop came in to inspect, he said he was "starting to like it" but it needed more books. Not my problem sir! He suggested maybe we write a grant for some more books for the shop to sell. Yeah right! Like any grant is going to give money to a well-off bishop to sell for a profit. Hah! But it was nice to get something done, and now we can start on the Luwanda store. It was nice to go on a little trip as well, and we had lots of fun with Mary and Jim. We'll keep you updated!

jess and steven