COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

With funds raised at a special chapel service, the Baylor Men’s Choir was able to provide new desks for students and teachers in the village school and to repair a wall in one of the school buildings. They were able to buy chickens so village women could sell eggs and to provide beehives so the men could collect and sell honey. The students and villagers also set up a garden, but it was destroyed by a flood in 2018. A doctor accompanied the 2017 Men’s Choir trip and conducted a clinic in the village. Brenda Bradley raised funds to buy shoes for village children.

In 2019 another group of Baylor music students visited Komolion. With funds the students raised and money from Komolion Human Development Fund, the village was provided with beans and rice, children’s underwear, washable menstrual kits, pencils and erasers for schoolchildren, and medicines for a one-day clinic staffed by Kenyan providers. The students also helped replace a cement floor in a school building. The Fund built a residence for two teachers to live in the village, expanded the kitchen where the children’s lunches are prepared, provided treadle sewing machines for two girls training as tailors and paid them to make new school uniforms for all village boys. The group also brought 300 girls’ dresses made by women in the US.

We will be able to continue with community development work only if we can continue to raise funds beyond what is needed for the girls’ tuition and for the coming-of-age ceremonies that substitute for female genital mutilation.