Village builds its own future

RABUOR, Kenya Loyce Mbewa-Ong’udi was late. Family and friends milled around her parents’ house in the green hills overlooking Lake Victoria, waiting for the daughter from America to return home.

Loyce Mbewa-Ong’udi was late. Family and friends milled around her parents’ house in the green hills overlooking Lake Victoria, waiting for the daughter from America to return home.

At last, the taxi bounced over the ruts and made a sharp turn into the compound of small brick and stucco houses. Loyce sprang out to a shower of greetings in the Luo language, hugs, helping hands for 12 enormous suitcases crammed with anti-AIDS medicines, asthma inhalers, storybooks, pencils and sharpeners, and recycled eyeglasses.

The supplies were for the Rabuor Village Project, which Loyce runs. In the crowd, she sought the woman who started it all: her mother, Rosemell Ong’udi.

This is the story of a village, spurred by two extraordinary women, rising from the depths of the AIDS epidemic to build a future for itself. In 10 years, with hardly any international aid, this poor farming community has founded a nursery school and feeding program, a pharmacy, a youth group and income-generating projects. The work touches more than 10,000 people in 10 villages and keeps growing.

But it’s not just a list of projects; it’s a change of heart. Rabuor’s work embodies what experts consider potentially the most effective approach to development: “community-owned” programs in which residents, not just donors, set the priorities, and change comes from the bottom up.

District Commissioner Godfrey Kigochi, senior Kenya government official for Kisumu West, says he wishes he had a project like this in every village.

Organizations that give money or lend expertise to the Rabuor project - Slum Doctors, Lift Kids, Pangea, Architects Without Borders - say the group is unique for its pragmatism and deep community roots.

The Rev. Charles Ong’injo, who blessed the work from the start, is helping other congregations launch similar projects.

Kenya’s AIDS rate has fallen since the 1990s, and far more people today are willing to go for testing and treatment. Still, about 14 percent of the district’s 160,000 people are infected, double the national rate.

The Rabuor project is about a lot more than AIDS prevention: It’s about people learning that they can better their own lives.

Loyce, 52, bounds into a meeting and revs up the team, with the energy of the field hockey and track competitor she used to be.

Rosemell, 69, tall and sturdy, brings a quiet wisdom instead. She speaks in a girlish voice, and her laugh rumbles soft and low.

She began back in the 1990s, when AIDS was ripping the heart out of almost every family here. Yet people barely whispered about it because prostitutes and truckers were the early conduits of the disease.

Rosemell didn’t talk about AIDS either, but she talked about the orphans it left behind. She recalls that the children were “very bad in their bodies” because they didn’t have enough food.

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