Esther's Family
Esther is 70 and is looking after her two grandchildren, Ruth (8) and David (17) because both their parents have died of HIV/AIDs. She is also looking after Hannah (10) and Cecilia (12) the children of a friend who has also died.
They live in a small wattle and daub house in the village of Gatundu, not far from Thika, Kenya. Estherrelies on the product of a quarter of an acre of land on which she tries to grow beans and maize and she has an avocado tree, which when harvested, will give her just 5 pence for each perfect one picked. The rejects they eat themselves.
Unusually for them, there is a drought in her area at present and when we visited her in March the ground was parched and hard and her crops were failing for lack of water. She was relying on the gifts of others to survive. Her little house has no water supply and no power so she has to pay for drinking water (about £3.00 per month) but she cannot afford to irrigate her land now that her rainwater harvesting tank is dry.
She had been selected by the parish social worker as one who would greatly benefit from the gift of a cow and so her local church had contributed 25% towards the purchase of a milking cow costing around £250 and you gave the other 75%! The parish also built her a cow stall.
Esther was beside herself as she looked at her cow, which will produce about 20 litres of milk each day soon and said that she would supplement the children’s diet with some of the milk and sell the rest locally for about 20 pence per bottle to keep the youngsters in school. She had had a cow once before but it had died and she did not have any money to replace it.
We just wish we could have captured the look on her face when we heard that people from England were so concerned about her and other grandparents, they had given money to help her!
Names and Photograph have been changed for child protection reasons.