Tembo Board and AGM

Tembo Kenya Board Standing: Peter Kerr, PatriciaCrossley, Helen Goodchild

Seated: Wendy Reimer, Rod Crossley, Nancy Carson, Don Reimer

The Tembo board held the Annual General Meeting in Victoria,BC on September 8 2010. There was a lively exchange of information and attendees applauded the announcement that Tembo should receive its Canadian charitable status by the end of the month.
The meeting approved the installation of Don and Wendy Reimer as new board members. All Board members were introduced individually. (This information will appear on the web site shortly.) The new web site http://www.tembokenya.org/ should be launched this weekend. Patricia gave an overview of last year's activities and the projects planned for October 2010 to March 2011.


Expect an occasional newsletter put together by Don and Wendy Reimer and a Facebook page started by Tanya Harmon.


Nancy Carson announced that she has nominated Patricia for recognition in Champions of Change, sponsored by CBC and ManuLife Canada. If Patricia is one of the ten finalists (in the category of Education-Community-International) then Canadians will be asked to vote. Stay tuned for information.

Looking for teachers!

We are hoping to run seminars in January 2011 for our Kenyan teachers in English Language Arts (elementary) and Math (secondary) . If you have skills and are interested in volunteering in rural Africa for about three weeks, please contact Mary Higbee at jim.higbee(at) yahoo.com

Preparing to return

We will leave Canada on September 24 to return to Kenya. We know we will be busy.

- the well at Imulama where we were blasting collapsed and had to be filled. We will be looking for an alternative solution to supply clean water to this dispensary that serves about 600 people a month.
- we will be administering the remainder of the Rotary International grant for Emmaloba, partnering with Maseno Rotary Club. We will supply computers for the school and help the community with a poultry project, adult literacy, Virtues training and a tree nursery.
- we have received a district Rotary grant to conduct Read for the Top in ten more classrooms
- Virtues training for the clergy will continue.
- in November and February we plan to run seminars on domestic and sexual violence in communities.

We have received generous donations which will help us with water projects, Virtues and business training for women. We are still hoping for continuing donations for education and job training.

Please check our web site at http://www.tembokenya.org/ for details of projects and how you can donate.
We expect to receive charitable status from the Canada Revenue Agency before we leave.

Building Community in Kenya

Please note that our web site is now functional at www.tembokenya.org. Thank you for visiting

Costs--a reminder

Tunashukuru sana --Thank you so much

Anything you could give will help someone. All money donated goes directly to support the work in Kenya.

It costs:
$2500 to put in a well in a village

$ 500 to protect a spring in a community

$ 500 per year for 4 years to send a student to High School and approximately the same amount for some post-secondary programmes

$200 per session to conduct Virtues training in Conflict Resolution and Restorative Justice in schools and communities for up to 40 people

$200 for a woman to receive microloans ranging from $15 to $150

$500 to provide an eyetest & glasses for 100 people

Between $100 and $200 to provide triaining for a trade job such as carpentry, tailoring or commercial driving.

This does not include the many people we help with personal and family difficulties throughout the year.

Home in Canada

We are safely home in Canada and have joyfully reunited with friends and family. Our taxes are done and some speaking engagements already settled. We will speak at the Victoria Rotary Club meeting on April 28, the ACW women's conference on May 4 and briefly at the Virtues Mentors conference at the end of May. We are always happy to accept invitations to present our work.

Fund raising is going to be one of our major preoccupations over the next few months. As soon as possible we'll have a web site running and have some new ideas for it.

We want to continue supplying clean water, education and, if possible, some basic simple housing for the homeless. Two of our Kenyan committee will be looking into the logistics of this while we are away.

We have been offered some land to use for a training centre where we could centralise Virtues teaching as well as instruction for small business. We will need about $2000 for buildings.


We have made a video summary of our work over the last 6 months. It lasts about 20 minutes. If you would like to help spread the word about the work of Tembo Kenya, we can give you the disc with a DVD format. Please let us know at kenyatembo@gmail.com and we will be happy to send you a copy.


We will post from time to time while we are in Canada to let you know what we are planning for our return to Africa next fall.

Our final week

This message will probably be the last one before we leave for Canada. I have nursed my ailing computer over the last months and am looking forward to a repair (which I think unlikely) or a new machine.
Let me tell you about our last week.
On Monday we attended the Read for the Top finals at Emmaloba. Again, a great experience as it was in Mwiyenga. The staff is enthusiastic and the head teacher is already planning how to use the same formula for other subject areas. They want to hold a contest on Science for their grade 8 –the final year before national exams. We left them the bells to use. The principal told us he received a delegation from grade 7, reinforced by the presence of their Peace Keeper, to ask when it would be their turn to compete. (More about Peace Keepers later)

It is customary to 'garland' special guests at a function. (We have a large collection of shiny garlands.) This video shows the chosen students bringing the garlands for me, Rod and the judge.
On Tuesday we interviewed seven young people who had dropped out of school and are jobless. Girls wanted to do tailoring, boys motor mechanics and driving. We can make a difference in someone’s life for little outlay by helping them acquire a skill that will put food on the table. Other organizations offer scholarships for formal education, but these people have no hope unless they receive a little assistance. We are hoping very much that generous donations when we are home in Canada will enable us to continue this.

Last Wednesday we conducted a day of eye testing at Maseno hospital. An American nurse volunteering there set it up for us. We distributed 20 pairs of glasses which improved vision enormously for the people concerned. Most people need reading glasses and we always bring a bunch of the dollar store ones with us. We had a few pairs and left some funds to buy more since we had accumulated a list.
A number of people had problems, mostly cataracts, that we could not help. Some required dark glasses because their eyes were becoming sensitive to the strong sunlight (we are on the equator). We tried to pre-screen for these problems but were not always successful. In addition we spent some time dealing with people who had no real problem but were trying to con us into giving glasses. They claimed not to be able to see the chart but lenses made the problem worse. Go figure. We decided eventually that they wanted the glasses because they were free, or for resale.
We still had a problem with the hand gestures (indicating the direction of the symbol) for some people, many of whom had never been to school and had no idea what to do. In addition there is a real problem distinguishing between 'up' and 'down', 'left' and 'right' We learned to disregard the 'wrong' gestures if they were consistent. We worked from 10 til 5 with a break of about 40 minutes. So we were doing about 3 an hour. Explaining the gestures and trying unsuccessfully to fit people mentioned above took some time.
We left the remaining frames and lenses with the nurse who will be here until July. We leave Kenya next week, so figured it was best to let her use the remaining kit.
At a Virtues seminar on Saturday we saw the teacher who had brought us the children in his school with severe vision problems that I spoke about a few weeks ago. He said the glasses were making a big difference to confidence and self esteem as well as sight.
On Thursday we did our accounts and made cheques for all the scholarships and the maintenance of existing Tembo projects while we are away.
On Friday we met our Tembo advisory committee and gave cheques into their safe keeping. They will pay fees as designated, maintain the library on rabbit keeping, fish farming, poultry etc, collect information about requests for water and educational assistance as well as continuing Virtues training.
On Saturday I conducted my last Virtues seminar for trained teachers on Peace Keeper training and Setting Clear Boundaries. It was a most interesting session. Emmaloba has just established Peace Keepers and there was a report on the process. The other schools attending received sashes for their own Peace squads. The open discussions throughout the meeting gave us many insights into school culture and difficulties in implementing a positive approach to education. We hope to continue the discussion on our email list for those who have access to the internet.

So that was our last full week. The next few days will be spent packing and leaving our apartment in good shape. In other news, ten Cabinet ministers have been implicated in big corruption scandals. Each party is trying to find clues to corruption involvement in the opposing party. In the coalition governement some Ministers belong to one party, others to the other.

At home we have had a big problem with rats in the attic (no connection between these two pieces of news) and have been scattering bait, trusting they will all be gone by our departure next Thursday.

When we are home, we will be setting up the AGM for Tembo and doing as many talks and as much fund raising as possible. Anyone interested in supporting the work of Tembo will be warmly welcomed. Thank you all for your support and prayers. We look forward to hearing from you over the next few months.