Limerick Post reporter Bernie English has returned from a stint with Building for Hope in Kenya
“Mustapha – I need three bags of cement, quick – put them in a toc toc and send them across on the ferry”. It’s not an order you hear everyday but this is Kenya, where everything is “poli, poli” – “slowly, slowly”
Architect with the Building of Hope project in Kenya, Jim Lynch, is under serious pressure.
We are the fourth group of volunteers from all over the country to arrive in Linkoni, Mombassa where our task is to finish building a school and home for blind orphans.
The building is up but there are no partitions in the toilets, the walls are only roughly plastered, the electrics need to be done, there’s tiling to finish, glass to go in the windows, paint is needed everywhere and landscaping and planting to do. And we 50 volunteers have eight days to do it.
The toc toc is a three-wheeled taxi and the ferry in question is the one which brings thousands of souls, jammed together and hanging off rails, to and from the city every day.
We arrived on the same ferry yesterday to be told that sharks had devoured two men whose boat capsized in that stretch of water earlier in the week.
This is the culmination of a dream which started two years ago. The Building of Hope charity was set up to build community facilities for some of the poorest areas in Africa and on the second project, Irish volunteers built a polytechnic in nearby Migombani.
On that trip, we were invited to meet the beautiful children at the school for the blind. Hard men cried when they saw the conditions. Sleeping three to a bunk with no sheets, no running water for showers or to flush toilets, nothing to cook on but an open fire pit and classrooms where lumps of the ceiling regularly fell in.
There was no question but that we were coming back.
The hotel has provided a special early breakfast from 4.30 am for the duration of the project and we are on-site each day just after 6am. 
By noon, the temperatures are in the high 30’s and the heat is unbelievable. We’re scraping the rough lumps off the plaster and looking through the window, I’m met with the incredible sight of a man standing up to his waist in the waters of the shark infested lagoon. He’s fishing to feed his family, one of the locals explains. There’s no dole in Kenya.
The children are at lessons in their old school and the largest room has been converted to a kitchen and store.
As volunteers come and go for tea beaks and lunch, the youngsters reach hands through windows, wanting to touch us. Each child wants to know the volunteers’ names, to touch hands and faces, to know who these crazy Mazungas (white people) are, who came half way around the world to help them.
It’s impossible to be stand-offish with the tactile youngsters. What they lack in vision, they make up for vocally. They sing like angels, forming the choir for the Mass said by Bishop Willie Walshe in the open air on Sunday. Afterwards we feed them scones made by Limerick volunteer Mary O’Shea from the Ennis Road and her kitchen team.
One of the smallest, Anne, an Albino child is just five years old. She crawls up on my lap to eat and promptly snuggles in and falls asleep there.
Project doctor, Rory O’Keeffe, explains about the brown blotches on her skin. “Those a melanomas. There’s nothing we can do to prevent the Albino children getting skin cancer,” he says. There’s no money for sun block and not enough teachers to make sure the children keep sun-hats on.
Abdul’s limbs stick out at peculiar angles and it’s evident from his face that he is severely mentally handicapped as well as blind. The strangely shaped limbs his teacher explains, are the result of his mother breaking his bones to try to kill him at birth. Handicapped children are though to be bad luck for African families.
As we get to know the children, they tell us of their ambitions to become teachers, doctors, nurses. The school will give them their chance. If they don’t find their way here, they become beggars.
The school grounds border a dump and one of the saddest sights each day is that of the street children, foraging on piles of rotting rubbish to try to find something to exchange for food.
On our second day as the bus arrives, Dr Rory brings me across the dump to what looks like a heap of sacks.
When the heap of sacks smiles, I realise it’s a man and he has the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. We’re making the security guards on the site nervous and they come over.
This is dangerous territory for Mazungos, they explain. People will come out of the bush and mug you. But they’re patient enough to translate questions to Victor, for that’s his name.
We discover that he has been living on the dump for two years but that he once had a home and a job. A witchdoctor cursed him, he says, and now he talks to God via the telegraph poles.
Soon, he says, God will come to take him away and he won’t be hungry any more. There’s no free mental health service in Africa.
The building site is a dangerous place even for the craftsmen used to working in these conditions but each night, the brave, resourceful children sneak out and feel their way around to inspect progress.
Sliding sensitive fingertips across polished tiles and feeling floor finishes, they bring updates on the work back to the housemother she tells us.
It’s five days in and there is a serious amount of work still to finish, so volunteers agree that they will put in 13 hour days instead of eight, and by a some miracle, everything is ready for the opening day.
We don crisp cotton dresses and good trousers instead of the dust and paint encrusted clothes we have been wearing for more than a week .
Bishop Wilie Walshe cuts the ribbon and the children are brought on the official tour of their new home. Someone turns the water on in a shower cubicle and the little ones start screaming and jumping in delight. One little lad throws himself under the pouring water, clothes and all, dancing with delight. The fundraising, the travel and the work in the blistering heat have all been worth it. We’ve changed his world.
