Monday

The alarm clock wakes me at 5:30am for a morning prayer, as I warm my bath water on the charcoal stove. I do house chores while the two orphaned girls I stay with help with feeding the chickens, the puppies and preparing tea or porridge for our breakfast. A walk to the office gets me there soon after 8.00am and a chapel meeting is held every day between 8:30 and 9:00am for bible sharing, prayers and sharing weekend family experiences.

Sophie Redempta

On Mondays the Imani team makes appointments to visit 2 of the women’s groups to review their various farming and income generating activities and a new youth group, God Agulu, who have just joined Imani. A visit to the Konyuka Women’s Group involves not only training the group but also school children and other members of the wider community.

Training with the Lake Women Group involves a lot of nutritional food preparation, presentation, packaging and utilization. Due to networking, Imani has created a ready market for the new grain amaranth, enabling members to have confidence in the crop.

Fieldwork ends somewhere between 3:30 and 5:30pm depending on weather, distance or topics to be covered. A small walk to the open air market enables me to pick up some food for supper, which we have at 7:00pm, watch the news on television, and compile a short report for the day’s field visit.

The Imani team visit an old disabled widow

Tuesday

Tuesday is always an office day for Imani. We compare and discuss the reports of the previous week for every field visit. Sometimes we must take a collective decision about certain issues, especially in conflict resolution. However, a lot of concern is given to identify vulnerable people and networking together to find assistance for such people.

This is also a day for meeting group officials if they want to come to the office. Other members of the community also visit us to consult if we could find some time to train or give a talk to their groups, or sometimes a whole group decides to come, to discuss whether we would accept to work with them. Development organizations within and out of the district also find time on Tuesdays to come to learn from the Imani methodology of entry into the community. This is also the day when the staff share reports about prospective collaborators and if there are any relevant seminars or training.

In the afternoon Kennedy and Erick remain in the office to attend to people, while Sophie, Priscilla and Eunice go to meet the women at the market to assist them to keep the trend in the changes of prices, especially for those who want to take or send their vegetables to Nairobi. We assist them to co-ordinate by phone, book space for their sacks of vegetables and ensure there is someone at the other end ready to buy them as soon as the bus arrives, so that the women can collect their money and travel back home to look after their children.

Wednesday

Early on I meet the Josga Women Group, which does not work directly with Imani but we assist them as a savings and credit group and we introduced them to the Kenya Women Finance Trust. We are there to help them with logistics, bookkeeping, ensure proper banking and that loans and savings are paid at the right time. Wednesdays are also days for 3 more groups:

• Pendo Letu with their bead making are almost independent, except they still need assistance with marketing.
• Ten Mothers is actively involved in Home Based Care, agriculture and nutrition and I visit them when they need training in food preparation and presentation.
• Beula Women get busy along with me over the weekends, offering catering services at weddings or funerals as an income generating activity. On Wednesdays, they work at the group farm and also assist the vulnerable amongst them.

My Wednesday evening/night is spent checking email and browsing the Internet for prospective collaborators, especially for training purposes. I then print some of these for discussion with the staff on Friday. It is through the support and enabling relationship with Amani UK that we are able to collaborate with others to complement the work started by Amani UK in our community.

Thursday

Thursdays are days for another 3 groups:

• Simbiri is far off, so I only go once a month, especially to oversee the pawpaw fruit project which we are trying to start up.
• Assisi does its alternative nutrition classes on Thursdays and they need my input in food preparation and presentation. Apart from that, Joan the nurse likes me to go round with her to issue medicine to bed ridden patients and I assist her in dressing wounds.
• Mang’ang’a is growing into a strong youth group and my only reason for frequent visits is to see that the nursery children are properly fed in a new programme we have just started. There is also a roof water catchment project on-going which I have to check.

The Mangan’ga  Nursery School run by the Youth Group

If we have any collaborators, we like to go out with them to the groups on Thursdays, especially if they provide us transport to go as far as Simbiri, to experience what we do in this dry area.

Friday

Fridays are market days, so we let the women go to the market. For us it is an office day when we plan the field visits for the next week. Any group members who need consultation also come on Fridays. We do our transport plans for the next week so that we know who will travel where and when and who will represent the organisation in different events.

We close the office by about 3.30pm in order to meet group members who do business at the market and to give time for those of us who go for catering, to plan and prepare and gather the women.

Saturday

If I am not doing catering services, I clean the house where I stay and catch up with the laundry and ironing of my clothes ready for the next week. Sometimes I work in the garden if it’s not very hot. In the afternoon, I have to look at the books of the girls I stay with, and give them encouragement in their school work.

Sunday

I go to church between 7:30 – 9:00am in the morning and take a late breakfast, feed the chicken and puppies, and then go to the shops to distribute the eggs from the chicken. I also catch up with the week’s newspapers.

In the afternoon, I attend our church group meeting for fellowship for about an hour, then I come back home to do sewing of bags, which may go on until late in the night.

Sophie Redempta
Imani Project Manager