How many times have you said, "I'm starving!"?  Problem hundreds and yet you most likely had a refrigerator fairly well stocked with food, cupboards filled with snacks and a variety of things to drink.  What would you have felt like if your stomach was growling and you had no refrigerator, no cupboards and nothing to drink.  For many of our Kenyan sisters and brothers this is the norm.  In a harsh and cruel land where rain seldom appears and where few people travel starvation is a reality.

The orphanage children of Pokot Outreach Ministries are among the luckier Pokot.  They have a roof over their heads, caring and compassionate caretakers and the love of many Christians in the western world who help to supply financial resources that enable them to have clean drinking water and the funds to purchase food when it is available.  But, even for these children, food shortages are a huge problem.  When I was at Kodich this past summer the well wasn't producing, there were about 20 drops of rain in a ten day period and there were two different times in that short period where the children had only a small bowl of corn meal mush in the morning and nothing else for the rest of the day.  The depressing part of this story is that it was rainy season!  Crops should have been almost ready to harvest, but without rain they weren't growing and even the trees were starting the shrivel.  The saving grace for these children was that there was some outside global assistance food that they received periodically and the military brought in water pumpers to refill the long empty water tanks.

For those who live deep in the bush, however, life is even more difficult. The tribe are primarily pastoralists and families are frequently broken up as the males take the herds miles away in search of water.  This year the drought has been particularly bad and many of the herds have been greatly reduced.  These people need your prayers - we can't feed the entire Pokot nation, but we have an obligation to feed the children has given us to shepherd.  If you would like to be a part of assisting these children please click below:

Orphanage assistance

If you would like to read more about the current crisis in East Africa please click here to read an article published in The Independent, a British newspaper.