Members of the Peacemakers UK Team visited Kenya in February & March this year to oversee the work and progress of the Centre. You will see from the photograph below, that the Prayer House was near completion.


Peacemakers International - Runyenjes Prayer House.

Pastor Selesio Njiriru, one of the Peacemakers’ Team in Kenya, is in the foreground.  He is soon to retire from his secular job in Nairobi and will be able to serve the community full time.  Also our long standing friend Patrick Nyaga Kavunguru.  We are all anxious to see this project and vision completed and fully functional and for the local community to be responsible, serving with their gifts, meeting the local needs and for the people locally to benefit.


One of the side rooms for the abandoned baby unit.

I'm now able to inform you that 3 months on, the Prayer House has been finished, the ground around is being leveled, concreted and grassed, followed by the planting of flowers and shrubs.

The furnishings will be purchased within the next 2 months and the Prayer House ready to be used as a retreat and a place for the youth in the area to gather.  The Prayer House will be a multi purpose building and the youth will be able to turn it into a Theatre and perform plays from time to time. It will also be hired out for weddings, conferences etc., as a means of raising money and making it self supportive.

There are 3 adjacent rooms around the rear of the Prayer House, one of them will be turned into an ‘Abandoned Baby’ Refuge/Counseling room, the second a temporary office/side room to stage and the third, which opens into the interior of the Prayer House, a store room/stage.


The land for phase 2 and 3 - a bit of a challenge to say the least!

Draft plans have been drawn up for the second phase and transferred to Kenya for a local Architect to draw and submit for planning permission.

Brenda Marshall

This year has been difficult for most people , if not all, with the credit crunch and people losing their jobs and homes, but despite all this, friends of Peacemakers have continued supporting financially and sponsoring a whole variety of projects.

 
For the full story - please click on the link below.

This time we were doing a similar thing but the Optician was a Kenyan, whose name was James. He actually was also a retired surgeon. Accompanying us too were Christine, a retired Administrator and Elizabeth, a Practice nurse from Great Amwell. Christine worked in the Optician's room whilst Liz assisted me on a part time basis. There were several young Kenyans on hand to assist with translations. 

The first day at the eye clinic was pretty steady, patients walking various distances from Runyenjes and Embu to have a free eye test and if needed a free pair of glasses. But then of course word got out on the Kenyan grapevine that we were carrying out these free eye tests and boy the next day they were queuing from 7.30 in the morning!

Thankfully the weather picked up too, because the first two weeks in August in Kenya had been pretty cold, but we were told that it could be cool at this time of year. They also had had a reasonable amount of rain which was unusual. We started the day at roughly 8:00am to 8.30 and finished at 5:00pm. The majority of the patients we saw were either Cataract or Glaucoma patients but we did have to carry out a minor operation or should I say the Optician did with the help of Christine. The patient had managed to get a husk of a small plant (unsure what plant) imbedded in his eye which the Optician managed to remove thankfully, and I should think the patient was pretty glad too.

We bought the glasses through donations to Peacemakers. The total number of patients seen were 750, 622 of these received glasses. Patients needing Cataract operations came to 25 and 6 Glaucoma. So I think the majority of patients went away happy. The good news is that we have been able to underwrite all of the Glaucoma and 6 of the Cataract operations.

The Snellen Eye Charts were provided free of charge by Vision Aid International.