Hi

In November, I will be going to Kenya with The Moving Mountains trust.

The Charity

The Moving Mountains trust are a charity based mainly in Kenya & Nepal, helping street children & their families with education, health & welfare, building & promoting environmentally & economically sustainable projects & providing employment & income for a wide range of people caught in the poverty trap.

The Charity also employs some of the children it has supported through school, with jobs through Adventure Alternative, a large safari company in Kenya & also with the Community Action Team, involved in building projects the Charity undertakes.  These schemes allow the individuals to move from reveiving handouts & aid to earning money & respect as an adult.

The Last Trip

On a previous trip to Kenya with MM, I was lucky enough to meet some of the people who benefit directly from the support of the charity.  The main project I was involved in was improving the Ulamba Childrens Orphanage in Western Kenya. The orphanage is home to 24 children from the local area. MM provides running costs for the staff, food & everything the children need from new school uniforms & new shoes.  The orphanage uses local resources & it closely integrated into the local community, making it a productive & sustainable project. My pictures show these happy children in clothes kindly donated on my trip & also the kitchen we helped local builders build. 

This Trip

The project will take place at the Nanyuki Street Childrens Home.  This is a centre that takes in children who have ended up living on the streets, many of whom because they have been orphaned through HIV/AIDS and have nowhere else to go, or they have been abused by their families and run away to the streets. There are huge numbers of street children in Nanyuki and throughout Kenya, and it is incredibly hard to help them as many have lived on the streets for so long that they cannot cope or adjust to the structure of living in a home or boarding school.  The children that come to the Nanyuki centre do so voluntarily and are offered counselling and rehabilitation as well as education, accommodation and food.

Involvement with this project is still in its infancy so as such, the support the charity provides is physical in the form of building and renovation work.  The hope is that in the future once the charity has built up a good trusted relationship with the local commuity, staff and town council, to expand the support they provide, perhaps through sponsorship for some of the older kids to go to secondary school, or in salaries for additional staff. 

Another aspect of this trip again involves the children from Ulamba Orphanage.  Many of the Children & staff from the orphanage will not have ventured far from their local area so we will be taking the children to enjoy their first trip to the seaside! Many of them can't swim so will need to be closely supervised - children & staff!

In order to do these projects, of course, takes money, which is where your help come in.  Any amount you contribute, big or small, will be split, some going towards the cost of taking the kids from the orphanage to the coast, some for the project in Nanyuki and the remainder to Moving Mountains to contribute towards the ongoing monthly outgoings of the charity for things like school and college fees, medical costs, the running cost for the orphanage, rescue centres amd clinics which we run throughout Kenya.  All worthy causes I know you'll agree.

Thank you for reading & I hope to see your name on the donations page soon.

The link below will provide you with further information on Moving Mountains:

http://www.movingmountains.org.uk/index.html