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SamwelKongere is leading our work on a variety of projects with the people of Rusinga Island in Kenya, in Lake Victoria, near Mbita.

Latest News

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mendenyo/message/1185

Fri Jan 25, 2008 2:08 am

Dear All Samuel seems to be getting a lot better now. He is in a men's ward in the Kendu Bay Adventist hospital. His wife Lillian is still with him and he says his children are fine, he has been able to phone them.

his eyes are okay a apart from the left one. He's had 2 drops in that.

Dear All

As I am assessing the situation today from Mbita-Rusinga Island, I need to recommend and thank our team for the serious efforts you’ve taken to help us get food, transport, medicine, and airtime which is being used as a bargaining chip to buy food etc. So sending that is not a bad idea....

The frustrated youths of the Kalenjin tribe are in the center of the country and frustrating all of the transport which is worsening the food shortages and could lead to renewed violence. Yes! I agree but we need to focus now on the long term projections. Can we stop here and check our ground interventions through MS? One; as Ken puts it; it is going to be very dangerous when some hooligans find you having cash’ you will be robbed and even pay dangerously. We can access the situation on ground the send direct funds now to respective districts and save some little for those whoever may need for airtime. As I talked with Grace, she mentioned some youths are worried and cannot consent their mobile numbers. Aftermath results shows people are scared.

I trust the leadership of Andrius, Dennis Kimambo, Wesley Cebbi, Ken Owino in transfer of money. I think we re-infocus for a long term lasting solution, which we can only get through the NGOs working in different parts of the country to source out the real cause of flawed animosity which Kenya realized in the last five days and so we can control the money to involve as many people, get news about who can help and who needs help among the Kalenjin, keep asking if they would let us share their telephone numbers and keep rewarding those who do and who point us out further to the harder to reach. So we're using all the talents of our laboratory for reaching out. Excellent. I am tired and going to rest I was able to send airtime to the following:

• Prossy +254720535754 500.00
• Francis Opiyo+254725873 500.00
• Job Odero +254721254959 500.00
• Tom Ochuka +254724813086 200.00

January 4 or so... +254 725 600 439 SamwelKongere in Rusinga Island on Lake Victoria near Mbita Point. We spoke in the morning but he didn't answer in the evening. Samwel is safe and he will try to write in the coming days.

RusingaIsland

Thanks for the kind interest you have shown on us. We count it all joy and this is one of the most privileges I had never had ever. Please let’s take you through our Island and where we are…

We live in Kenya, the western part of the country. We are in one of the eight provinces of Kenya called Nyanza Province. In Nyanza we live in Suba District, Mbita division and in Rusinga Island. Rusinga Island has two locations with a total of 6 sub-locations.

The island is one of the 16 Islands in Lake Victoria. The island is connected by a causeway to the main land. The causeway was built in the year 1982. The island is 43KM² in size with a rapidly growing population of approximately 20,000 people. It had an intermittent rainfall of less than 1000mm p.a. The Island has one season for planting each year with always poor harvest now for the last five years. The major crops grown include sorghum, maize, beans and cowpeas. The major economic activity of the Islanders is fishing and small scale horticultural farming. The majority of people cannot farm at the lake shore because of the hippopotamus menace.

The Island has a serious disease burden and malnutrition. The major diseases in the island includes Malaria (45% prevalence rate), HIV/AIDS with 30% prevalence rate among other tropical diseases. There are 17 primary schools and each has a kindergarten, one village youth polytechnic and 5 secondary schools. The Under Five Mortally Rate in the Island is 165:1000. The Island has 76% people who live below the poverty line (get less than 1US$ daily for their basic needs). The Rusinga Island people speak Luo as tribal language, Kiswahili as national Language and English as the official language.

The island is challenged with the high number of the orphaned children; this is characterized by at least two burials of parents every week. The HIV/AIDS pandemic and its effects are seriously felt in Rusinga Island. Suba district is known as leading in Under Five Mortally Rate, and poor immunization in the country.

Lack of Information centres and lack of market information makes it very hard to go through development and creating a technology hub can make the community informed and can raise the Education Levels.

Thanks so much and this forms our first trip to Rusinga Island. There is a lot about Rusinga Island in terms of myths, stories e.g. proconsuls, animals and other interesting stories that can be said when requested. Feel free to ask any other information about us and our surrounding.

SamwelKongere

Thanks for that page for me and my home area, I am working on some modalities and would want you to get infomation about Rusinga Island. I have also tried to login but it is not coming my way, give me further Instuctions and how to make it possible for me to Upload later. I like that page and I need to give you more Information about Rusinga because many activities are going on which is through created by the open leader forum here. SamwelKongere

UnknownPhotographer

Resources

AIDS in Kenya: Glimmers of Hope

United Nations role in the AIDS fight with special reference to Kenya. Andrius: Note the importance of focusing attention on women and girls because the AIDS pandemic is driven by their vulnerability and all that makes them vulnerable. Is there a way to focus our support on grandmothers? To link computers with girls?

Dear All,

Something more about Rusinga

Yes, we are doing well in Mbita. Below have a look at the historic nature of Mbita community:

Rusinga Island, with an elongated shape approx. 10 miles (16 km) from end to end and 3 miles (5 km) at its widest point, lies in the eastern part of Lake Victoria at the mouth of the Winam Gulf. Part of Kenya, it is linked to Mbita Point on the mainland by a causeway. The local language is Luo, although the ancestors of the current inhabitants were Suba people who came in boats several hundred years ago from Uganda as refugees from a dynastic war. Many Rusinga place names betray Suba origins, including the island's name itself and its central peak, Lunene. As of 2006, estimates of Rusinga's population range between 20,000 and 30,000.

Rusinga is widely known for its extraordinarly rich and important fossil beds of extinct Miocene mammals, dated to 18 million years, where Mary Leakey discovered the first complete skull of the "stem hominoid" Proconsul in 1948. More than 10,000 fossils are now known from five major sites, with abundant hominoids including an almost complete skeleton of a second species of Proconsul, as well as Nyanzapithecus, Limnopithecus, Dendropithecus and Micropithecus, all of which show arboreal rather than terrestrial adaptations. The first true monkeys do not appear until around 15 million years, so it is widely supposed that the diverse Early Miocene African hominoids like those found on Rusinga filled that adaptive niche, and subsequently gave rise to both cercopithecids (Old World monkeys) and hominids (great apes and humans).

The fossil beds are layers of volcanic ash produced by a succession of explosive eruptions during the earliest stages of a volcano that eventually covered an area 75 miles in diameter. The volcano is now eroded down to the frozen magma in its vent that makes up the Kisingiri hills on the mainland opposite Rusinga, and the surrounding remnants of the cone: the semicircular Rangwa mountain range, and the islands of Rusinga and neighboring Mfwangano. This rift valley volcano on the southern flank of the now-inactive Winam Gulf tapped much deeper in the mantle than oceanic or subduction zone volcanos, and its lavas and explosive ash clouds thus contained much more carbonate and alkali than normal. This meant that even though

the Miocene environment was a tropical rainforest, the chemistry of the successive ash beds was that of a desert dry lake, preserving everything from caterpillars and berries to apes and elephants in an unusual situation found only in a few other East African ex-volcanos, notably Menengai and Homa Mountain in western Kenya, Napak and Mount Elgon in Uganda, and the much younger Oldoinyo Lengai in Tanzania, which created the fossil beds of Olduvai Gorge. Pleistocene mammal fossils, including an extinct antelope known nowhere else, are also common in former shoreline deposits around the edges of the island, left behind as Lake Victoria has slowly subsided over the centuries due to erosion in its outlet.

Most residents of Rusinga make their living from subsistence agriculture (maize and millet), as well as fishing. The native tilapia is still caught, though this species (like all others native to the lake) has been decimated by the voracious Nile perch that was introduced into the lake in 1954. Constant onshore winds cool the lakeward side of the island aand this can be a good site show when you visit Us any time anywhere.

Samwel

Dear All,

I am happy with the expected overlaps between, my community and FantsuamFoundation and this A great venture to me anyway. I am just grateful and would say their is link, for the Kenyan there Mr DavidMutua is A well known friend and colleague we met the recent completed AfricaSourceII In Uganda where there were many from FF.

The situation In RusingaIsland is comparable and the overlaps will enable some improvement to the life status here and there.

Thanks for for your concern and remember to ask those who attended the AfricaSourceII workshop about me and they will know.

Thanks, Samwel,Kenya.

Exploring overlap between Samwel in Kenya and FantsuamFoundation in Nigeria.

Samwel's page is very helpful. As I read it I found myself thinking of overlaps between the situation Samwel describes in Kenya and the situation I know at FantsuamFoundation (FF) in Nigeria. (Where incidentally one of the staff members, DavidMutua, is a Kenyan). I am wondering how we can bring together areas where both groups are active, to the benefit of both - and maybe others as well.

I wonder if HIV/AIDS and/or other health topics would be the best starting place. Even during my own brief stays at FF I have been aware of one bereavement after another amongst the people that I know - and amongst those people I witness a repeated emational burden of genuinely shared grief. This is not to say that the people I know seem permanently miserable - but death is repeatedly present.

Nutrition is a big factor in fighting HIV/AIDS at Fantsuam. FF has a PositiveConcern group - the local Doctor teaches about nutrition, and there are initiaitves (underway or planned) for a related PositiveGarden, PositiveKitchen, PositiveRestaurant, and fish farm.

Perhaps there could be some exchange of ideas and information between Samwel's group and FF. If this is a good idea, I confess that I don't yet know how we would deal with the practicalities of enabling someone to be the link person on the FF side.

Hi Samwel, and is it PamelaMcLean? It's helpful when you sign your name when you add a note, but also in the Preferences page. Yes, what could we do to help regarding HIV/AIDS? How can we help with Nutrition? --AndriusKulikauskas

http://www.fao.org/docrep/008/v4050b/V4050B07.htm gives information about tilapia (a kind of edible fish) as something that's already being done in Kenya. Tilapia has been used by Prof George Chan as part of the Integrated Farming and Waste Management System. See also http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DreamFarm.php So if already existing practices can be put together, complemented and so on, then things might really run faster, no? -- LucasGonzalez

AboutThisPage

• PageType=Location
• ThisPageRecommendedBy = AndriusKulikauskas
• FeaturedIn = MyFoodStory
• KenyansToCall=SamwelKongere +254 725 600 439, Prossy +254720535754 ,Francis Opiyo+254725873 , Job Odero +254721254959
• LatestNewsFromKenya=SamwelKongere is resting after traveling yesterday to HomaBay and helping people. He's been active on the phone, too.

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