In Swahili the word Tumbe means despised and cast out, and the people who live in Tumbe today were just that.
These people lived in villages throughout south eastern Kenya and were evicted by fellow villagers because they had leprosy. They migrated to this area near Gazi where there was a hospital which gave them treatment and halted the spread of the disease.
The leprosy sufferers set up homes and married and had children but the hospital closed and they are now considered squatters.
Most of the adults are illiterate and show the physical effects of leprosy but their children are normal, boisterous and happy and would like the opportunity to go to school but with parents who are beggars they have no possibility.
As well as the small mud huts that they live in, they had built a larger hut for use as a community hall, An anonymous donation enabled this hut to be improved and with help from the Rotary Club of Horbury and Ossett Phoenix in Yorkshire, England, benches, reading and writing materials and a blackboard were installed and the building passed as adequate for a government teacher to attend 3 times a week to teach the adults.
The teacher is often unpaid but he has achieved tremendous success with over 25 adults on the register and 15 attending each session. 3 of the adults have already obtained a pass mark in their first exam.
But what of the children?
They do not have leprosy but suffer the stigma of being children of beggars and squatters.
We are working with local communities to help these folk and we were very pleased when the local church renamed the community as The Blessed Camp.
Several of the children are now sponsored to attend a local school and each time we visit Kenya we are able to donate food
parcels and clothes.
There is much to do and we would like to increase the number of mosquito nets installed and help them in their quest for clean water.
There is a water pipe to the village but the villagers
tumbe_teaching
cannot afford to pay the water rates so it is locked off. They are not allowed to have a well dug because of their squatter status.
In the meantime they drink water from local streams!
In 2011 we stopped working with these people because a group of Evangelists were working in the village and we were not happy with the situation.
We still sponsor many children from the village and support their families.
