Woman helped raise siblings, now nurtures villages

RABUOR, KENYA -- Loyce Mbewa-Ong'udi was late. Friends and family members milled around her parents' house in the green hills overlooking Lake Victoria, waiting for the daughter from America to return home.

At last the taxi bounced over the ruts and made a sharp turn into the compound of small brick and stucco houses. Mbewa-Ong'udi sprang out to a shower of greetings in the Luo language, hugs, helping hands for 12 enormous suitcases crammed with anti-AIDS medicines, asthma inhalers, storybooks, pencils and sharpeners, recycled eyeglasses.

The supplies were for the Rabuor Village Project, which Mbewa-Ong'udi runs. In the crowd, she sought the woman who started it all: her mother, Rosemell Ong'udi.

This is the story of a village, spurred by two extraordinary women, rising from the depths of the AIDS epidemic to build a future for itself. In 10 years, with hardly any international aid, this poor farming community has founded a nursery school and feeding program, a pharmacy, a youth group and income-generating projects. The work touches more than 10,000 people in 10 villages and keeps growing.

But it's not just a list of projects; it's a change of heart. Rabuor's work embodies what experts consider the most effective approach to development: "community-owned" programs in which residents, not just donors, set the priorities, and change comes from the bottom up.

District Commissioner Godfrey Kigochi, senior Kenya government official for Kisumu West, says he wishes he had a project like this in every village. Organizations that give money or lend expertise to the Rabuor project -- Slum Doctors, Lift Kids, Pangea, Architects Without Borders -- say the group is unique for its pragmatism and deep community roots. The Rev. Charles Ong'injo, who blessed the work from the start, is helping other congregations start similar projects.

Kenya's AIDS rate has fallen since the 1990s, and far more people today are willing to go for testing and treatment. Still, about 14 percent of the district's 160,000 people are infected, double the national rate.

The Rabuor project is about a lot more than AIDS prevention: It's about people learning that they can better their own lives. Loyce Mbewa-Ong'udi, 52, bounds into a meeting and revs up the team, with the energy of the field hockey and track competitor she used to be.

Rosemell Ong'udi, 69, tall and sturdy, brings a quiet wisdom instead.

She began back in the 1990s, when AIDS was ripping the heart out of almost every family here. Yet people barely whispered about it because prostitutes and truckers were the early conduits of the disease.

How it started

Rosemell Ong'udi grew up without a father, helped raise her siblings and sometimes went without food herself. In 1998, she began giving the children food from her own home. Then she turned to a women's group she had founded to see "what we can do for these children, now we are their mothers and fathers."

Worried about the orphans, Rosemell Ong'udi cut short a visit in 2001 to Loyce Mbewa-Ong'udi in Seattle. On her return, she asked Ong'injo if the women could use a room at the Rabuor church. She asked her husband, Wesley, a retired school headmaster, for money to hire a teacher. The women started a nursery school.

When Loyce Mbewa-Ong'udi visited her childhood home months later, she saw how much had changed.

"I had a first-class community and village to bring me up. Everything a child could dream of, I had it," she says. "People rarely died. The first one I knew, I was 18."

But in Rabuor, so many were dying that villagers spent much of their time and resources on funerals. Loyce Mbewa-Ong'udi, who once worked for the World Bank and the Gates Foundation, looked for a way to help.

She sent her salary. She asked people in her Seattle church to contribute. Then she and supporters founded the Rabuor Village Project in 2003 as a nonprofit group under U.S. law. The money trickling in helped buy land, build classrooms and hire teachers.

But people were not ready to discuss AIDS; their focus was on feeding their families.

The first step was to increase crops, starting with corn. Next came projects to earn income, keep children in school and train adults in agriculture, nutrition, vocational skills. Conditions still remain basic: no running water, no electrical service, no cars, but a few cell phones.

But now the nursery school serves two hot meals and a hearty snack every day to 160 students. The Rabuor project pays 25 salaries, including four teachers, four cooks, a nurse and two pharmacists -- people who volunteered before there was money for salaries. Community health workers survey 10 villages.

In Seattle, Loyce Mbewa-Ong'udi is the only person the project pays; the team relies on volunteers, including Carol Kinney, a nutritionist who conducted a feeding survey in Rabuor.

Loyce Mbewa-Ong'udi is driven and acknowledges driving others. But she doesn't own land or live here, and she recognizes the project can succeed only if villagers are involved.