PERSPECTIVE

We love to have visitors at Humanity Home, for many reasons. It dawned on me in June of 2023 that visitors provide perspective on what we do at HH and how we got here. A college friend from nearly 50 years ago who is a medical professional expressed interest in visiting Humanity Home. We were unable to find a time that worked for her schedule when I would be at HH. However, she was able to join a medical mission trip that is bringing her to Kisumu even as I write this update. I tried to prepare her for what she would experience in Kenya, but doing so is impossible.

Her group spent the first week of their mission treating patients at a rural hospital. After a few days, she posted this on her travelogue:

This has been and continues to be a mind-blowing and life-altering experience. I’ve been to underdeveloped countries before but here’s nothing that compares to what I’m seeing here. The Kenyans have so little access to care and so few resources for self-care that it makes an American such as I quite ashamed at the excess and access we have.

I encourage everyone in my world of friends, family and professional colleagues to learn about resource-limited countries’ needs and respond to them in any fashion you can – by volunteering, sponsoring an orphan, raising money to support worthy humanitarian groups, donating money or supplies – and to contribute to any degree toward a more just and equitable sharing or distribution of resources.

Her observation reminds me of exactly where I was in my heart and mind some twelve years ago when I first did humanitarian work in Kenya.

About the same time as she wrote this post, she called me from Kenya and said, in essence, “”I have a completely new appreciation for what you do and why you do it. What you are doing is incredibly hard…” and went on to describe the kinds of things discussed in her post.

Her comments made me reflect on several things. First, although there are conditions all around us like those this friend refers to, this is a vivid reminder that the children she is seeing are what our kids’ lives would be like if not for Humanity Home. This is why we do what we do. Judy and I become immersed in the everyday details of taking care of 24 children (and for me, trying to raise money), but the passion evident in my friend’s message is exactly what drives us. Second, what we do is hard and often gut-wrenching, but it is also exquisitely gratifying. Judy and I often express that we cannot believe we get to do such an amazing (to us) thing with our lives. For me, I often wonder why more people don’t do things like this, in one form or another. It is within our grasp, and these activities uncover emotions and strength within ourselves that we did not know we had.