At first I thought his name was "Robot." He was a small, wiry man, who seemed to have a whole wardrobe of ripped and torn clothing. He kept bringing me bottle-caps, which I had mentioned I may want to make into something. Anyway, he didn't want the children to step on them with their bare feet.

Then he began carrying bricks to make a new hut behind the SOVCO office. First he laid them in a circle, and began building on top of that. Robert was always in motion, and he was everywhere, every day. Outside the outhouse, he rigged up a plastic bottle to pour water on the children's hands after they came out.

One day he handed me a thousand-shilling bill, worth about 40 cents. "For airtime," he said (airtime is what they call the pay-as-you -go phone service). I asked him if he had a phone, so I could call him. No, he didn't have one. He just wanted to help me out. Robert is a SOVCO volunteer.

Collin is a SOVCO volunteer, too, and has been for years. Need a bottle of water or some airtime? Yell for Collin. He'll fetch it at the village store. One of the kids is sick and has to be taken to the doctor? Collin will take her on the SOVCO motorbike. There's a package at the post office in town? You need someone to sleep at the worksite to guard the new bags of cement for the SOVCO school? Need to locate one of the children? You can count on Collin.

Collin and his wife Alice just had a beautiful new baby (who was sleeping in the hut when this picture was taken). We took them a bag of sugar from town when we went to visit them. Alice fed us a special meal of squirrel and beans and posho (a kind of cornmeal dish, served with everything). They sent us home with one of their precious chickens (alive, and sometimes protesting, riding upside down held by its feet by Collin on the motorbike), so we'd have a fine meal the next day, too.



"Jesus looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. He said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.”
                                                                                               Luke 21:1-4, RSV