Tell Me How to Seek the Compound I?

School has begun in Nambale and Siaya. Our kids are back in school and a new year begins. I am so far away from them and yet they are with me every day.I see their ragged uniforms, I look down at their unshod feet, I cringe at the disease I see in their eyes and on their scalps. I tweet for them, I solicit donations to help get them fed, I pray for them and for all the adults I’m counting on to care for them. I’m also praying that their parents really take on this community feeding program and make it their own.

I am also readying for the naming ceremony of my latest grandchild. I am looking at Shel Silverstein poems to read and I am remembering my own children when they began a new year at school. How privileged they were. Not only did they have entire new wardrobes, but they went to private schools and private universities. Health concerns or food were never even thought of. Their father was a doctor at Man’s Best Hospital, and their mother was a great cook who could go to the store and buy whatever she felt like cooking paying no heed to sales or limits.  

For me, it is trying to get the world I knew to know the world I know now. I just read Bill Gates letter for the Davos Convention. It’s really good (and I don’t like him very much). He has a bully pulpit and tons of money to get his ideas out. I no longer live that other life, and getting people to care about starving children continents away is a challenge. So tonight I think about all my children, the ones that I bore, the ones my daughters bore and all the ones over in Kenya. How do I meld the worlds and make the one that needs it the most a better place for the children who live there?