Here’s a brief tour of the new wellness center in Gambella. We built the tables, desk, and benches during our trip there this summer.
(Source: youtube.com)
This picture is of Kaltuma. She is a villager in one of the four villages in the Isiolo area of Kenya that GHNI works with. She, and a handful of other villagers, have been trained to be CHWs (Community Health Workers).
Learn more about their work at Jeff Power’s blog.
After meeting as a team, and meeting with the villagers, and meeting with our wellness expert…after all of the planning…this is what our week in Gambella boiled down to…this was our blueprint for the week. So simple to execute (though not easy, due to challenges we are not accustomed to facing in the US), and yet so impactful to this village (and to us as well). It ROCKED!
After four full days of travelling to Isiolo (which is the main town near Gambella), and visiting villages (Gambella, Ola Nagele, and Bulesa Dima), we finally have access to the internet to share an update with you. 
Before we left, we feared that rain would make the roads to some of the villages impassable, but we have not had any such problems. In fact, the area is in the middle of a huge drought, and they are in desperate need of rain. We took a break from our work in Gambella this afternoon, and spent a couple hours visiting the village of Ola Nagele, where some of the women performed their traditional dance for us. Shortly after they started, it began to rain. We could see rain over the mountains off in the distance, but we have seen that several times since we arrived, and no rain has fallen. But today, the rain moved very quickly from the mountains, to our villages; and it rained hard, for about 20 minutes, while the women continued to sing and dance. We got drenched, but we were so happy for them to finally have rain, that we wanted to stay out with them and soak it all in (plus, it’s not a bad thing to get a reputation as the people that brought the rain)! 
We have been working on a few great projects in Gambella, that we’re very excited about! The Wellness Center (which we were previously calling the health clinic) is really gaining traction now. There has been an intern (Priscilla) in the area for the past three months, and she really has a vision for getting this Wellness Center up and running, and for duplicating the way things are getting set up in Gambella, in other villages as well. Due to the contacts she has been able to make locally, she was given some great advice, to ensure that we are not reaching beyond the scope of what we are permitted to do with this building (hence the new name of Wellness Center).
We’ve been working on building tables, benches, and a desk for the Wellness Center, so that it can be completely set up and functional. Priscilla has also initiated the training of four women to be Community Health Workers (CHW), through an officially sanctioned government training program. This is a huge boost for the village.
One of the other construction projects that we have been working on, is building desks and tables for the grade school. Part of our group painted the name of the school in big, bright letters, on the administration building (it’s the first building you see as you head up the road to the school). The principal has a great vision for the school, and it’s nothing short of amazing! We’ll post more about that in the future, but for now I wanted to get you this update, along with a couple photos.
We plan on finishing the benches for the Wellness Center tomorrow, as well as the tables and desks for the school. We will also be bringing 40 more goats to the village tomorrow, to replace the ones that were stolen two years ago.
Thank you for caring about Gambella—we love them dearly!
