We hope to have at least fifty knitted lions by next summer. The first fifty will be for the beds of the fifty students that will enroll at the school in the fall of 2008. This will be the first group of students arriving at the Beverly School.

If we have more lions, we can ask Megan and Ben or others going to help at the Beverly School to share these extra lions with children in the Kisumu slums where Megan and Ben gave out knitted bears this summer.

Please feel free to use a different pattern than this one or to crochet instead of knit! There is a gorgeous but complicated lion pattern in the Victoria and Albert knitting archives on the web. There may be many other much better patterns for knitted lions than this one.

In particular, my lion face is a work in progress, so please let me know your face ideas and improvements on this lion face.

Materials:
Size 7 knitting needles
Worsted weight yarn either machine washable or cotton (I use Saucy cotton wool myself)

Leg and pants:
Cast on 10 stitches in lion colored wool. I’ve tried tawny brown but think shades of yellow work better.

Knit 10 rows.

Note: An easy way to count these garter stitch rows is to count the raised rows. Five raised rows equals ten rows, because with garter stitch, every other row is raised up.

Switch to the color you choose for the pants. Cut your lion colored yarn leaving a healthy tail of yarn. By the time you finish knitting your lion, you’ll have a lot of these yarn strands, but you’ll use these strands later to sew the lion together. Knit 20 rows in the pant colored wool.

Now start the other leg. Leave the first leg on your knitting needle and cast on 10 new stitches in the lion color onto your knitting needle that is holding the first leg. By casting onto this needle you will knit two legs that can easily be joined with the same side up on both legs

(Because of the way the knitting looks when you change colors, you will see that one side of your work is the front while the other side looks like the back).

Repeat as with the first leg knitting 10 rows in the lion color and then 20 in the pants color.

Here are two legs ready to be knit together.

Now you are ready to knit both legs together. Just knit across both your first and second leg and then keep going knitting 16 more rows for the top of the pants.

Torso of the lion:
Change to a color for the top of your lion body. Knit 20 rows in this color. You can do stripes or anything you want with any of these sections.

Here, the legs and pants are knit, the torso is knit and I have begun to knit the rows for the head.

Head:
Change to lion color and knit 5 ½ inches in this color. I find this is about 44-46 rows of knitting but it will be a bit different for knitters knitting tighter or looser than me.

Back of lion:
When you have knit the 5 ½ inches of lion color for the head, you are now going to knit the back of the torso and the back of the pants and legs. This means knitting 20 rows of the torso color, 16 of the pants color then knitting each leg separately. Basically what you are doing is what you did on the front only in reverse order. Bind off at the end of each leg.

This is what your knitting will look like, a long strange skinny thing.

Yes I know. You have a lot of yarn strands everywhere, but don’t worry! You really will need a lot of them for knitting the lion together!

Putting the lion together:

Fold it in half at the middle of the head section. See how the front and back match up! Stitch together the back and front of the head, Stop stitching at the place where the torso color starts.
Working on the face:

You can make the ears as you sew up the sides by sewing across the top corners on each side of the head. Lion ears are not that prominent with the mane falling over and around them. Stuff the lion head before embroidering the face. Polyester type filling works well.

When you go to embroider the face note that lions have slanting eyes, narrow chins, and distinct wide nose bridges with a triangle of nostrils much like domestic cats. If you google lions you will find lots of helpful photos. Use a contrasting yarn color when embroidering the face.

My first attempt didn’t have enough contrast between the skin of the lion and the embroidery color. It was hard to see the face.

I think the lion above with the pink top looks a bit like a lion and is easier to see, but please feel free to find your own way with this (and then share with me your tips!). I will be knitting lions all winter, so I welcome suggestions!

When you have your face done you can stuff it with some kind of fiberfill stuff and then start a running stitch along the bottom of the neck encircling the whole head. Slowly tightening this running stitch as you stitch round a second time so that the lion head gets pulled in and there begins to be a pronounced neck. Gradually tightening the yarn in a couple times round the head makes for a head that doesn’t look like a knitted square. The tighter you make your running stitch the more it will look like a lion as, like other cats, lions have narrow chins with their heads widening at the top.
Now the arms:
With your torso’s color yarn pick up 8 stitches along the side of the torso near the head on the front of your lion and then 8 more stitches along the side of torso on the back of the torso.

This is the trickiest bit. At the risk of confusing you, I am showing you exactly where the first 8 of the 16 stitches come from on a lion with no face yet. The other 8 come from the back torso.

Here is another photo about the arms. Looking down on the lion from above, I hope you can see where I picked up the stitches for the arms after I sewed the head together.

You will have 16 stitches. Knit 16 rows in this color then switch to the lion color for 10 rows. Bind off. You will see how it naturally folds in two and becomes an arm. Now pick up stitches on the other side of the lion for the second arm and knit the same 16 stitches in the torso color and 10 in the lion color.

Finishing the lion:
Lots of sewing up seams here. I don’t know if its better to knit a couple of lions then do all the sewing or sew them as you go along. Depends on your personality. I don’t always like finish work so I tend to knit a bunch of lions then sew them all up when I feel like it. Anyways, you’ll see how the front and back match up and sew together. Stuff with polyester fiberfill of some sort as you go. I sew up the arms then stuff them, then sew the torso and stuff it and so on.

Tail and Mane: I have made tails by casting on three or four stitches then knitting two inches or so and then adding strands for the end of the tail. Attach them almost where the legs begin not at the waist. They look wrong farther up on the pants, sort of like a tail coming out of the middle of the back instead of at the hind end (as if lion’s wear pants). For the mane, I have used a crochet hook to attach lots of various lengths of different mane colored yarn. For the girl lions, I don’t plan to give them manes since female lions do not have manes. So far, the manes I have made for the male lions look better with strands in front of the ears as well as all down the back side of the head. Some longer strands seem to help the lions look lion like.

Here is a lion front and back. Please let me know your questions about this pattern!

Send all lions to Green Hope Farm, POB 125, Meriden, NH 03770 and we will see that they get to Kenya. Thank you so much!

PS Skirts for fancy lionesses:
Pick up about 40 stitches around the waist of the female lions with three or four double pointed needles. Take another double pointed needle and knit around the body of the lion increasing every fifth stitch for eight or so rows (not an exact science). Switch to a contrasting color for the hem, knit a row in this contrasting color then purl a row while binding off. One of the bears Ben and Megan gave to a child in Kisumu had a pink skirt. I loved seeing the little girl holding that bear- but it is a lot of extra work.

Yesterday was an incredibly beautiful day. The light was soft, yet because it’s been so dry, the light was also very intense. Everything seemed almost unreal in its crisp dilineation. After the UPS truck had roared down our hill with the day’s packages, each of us wandered off to our evening lives. Taking a page from Will’s book, I went down to the Rose garden and settled into the shade of big sheltering Alika Rose right next to the overflowing vegetable garden. I lay there as a dog or a kid might. I watched the few wispy clouds of evening blow in and the honeybees enjoy the flowering Broccoli. I chewed a stalk of grass and found myself in a joyful, mindless place.

This was a good moment in my ongoing skirmishes with my inner patriarch, for there is certainly still a part of me that buys into our culture’s mania about productivity and the accomplishment of goals in contrast to the joys of lying in the grass doing nothing.

I notice my crusty old inner patriarch more intensely this time of year than during other seasons. Summer can be a bit of a juggle for a gardener and the end of the summer brings most everything to a head.

Impossible ideas of how much and how perfectly I can accomplish, produce, achieve, and meet goals are damaging ideas to carry at any point in the year. It is a blessing that during the harvest season, when so much ripens at once, I am forced to look at these ridiculous mind ideas that still pull at me. Late summer gives me so many opportunities to throw out my lingering patriarchal ideas, one aimless happy moment at a time.

Yesterday, as I lay in the grass with pears rotting, apple trees laden, tomato vines burgeoning, shelling beans rattling in the wind. and potatoes ready to be dug, that tired out patriarchal mind tape that it’s a crime against humanity not to can every last tomato or make every last basil leaf into pesto for the freezer was silent. The happy moment in the grass had swept aside my tiresome list of shoulds. I was perfectly content doing nothing and didn’t even need the reassuring news flash that the world had not fallen off its axis because most of this year’s pears are destined for compost pile.

Because the world is nothing if not synchronistic, as I take on my inner patriarch with renewed enthusiasm, I find myself hearing of your struggles to lay down patriarchal self expectations as well. One lovely woman whom I talked to last week felt she was healing, but her inner patriarch kept telling her she was not healing fast enough. She told me a part of her story. I was in awe at how much courage it took to simply get up each day, let alone heal faster. She was a mirror held before me about all the ways in which I go patriarchal and convince myself that I am not moving fast enough.

Right after this conversation, I talked to a man who wanted to share with me his thousand and one suggestions about how I could run Green Hope Farm better, the way a real red blooded American business is run. He suggested the kind of complete makeover that would have pretty much eliminated all the things that actually make us feel real to each other, you to us and us to you. Sometimes I get confused and take this kind of call personally. Because I was thinking so much about our collective patriarchal wounds, I just felt sad for him as his suggestions continued. If he made this many suggestions to a complete stranger, I could only imagine the brutalizing patriarchal demands he made of himself. How unfortunate that the culture had convinced him it is not acceptable to be his own self . How unfortunate to believe he is only okay if he is all things to all people. Since most of what we learn from any given situation is from the vibrational exchange and not the words spoken, I didn’t say much to this gentleman, but I hoped that my good cheer in the face of all things he found wrong with Green Hope Farm would give him pause to experience that perhaps there was another way to be than to Walmartize his life and business while simultaneously beating himself up with a patriarchal 2X4.

As I study patriarchal wounds in myself and others, it’s hard not to notice how many of them are tied to issues of time. Time is one of the core ways we are wounded and controlled by patriarchal values. I can’t recall a single story you have shared about a health situation in which you felt the status quo gave you the time you needed to make a decision about how to proceed. Come to think of it, I can’t recall anyone in ANY situation mentioning that he or she was given enough time to make a decision. Whatever time we have, it appears we have to engage in hand to hand combat to take this time for ourselves. Nothing in our culture says, “Slow down, take your time.”

A completely anecdotal bit offered here about why taking time might in and of itself be a healing experience. A friend experiencing high blood pressure asked me for thoughts. As he wore an enormous digital watch constantly telling him patriarchy’s idea of the exact time, I suggested he take off his watch and see what happened. His blood pressure almost immediately dropped significantly and stayed that way.

One time difficulty that I have struggled with as an adult has to do with a learned response from my childhood. Out of its own woundedness, my patriarchal family of origin expected an immediate response from me to any of their questions or demands. Unable to actually come up with immediate responses, I numbed out to the process of even beginning to feel what I felt and learned to look for clues in their faces about the “right” response to please them. How this affected me was to make my physiological response to almost any question a frozen feeling, yet simultaneously I expected myself to know the “right” answer and felt a lot of shame when I didn’t.

This kind of conditioning to think we should be able to offer immediate answers favors the existing social order of patriarchy, because when we don’t have time or give ourselves time to feel what we feel or know what we know, we will usually fall back on the rules of the culture. These cultural rules support overextending ourselves by doing way too much, expecting way too much of ourselves, and trying to be all things to all people.

It’s been a conscious process to shift how I deal with any question or decision. I remind myself I actually have time to make a decision, learn how I feel and know what I know. I sit in my heart and wait to feel and know. If I don’t get clear how I feel, I wait to make a decision. Jim has been a great support of this process,. He frequently reminds me of the sacred feminine principle that when we give ourselves all the time we need, the waters of indecision will eventually clear and we will find our own truth.

One way this has played out in my life is in the running of quirky Green Hope Farm. I never expected to run a business of any size. As questions arose within and without during the early years here, I experienced that frozen panic and anxiety that came from the false idea that I needed to decide things immediately. Jim, along with my guides, constantly encouraged me to give myself time to answer any question. This led to a business not run in a conventional way, but in a way that reflects my truths. As I think about my years of finding my way and unlearning my learned childhood response, I feel there is no more profound tool for dismantling patriarchy than GIVING OURSELVES TIME.

The degree to which I run a maverick organization and live true to myself is a direct reflection of giving myself time to find out who I am and who I am not, what Green Hope Farm is and what it is not. Even with something as small as the pear harvest, I needed to give myself time to know that a time driven harvest of the whole crop was not a necessary self definition of me as custodian of the farm or a defining characteristic of this place. Lying in the grass in a timeless moment, I was relieved of the burdensome misunderstanding that a pear harvest would ever define me. Only God defines any of us.

Each of us has within us a pool of divine wisdom and love, but it takes time to settle into this pool of love and illumination. It takes time to let go of the distractions and confusions of a culture that would tell us to skip the pool and stick to it’s set values. And finally, it takes time to sit in the pool and know what we know.

I can think of no circumstance in my life where I regret giving myself time to know how I felt. I look back with sorrow and increasing compassion on choices driven by reactive responses born from my patriarchal wounds.

Because I have been trying to untangle this time related wound for a long time, I’ve been drawn to make such Flower Essences as Thyme from Omey Island, or the Omey Island combination Essence and, of course, the Sacred Feminine Flower Essence combination as well. The two Irish Essences were made on a Thyme covered tidal island, once a celtic refuge when patriarchy came to Ireland and a place that continues to exist apart from any patriarchal time defined civilization. It is the rhythm of the tides and the tidal water that sweeps across the sandy flats between the island and the mainland that compose Omey Island time. No digital watches drive this island’s heart and soul.

These Essences, with their wisdom unhitched from patriarchy’s sense of time, call to people more and more these days. I am so happy whenever a bottle leaves here. It is encouraging to think of a timeless way of being flickering to new life in our lives. What a call for celebration to know thyme’s up for patriarchy. I think I will go celebrate right in this timeless now. Will I sit and watch the goldfish in the big pond? Will I sit in timelessness with the bees? Will I munch an after school apple with William while stretched on the still green grasses of the farm? I don’t know yet, but one thing I do know. The making of more Pear Cider is not on the docket.

A week or so ago it was peach heaven.

When the wind blew, the laden branches knocked against the windows of the office and we would be reminded to go outside to get a few to eat.

Nary a peach got canned because between us, we just ate them all. Quite happily actually.

Then suddenly the pears were upon us.

In the heat of some very hot days last week the pears went from very green on the trees to too yellow Pears get a sort of gritty texture when left to ripen on the trees. There were suddenly a lot that were too yellow and too ripe. We picked the still green pears and shared them around the neighborhood. Then Will and I decided the thing to do with the too ripe pears was to make some pear cider.

On Friday afternoon, I made a test run batch and got a gallon and a half of pear cider. Things went fairly smoothly. William and I were set to take on the bulk of the overripe pears on Saturday morning.

However the pears got just that more mushy overnight. As we went to press the ground up pears through the press the pears mushed and squirted out all over the place. I needed but did not have some sort of muslin bag inside the press to keep the pear mush in. Apples are drier and have more body, even when ground up. This serious mush problem had never developed for us during apple cider making. Meanwhile we had a zillion ripe pears, a press that was goobing out the sides with volumes of pear mush and a zillion yellow jackets swarming the operation.

Here’s an action shot of the pear mush squirting up onto the top of the pressing board.

We had problems in River City. The stuff coming out wasn’t cider but glop and this glop wasn’t exactly going through our cheesecloth and strainer with ease. The tiny amount of liquid being produced was just enough to drown the hundreds of yellow jackets falling into it and not much more.

William had the best idea. He said, “Let’s do something else.” So we left the mush to the yellow jackets and took the dogs for a walk.

Sometimes it’s such a good thing to have someone around who knows the moment to cut one’s losses.

Had it been up to me, some warped notion of not wasting the pears might have kept me at the press all day, cranky and covered in pear stickiness. But Will knew just how to cut through the gordian knot of worry about making the most of the harvest.

He knew that rambling with the dogs on a lovely September day was a way better harvest to carry into a long New Hampshire winter than a pint of yellow jacket infused pear sludge.

Thanks God for William!

I just about growled when I walked into Emily’s college dorm room. Mother Bear. Mother Bobcat. Mother Wolf. Mother Pit Viper. I am not sure who I was, but I was MAD.

Emily has a triple in her new college dorm. The technology of the times meant that, before her arrival yesterday, she had facebooked, instant messaged, emailed, phoned, and even met one of her new roommates in person before arriving at school. This had been a lovely way to begin life away from home with new people.

But when we walked into Emily’s room, I found myself reacting in a rather primal way.

Because the three roommates were arriving on different days, Emily had suggested that they wait until they were all there to decide how to set up the room. The trio had agreed in a conference call to wait.

One reason Emily suggested waiting is because she had heard me tell, too many times perhaps, the story of my arrival at college. When I opened the door to my freshman room, I found my roommate had completely moved in ahead of me taking the best closet, the best side of the room, and the best window. Her mother and aunt had hung hideous curtains in our two windows and put matching hideous bedspreads on our beds and shag rugs on our floor. Everything was a rusty orange.

I don’t think my roommate had any control over her relatives behavior but I didn’t understand that at the time and held her responsible for what had happened. A further problem was that I had no notion of my right to negotiate anything in our life together or any sense of my right to reconfigure our relationship or our room at any point during our long year together. Though I did remove the bedspread from my bed, I thought a nice person would just accept the situation. I thought a nice person would not feel as upset as I did about what had happened. I actually felt ashamed that I cared so much about things being done before I had any chance to weigh in with my opinion.

It wasn’t so much my roommate that dug the grave in our relationship, but me. My childhood had trained me well to roll over and take whatever was tossed my way. Nothing much had been negotiable in my childhood household and for some reason I had long been cast in the role of the family black sheep who got second best, if anything at all. As I embarked on this relationship with my freshman year roommate, I didn’t understand I was entering new territory, a situation in which I was an equal partner with a fellow human. I didn’t grasp the essential idea that I had volition to shape the relationship. Sadly, neither did she, so we muddled along through a year of misunderstandings.

I was raised to be passive. During my childhood, it had worked to my mother’s personality’s advantage to have me this way. I internalized all my angry feelings about my powerlessness and second class citizenship in my family. I escaped into a world of books, though my body constantly called me back to BE in my life and address what was going on. Besides endless bronchitis, a disease I link to my feelings of grief and despair, my rage about my situation surfaced in the form of endless injuries and broken bones. On the surface of things, there was never a ripple of dissension breaking the enforced “harmony” of our childhood home. Yet within my own body, battles were a constant.

So I counted myself out completely as I entered my freshman year room. I stood alone in the room with this strange new roommate, her older sister who went to our college, her twin sister who also was a freshman at our college, and her mother and her aunt both of whom had gone to this college. I didn’t even have the mixed blessing of my parents at my side to bump my numbers and potentially my power in the situation. This was because my parents had hardly turned off the car when they dropped me at my dorm.

Their daily life revolved around their drink schedule. It was nearly lunchtime when they unloaded my two bags. They needed to get a move on to speed off to their midday martinis. Had they been there, it wouldn’t have been a help anyways. They would not have validated my feelings of unfairness because the glue that held our family together in some kind of horrible unit was this pervasive notion that everyone was either better than or worse than everyone else. Based on a criteria known only to them, they would have met my roommate and decided immediately that I deserved the worst side of the room or the best side based on a snap judgment that she was the better or worse person. There would have been no suggestion that perhaps we were equals who needed to divide things fairly.

Fast forward thirty odd years to find me entering Emily’s room. As I looked around the room, I nearly hit the ceiling with an explosion of feeling. You can guess the scene, can’t you?

The roommate who had arrived first had taken the bed by the window, entirely filled the only bookcase with her stuff, taken and completely filled to the brim one of the two closets (when three people needed to share the two closets) and taken the best desk, positioned with the greatest light. The degree to which she had settled in made it appear she had been there six months, not overnight. She had even left towels on the best towel rack by the door. A note from her said she had taken a full closet because she didn’t want one of the bureaus. I think this was when I snarled in Emily’s direction, “As if how she feels about bureaus means you don’t deserve closet space.” A book called, “The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run into at College” was prominently displayed on “her” bookcase. I was tempted to take off my clothes and see what she would do with a naked parent!

Having me MAD was perhaps easier for Emily than having me weeping. Emily was great about the situation, She didn’t get sucked into the better than worse than dynamic AT ALL. She was so much more balanced than I was when I was her age. Heck, so much more balanced than I am now! She put her stuff in a neutral position in the room and calmly talked me down, “Mom, don’t worry. I can take care of myself. I am not going to let her do this. When we are all here in a couple of days, I will make sure we figure out the room arrangement fairly.”

With that, I dragged myself back from the unfinished business of thirty years ago, figuring I could ruminate later about why I had gone code orange when I entered her room.

Clearly, Emily was all set to take care of herself in a million ways I had been unable to when I was her age. Clearly she had both a skill set and a sense of her own value that I lacked during my own freshman year.

She knew herself an equal member of her new tribe. She didn’t need my angry reaction to go forward or feel empowered. I could let it go. I knew she would prevail in her desire to create a democracy in the room. There would be no default autocracy like my wounded roommate and I created.

The time to leave Emily to her new life came. The weeping could be postponed no more and so we had our group cry. Then, as our car headed away from Emily’s dorm, I glanced back to see her strolling across a shaded lawn towards her first pre-season soccer practice. She was walking with a fellow freshman soccer player. They were talking with great intensity, swept up into their new world already.

I was glad for a couple of differences between the two occasions thirty odd years apart.

1) I was glad martinis were not involved in this occasion.

2) I was glad that unlike my poor beleaguered freshman self, Emily counted herself an equal among peers, no more and no less.

3) I was glad that Emily had an internalized sense of her own value that would carry the day even as her Mother Bear Mother Bobcat Mother Wolf Mother Pit Viper drove away.

And 4) I was glad that sometime shortly after I settled into my freshman year orange abode, I began a disorganized but determined search for a different way to live with people than the way of my tribe of origin, a search that would involve a zillion books, and tens of thousands heart to hearts with spiritual teachers, therapists, beloved friends, cats, dogs, Angels, Elementals and God.

As I saw Emily in action in her new life, I saw that my search had been of value not just as a means to ease the inner battles that raged within me, but as a support to people with whom I shared my search, people including precious Emily. I could see that my search had helped her experience, even in a time of stress, her great equality with everyone else, her Godness in a sea of God. That alone made all the searching worthwhile.

As fate would have it, last school year, Ben was asked to give a tour of the school where he teaches to several Kenyans working to create a school outside Nairobi. As he walked around campus with the Beverly School of Kenya’s founder Abdi Lidonde, Ben was inspired by what he heard. By the end of the tour, Ben had decided to go to Africa this summer to offer whatever help he could.

This is the forty acre piece of land where the school is to be built. It will be self sustaining with the students helping to raise the food for the school during their vacations. The soil is very fertile and the climate perfect for year round agriculture. They will have farm animals as well as garden plots.

The Beverly School of Kenya, set to open in the fall of 2008, is named for Beverly Lidonde, an indomitable woman who raised twenty five children. Her son Abdi emigrated to America and put himself through college by working as a night janitor at Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Eventually Abdi became the head of the physical plant at Holy Cross.

At a certain point in his life, Abdi and another fellow Kenyan and childhood friend named Alice Mudiri decided they wanted to give back something to Kenya. They came up with the idea of building a boarding school. Initially they hoped to build a school large enough to educate and house ten students, but with the help and encouragement of other people, especially an American named Tom Maher, the Beverly School will someday educate and give a home to up to three hundred students.

Here is Alice Mudiri, interviewing potential students in Masaii land.
Children going to the school will be children either without parents due to the AIDS epidemic or children who would never get a chance to get educated because of the financial situation of their family. While education is technically free in Kenya, children must buy books and uniforms, items way out of reach of most Kenyans.

When Ben and his girlfriend Megan went to Kenya this summer, they helped Alice to travel around the countryside interviewing children interested in going to the Beverly School. Their travels with Alice and the other Kenyans working to create this school so inspired Ben and Megan that they plan to return, hopefully next summer. Ben wants to return to Kenya with a film crew. He is intent on making a film about the school in order to help get funds for the project. And Megan? Megan is learning Swahili so she can talk to everyone more easily.

Not that her lack of Swahili seems to have slowed down her communication with all the children she met! Here she shares bubbles with some new friends.
The Beverly School will educate children from kindergarten age through twelfth grade. However, Abdi and Alice feel strongly about not separating siblings so if a sibling group contains a child younger than kindergarten, he or she will be taken care of at the school until ready for kindergarten. Abdi and Alice feel very strongly about keeping siblings together because this is all the family that most of their students have left.

Here are the first two children set to enroll at the Beverly School. When Hilary and Vincent met Abdi Lidonde and Tom Maher they were orphans living in a three foot box in the Kisumu slums near Lake Victoria. They were eight and ten. Though they had no family and were not related to each other, they had formed an intense bond and worked to keep each other alive. When they saw Abdi and Tom, they decided to follow them out of the slum and take their chances that these two would take care of them. The strategy worked and they are now being taken care of by friends of Abdi’s until the school opens next fall.

Megan and Ben went with Alice to the slums of Kisumu to interview potential students. This was the heart of their visit to Kenya.

This young mother was near death from AIDS. It took her many minutes to sit up for this conversation with Alice. Her great anxiety was the fate of her two children and Alice promised to enroll both children at the Beverly School and see that when she died, the two children would get care and shelter until the school opens next fall.

When Ben and Megan returned to Kisumu the next day, they could see the peace that Alice had given this mother.

Her children would be saved.

Ben and Megan learned that virtually all the adults in the Kisumu slum have AIDS. A woman going door to door selling food helped Alice know the most dire situations in need of immediate attention in her part of the slum.

Together they moved through the endless slum hearing one heart breaking story after another and meeting children and adults of the most incredible courage.

These two had found themselves jobs at age two and four and then eventually found a home with a friend of Abdi’s family.

Ben and Megan were struck by how the younger children had such hope while the older children had begun to understand exactly how bad their situation was.

While most of the younger children seemed to miraculously find some joy in their lives, this family was extremely subdued. Alice discovered they had not eaten in several days and were about to be evicted from the windowless cell where they lived.

Food was sent for and while they ate, everyone heard their story. When the woman’s husband died of AIDS, she became the possession of her husband’s brother. When she told her brother in law that she would not sleep with him because of her AIDS, she was thrown out by his family and her brother in law took her sewing machine which had been her livelihood.

She started to sell roasted corn by the roadside but an AIDS shot she was given to slow the course of the disease made it impossible for her to use her arm and she was no longer able to make even this small amount of money for her family. Megan gave each of these children one of the bears I had knit, but this was a tragedy that needed much more than that.

As I looked at Megan and Ben’s slides and heard these stories, I found myself so awed by Abdi and Alice’s ability to navigate the overwhelming situation of their country without despair. Instead, they have a plan. It is to not just a plan to offer temporary relief in the form of a meal here or there, but a long term plan to give a group of children lives.

Abdi noted that educating children at the Beverly School would affect way more people than just the students of the school. He told Ben that Kenya was such a small country and education was considered such an important thing, that each of the children educated at the school would go back into their society with a tremendous amount of status. This would give each of the graduates of the Bevery School the potential to make great positive changes in their communities.

When Ben and Megan travelled to the savannah to Masai land they noticed that the one educated man in the Masaii community where they went was looked to by the rest of the group in just the way Abdi had explained it.

The gentleman in the grey suit is the man who was educated and therefore the de facto leader of the group.

Masaii had travelled for days to meet with Alice. Megan who listened to each interview was impressed with how articulate the children were about their desire and RIGHT to an education.

Meanwhile, Ben wanted to set off overland into the savannah. He said he had never been anywhere that had called to him as loudly.

This was true for rhino too.

If you would like to support the Beverly School of Kenya in any way, contact them at www.beverlyschoolofkenya.com

If you would like to be a part of a project to knit a small stuffed lion animal for the bed of each child at the school or help with an effort to sew a quilt for each child’s bed at the school, please contact me, Molly Sheehan at our email address of green.hope.farm@valley.net THANK YOU!