Housing and caring for 96 children at the Marindi Children's Home of Grace is certainly a busy operation, and there is never a dull moment. Twenty-seven employees are at the orphanage cooking, cleaning, caring for the children and managing the new dairy and bee farms. We recently added a girls dormitory and a boys dormitory to allow more space for the children. We just finished building a library that will be furnished with books, computers and other educational materials that will be on hand for the children and workers. Our future plans are to build a cafeteria, a vocational training center and a music center. A tractor, a tiller, a planer, many other tools and musical instruments are already on the way to our orphanage in the container. Sponsors are donating their money for each child to live at the orphanage. We need your help for the extra projects so that the whole community can benefit from our assistance. It is better to teach someone to fish than to give him a fish.

All of the Marindi Children's Home of Grace kids attend Cowino Primary School. The provisions at this public school are meager. The classrooms are crowded, and some children have to sit on the dirt floor or on rocks. The walls of the mud building have cracks, allowing wind to enter the room. We must build a new school facility so that these children will be have a better learning environment. This will require $50,000 that we hope to raise soon. We are sending supplies such as paper, pencils, rulers, chalkboards and books to this school. Also, with 96 orphans, we have a few growing up -- they want to attend college. Send a Kenyan to college for only $600 per year's tuition -- it will be an honor to him or her.

One of our first projects was to pipe clean water to a drought-stricken rural village at the base of Mount Kenya so that the people would have clean, healthy water. We do not want to drink brown water and are assured that Kenyans don't want to, either. Contaminated water can cause numerous health problems such as dysentery, typhoid, cholera and other water-borne diseases. KenyaRelief.org is working with the Huntsville, Ala., chapter of Engineers without Borders to raise funds for a deep borehole for the orphanage and the community. We are excited about what the future might bring.

Every year we take a medical team to Kenya. However, we need to build a medical clinic in Migori so that the children can have constant health care, not just annual check-ups. We still need $30,000 to finish this project. The clinic will have equipment, medicine and staff. We gather donated medical supplies all year to send on the container shipments. Let's join together to care for the sick, one step at a time.