This is what American taxpayer dollars paid for me to do this week

This is what American taxpayer dollars paid for me to do this week:

Play with cute kids...

Look at elephants...

and hyenas...

and wildebeest...

and hippos...

and beautiful lakes...

and flamingos...

And watch a traditional Maasai dance.

Seriously, though, what I did this week was head south of Nairobi to the area around Kajiado to monitor some nutrition programs.  The area is populated mainly by Maasai pastoralists, who lost a huge proportion of their cattle in last year's drought.  Even though the drought is over now (at least for the moment), without the cattle they don't have enough to eat.  The kids especially are suffering, since milk is usually a big part of their diet and now they're mostly just getting porridge.  So over the past year OFDA has been funding NGOs to work with hospitals and clinics to improve the way they treat people with malnutrition, and during the height of the drought we provided supplemental feed for some of the animals and seeds to plant some crops for the next rainy season, so that people didn't lose their entire livelihoods.  In some areas we also provided monthly payments to the poorest families (of about $15-25) so that they could buy food.

These are some of the women who received monthly payments for their families, which they said allowed them to feed their kids and keep them in school.

When I asked them if I could take their picture, they said Yes!  But instead of just standing there like I thought they would, they insisted I wait until they were properly posed, and then they started singing a traditional Maasai song (in the video above), which I was told is about what a good day it is.

As part of our monitoring, we also watched some babies and mothers being weighed and measured to check for malnutrition, which reminded me a lot of my time in Peace Corps:

We also inspected the supplementary food that is given to the malnourished children and mothers:

So it was a really good, interesting trip, and hopefully I did actually earn my salary for the week.  The lovely scenery was just a bonus that we got to see on our way from one village to the next.  I feel so incredibly lucky to have this job.

You can see more pictures here.