Eldoret on the BBC

Eldoret featured on the BBC today. There was a radio clip someone e-mailed me - I don't know where to find it. The website has a story with some overlap here.

Very interesting. Street children are part of life in the town - interesting to hear an outsider's perspective having moved ourselves from being outsiders to insiders. He accurately describes some problems and others (in my perception) reflect his own provenance from a materialistic Mammon-worshipping society. I certainly don't share his liberal sympathy for the seller of the illegal brew ("one way of raising a few coins to buy food") - these people are dealers in human misery. The coins raised by selling it are the coins that an addicted husband stole from his own wife and family for their food. The sellers make the choice to support themselves at the cost of the misery of others. Eldoret has 250,000 people, and only a few of them are sellers of illegal brew, so I don't buy the reporter's suggestion that it's a necessity.

In our church we had a member who lived in the Kipkaren estate where the interviewed seller lives. He would not shake the habit of drinking illegal brew with the money that his own family needed for food, and after much loving admonition and practical assistance from the church, was eventually excommunicated. Perhaps he bought some from the guy interviewed! On the other hand, we have people in the church who are equally poor as the illegal brew seller, but who choose to love Jesus, trust God and make hard decisions of honesty and soberness, declining immediate gain or cheap pleasure. And these people have joy in the Lord. What the BBC will never tell you is where the real answer to these kinds of problem lie...