When my friends Anny and Piero told me that they were flying to Nairobi this Summer to help out Claudia and Marta at the Good Samaritan, I knew straight away that I wanted to join them. 

I’ve often been into volunteering whenever an opportunity befell me, but this time I had a chance to experience first-hand the reality of those places and their poverty. I was feeling clueless about how I would have responded to what I was about to see, to misery and dereliction. 

And what I saw was in a way worse than what I envisioned, at first sight at least.

Notwithstanding the disadvantage, remarkable for those who are accustomed to a Western lifestyle, usual – if not enviable – for the most Kenyans, it has been an enriching experience that I want to live again. The children at Good Samaritan are living a more and more acceptable life, owing that to the volunteers and to the people that constantly look after them. They have shared bedrooms but they are always granted a personal space. They have hygienic services and water to wash themselves. With the aid of the distance support set up by our organization, they all attend a school according to their age and they receive periodical visits by a doctor – all serviced that the Kenyan state does not guarantee. 

The children start feeling that, even from afar, they can count on some affection – an affection they genuinely return. Their mutual solidarity, the loyalty they share for their ‘brothers’ at Good Samaritan has moved me. There is so much left to do though. Hence, any kind of help is more than welcome. It takes so little to provide them with an education and medical care they are supposed to have the right for. All to the purpose our organization abides by: to thrust them towards a fair future, free from the chains of poverty; to give them an opportunity they might not have otherwise.

This experience would have never happened without the organization and my dear travel buddies. They revealed themselves to be determined, sensitive and organizational: “practical” at all times. I thus thank Anny and Piero, Marta and especially Claudia, the young president that was so determined in the development of this organization and she now takes care of it with such dedication that any old-timer would wish to have.

Mariella M.D. Setzu