Over the years the Utooni Self-Help Group has received help from a variety of organizations. World Neighbours conducted trainings for group members, and paid committee members allowances whenever they left Kola to work with other groups whether in Kenya or abroad. Every two years during the European summer, scouts from the United Kingdom fly in with building materials or money to buy building materials and help build water tanks and gutters for Utooni. We have made sure that NGOs don t dictate what we do with the money they give us. Money is clearly something the Group can never get enough of, but it manages with what it has.
Famine remains a stark reality.
The government can also bring problems. Whenever the Kola community has been mobilized, for example, to build in three days a dam that would ordinarily take three weeks, the local administration becomes nervous. This is something Mukusya hints at but does not go into any detail. It is a pity if the local administration can become nervous about people pulling together whatever they have to make their lives better. After all, a lot of what the Utooni Self-Help Group is doing is what the government should be doing.