Jill Biden, the First Lady of the United States, visited the Kenyan village of Lositeti, where she received a warm welcome from the local women’s group, Loisoit. The group performed a traditional dance to the song “God’s Doing” while dressed in colorful tunic-style outfits and beaded necklaces. Biden was given a beaded necklace representing the Maasai culture, and Ambassador Meg Whitman received a red scarf from the Maasai people.

During her 90-minute visit, Biden held a roundtable with local women and visited the outreach center, which operates every two weeks. The center has four stations, where children are weighed to determine necessary commodities, community members are weighed and measured, physicians perform physicals, and medication, vaccinations, family planning, and reproductive health services are provided.

The area is also home to six tents set up by the church, which is the outreach center. Lositeti is the only water source within a 25-mile radius and is a popular spot for health outreach tents, especially on Sundays when people attend church. The community is under extra pressure as half of the livestock in the area have died due to the lack of vegetation and water.

Biden also met two Maasai women and their children during her visit. Gladys Motete, 32, who was four months pregnant at the time, had brought her five-year-old son to play in the open doors of Land Cruisers. She explained that the drought was having a severe impact on their community: “Very hard, it is very hard, because people, they have no food, they have no water.”

Alice Kirimi, 34, was holding the hand of her 1.5-year-old son, Victor. She stated that their village was also struggling with a lack of food and water, and transportation was a challenge for them to get to school. We have to walk very far to the school. We don’t have any vehicles,” she said.

 “Today we came to meet with people of this area. They talked about how their livestock are dying. Obviously, you can see the drought here, how bad it is. The water here feeds 12 villages and each village has approximately 1,000 to 1,200 people. So they are coming here, they are coming here to get water, they are bringing their livestock. But unfortunately for many of them their living comes from their livestock. And for most of them their live stock are dying. So they are having a hard time. Their children are malnourished. They cannot feed their children. They cannot afford to send their children to schools because there is a fee – not for the elementary school but for the older grades,” said Jill Biden.

“So you can see – I mean the United States is providing 70 percent of the budget – the money coming into the region. We cannot be the only ones. We have to have other countries join us in this global effort to help these people of the region and, unfortunately, you know there is the war in Ukraine. There is the earthquake in Turkey. I mean there are a lot of competing interests but obviously here people are actually – livestock, people are starving.”

Naomi Biden stood off to the side, observing the exchanges as they unfolded. She was dressed in a white shirt with a shawl draped around her neck.

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