Second week in Kakunga!

Our second week in school has been a really busy one! We have started planning what our main investments and schemes are going to be in terms of the time and money we have at our disposal, discussing them with the various stakeholders and looking for suppliers. EPAfrica also has a central pot funded by various donors that is supposed to go towards electricity and water projects in our school, which we have applied to in an attempt to get funding for a generator to provide the school with electricity during power cuts and failures. We should find out by the end of the week if we have been granted the funding, so everyone at school is keeping their fingers crossed!

Kakunga Girls’ has just built a new library building, which will be a huge improvement on the small room in which they keep all their textbooks and novels at the moment. At the moment it is not connected to the electricity and it still doesn’t have any furniture or shelves to arrange the books, so we are hoping to help the school with all of that so that by the time we leave the school will have a fully functioning library. We are mentally preparing for the long process of cataloguing all the existing books, plus the new ones we are intending to buy and trying to sort out a library system that will limit the risk of books getting lost or damaged.

Another issues we are looking into is photocopying: at the moment the school has to hire a nearby school’s photocopier for every large-scale printing job such as exams sheets. This is costing the school a great deal of time and money. There have been occasions where the school has had to postpone exams because of power cuts affecting the whole area, so if the school were to get the generator AND the photocopier, it would even be able to generate some income by renting it out to schools affected by electricity failures or who do not have their own photocopier. Genius!

An area that we are really interested in helping with is giving the girls a broad array of opportunities once they finish high school. Currently, only one or two girls a year is able to achieve the grades they need to obtain a sponsored place at university. Some girls can still go to training colleges, but these are often unaffordable. Along with the Careers Advisor, we have started a new club in school that is similar to Young Enterprise: with a small amount of initial capital, the girls will be divided in teams and will have to set up their own little business. We are hoping to encourage entrepreneurial spirit and help the students develop skills that will serve them later on in life. The scheme is still in the development stages, so we’re excited to see it implemented!

Finally, we have been trying to find ways to help the girls access affordable sanitary pads to stop their periods being so debilitating. We haven’t quite drawn up a proper plan to tackle that issue, but we will keep you posted!

Aside from all our exciting projects and ideas, life has been carrying on fairly normally: Mama and the family are still hilarious and lovely, the food is abundant but we are training our stomachs to be less muzungu and more Kenyan (HUUUUGE portions!). We came back to Kakamega early on Friday because Emily wasn’t feeling too great, so we got her checked out and dosed up on meds, but now Bea is nursing her because she is a lovely lovely partner. In fact, most of the Kakamega Project Workers appear to have come down with something, so we are all moping and recovering together.

Don’t worry though, it’s nothing serious! We will be back in shape and ready to get back to our schools in no time:)

Until next week,

Emily and Bea

Muzungus on a mission

Emily: Our first week in Kakunga village has been awesome! We are gradually adjusting to our new environment: we have adopted an almost entirely Kenyan diet (we attempted to cook spaghetti for our family once. They were unimpressed.) and our waking hours are now between 7:30 am and 9:30 pm (if it’s a late night).

Bea: It’s so nice coming back after a long day at school to the family we are staying with. The lady we are staying with, (“Mama” as we obediently and fondly call her), eats with us every evening, and has already decided that “muzungus” (white women) are a lot less sensible than is generally believed. It has taken a week for her to accept that we are able to find the school on our own (its at the end of the one straight road beside the house), and that we can use the gas cooker without burning the house down (Still a bit doubtful in regards to Emily).

Emily: Ridiculous allegations. Our new family is made up of Mama and a number of relatives. There is never a dull moment! The children were shy at first, but Bea won them over with her tennis ball, which has provided hours of entertainment. We attempted to teach them how to play some card games, but we were soon bested by little Kanny’s cheating snap antics.

Bea: We’ve both been really moved by how generous Mama is. She was widowed in 2010, but undertakes to support so many nieces and nephews by putting them through school, and also funded a new classroom at Kakunga school. She never fails to be full of warmth and laughter, and is known by almost everyone we come across. One of her more recent missions has also been to convert us into Kenyan women by eating large and multiple helpings of anything we eat, a challenge which we have both accepted with vigour.

“Mama” with her brother whose children she puts through school

Emily: Mama has really been such a blessing: she has made us feel so welcome and she lifts our spirits every evening if we are feeling even slightly overwhelmed by the amount of work there is to do or tired from the long walk home. We are already dreading having to leave her at the end of our project! I think she is also worried about us leaving her care; every morning she feels the need to ring Mildred  just to check that we have made it to the school without getting lost. To be fair, it is a pretty long walk: it takes us about 45 minutes to get to school in the morning, and sometimes over an hour on the way back.

Bea: The school is next to Kakamega Rainforest, so just a few minutes walk from the main road leads to stunning views of lush green countryside. The road we walk on however is very busy and dusty, as there is West Kenya Sugar Factory, a big market and A Technical Training Institute nearby. On the way back every ten seconds we are greeted by workers on motorbikes or walking along shouting out “muzungu, muzungu!” (“white woman, white woman!”), and asking if we want a ride. However, we have made friends with some of the people who sell tomatoes, onions and avocado by the road, who we chat to everyday and buy supper from on the way home.

Emily: At school our day normally begins with chai and bread and butter in Mildred’s office, where we have a quick chat about our plans for the day and say hello to the lovely secretary, Eunice. Our schedule has been pretty packed: the school has been pretty emphatic about their need for more textbooks (currently the average ratio of textbooks to students is 1:4) so we spent the first couple of days trying going through all the handwritten records of books that have been bought in the past couple of years, comparing them to the librarian’s records of books that have been lent out to the girls and compiling a huge inventory spreadsheet.

Sorting through the book records with a much-needed chai

Lovely Eunice bringing us chai

Bea: Many of the text-book numbers in the various records did not line up and the text-books are stored in a tiny room in cupboards. Looking through them we discovered some books with whole chunks missing thanks to rodents. Consequently helping the school set up a library with a clear checking-out system and shelves seems like a priority. We were pleased to learn that a newly constructed building on the grounds is going to become a library, and that the school has plans for shelves to be constructed as soon as the girls’ parents are able to pay their school fees.

Emily: At the moment we think that this will take up most of our resource investment, but we are also exploring ways to improve the girls’ health (malaria seems to be a big problem at the moment) and their general wellbeing. We discovered that many of the girls are not able to afford basic sanitary products, so their periods can be a huge obstacle in terms of getting to school and going about things freely and comfortably. In order to find out more about the girls’ needs and to understand their daily challenges we have tried to devise ways to get to know them and mingle casually in a way that will make them feel free to talk to us frankly. So far this has proved trickier than we thought…

Bea: For the first few days we focussed on getting to know the school management and finding out their views on what can be done to help the school. By Thursday we felt it was high time to mingle more with the students and find out their experience of school. We found ourselves being left for five minutes with each class, who each demanded that we perform various activities. Some of the classes found it fascinating to watch us do a maths question on the board, whilst others derived great amusement in hearing my increasingly desperate announcements of my name, which spiralled from “Bea”, to “Beatrice”, to “Beetriss” to “Bee-trees” which Emily and Mama now (fondly?) refer to me as. The older classes proved more curious to find out if we “abstained”. We found this challenging to answer given the highly conservative attitudes in the area of “boy-girl relationships”.

Emily: One day we decided to have lunch outside with the girls instead of staying in the principal’s office. We queued outside the kitchen along with the students, who somehow all managed to sidestep and sneak their way in front of us so we ended up right at the back of the 200-person queue. When we finally made it to the front, we were served our Githeri (beans) and turned around to find a huge semicircle of girls just staring at us waiting for us to do or say something hilarious. This wasn’t quite the informal mingling session we’d envisioned!

Beetrees: A more informal mingling opportunity happened on Sunday when we attended the church beside the school. It is a Salvation Army church, and we arrived to find a huge procession of people marching around the village in military style with a brass band playing and – to our mutual surprise – some other “muzungus” marching in white uniform. The service lasted for over 4 hours, and involved much singing, dancing and blessing each other. We were welcomed to the front to introduce ourselves to the community, and then watched as the other muzungus performed a tambourine dance for the congregation. The crowd went wild. We ended up having lunch with the other “muzungus” and learnt they were a group of visiting American Salvation Army members, and tried not to appear envious when they described their hostel’s hot showers and internet. We parted with promises to see each other next year in July at a large Salvation Army conference in London…

At the end of this week we are feeling inspired, motivated and exhausted. We can’t wait to see what next week will bring!!

Arriving in Kakamega!

As you may already know, for the next 10 weeks we will be working with Kakunga Girls Secondary school representing Education Partnership Africa. We hope this blog will be interesting to those considering being project workers for EPA, and for those who were kind enough to help us in fundraising the £1800 to be invested in the school.

WEEK 1

Emily: We arrived at the EPAfrica central house on the afternoon of the 1^st feeling bedraggled and ready for a shower. We were greeted by the security man, Griffin, and a variety of cattle, poultry and goats. This bode well for supper. The house was cool and welcoming, so we immediately felt at home and we wasted no time setting up our mosquito nets and preparing to shower.

Bea: A complex network of mosquito nets, string and tape quickly emerged. Water for showers was less forthcoming as there was no water supply. We masked the smell in mosquito repellent. Although weary, our spirits were lifted by the contagious laugh of Bishop Nicholas, who we hosted that evening, and who bravely sampled our spaghetti and chocolate.

Emily: During the first few days in Kakamega, we had a packed training schedule with our wonderful project manager Kate and somewhat lack-luster coordinator Matt (joking! He is also wonderful). In the evenings we aimed to relax with some fun card games. They turned out to be rather more intensely competitive than relaxing.

Bea: More relaxing was our evening on the 3rd. After a busy day of training most of the group headed to bed early. However, Emily Matt and I found ourselves talking with 2 Kenyans Ringtone and Billy late into the night. Ringtone explained he had been abandoned as a child and grew up on the streets, yet managed to make it as a famous singer and now tours schools as a motivational speaker. He turned his motivational speaking and performing prowess to attempt to persuade Emily to marry him, but to no avail.

Emily: Indeed when I mentioned my lovely boyfriend waiting for me at home, he assured me that the Bible clearly states that “the best is yet to come”. It was all fun and games and we had a really enjoyable evening as a group. Please see below one of Ringtone’s performances. (#friendsinhighplaces).

Bea: On the 4^th we all headed bright and early in our smartest clothes to the Head-teachers’ Conference. We were really excited to meet Kakunga Girls’ Principal, Mildred, who was the only female principal of a school EPAfrica is working with in Kakamega this year. She immediately gave us a big hug and told us we were “her Kakunga girls”. After meeting the principals over “African tea” and mandazi we sat down to discuss four of the big issues facing the schools: funding, gender, post-secondary opportunities and health.

 

Emily: We really were able to learn a whole lot from the head teachers, and were inspired by how aware and open they were when discussing the various issues. I found the discussion on female education particularly heart-warming, as most of the principals were male but were regardless very clued up on the issues girls face, such as poor encouragement from traditionalist parents, pregnancy and “boy-girl relationships” and menstruation.

Bea: It was saddening to hear that many students finished school unable to find long-term employment due to fierce job competition and an increasing demand for university qualifications. At the district schools EPAfrica works with, at most a handful of students can be expected to achieve the grades required (B plain) to earn a state-funded university place. Although the Principals acknowledged it was important to provide the students with information about alternative routes such as other forms of training, they stressed the sheer lack of such avenues.