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
Bea and Emily: The best is yet to come 