Jambo!
No video from me tonight, I’ve had a long day and have another long one ahead of me, but I wanted to recap the day a little.
We started the day at Kitie Secondary School, where there are 280 students, 110 of them girls, all of whom were taking exams when we arrived. The principal took us around the school, showing us everything from the latrines to the area where the water was collected. They don’t have running water at the school, so there is an employee who goes to the well four times a day, brings the water back, and sends it from one end of the property to another through a pipe. When the water reaches the large tank near the kitchen, it is mixed with chlorine so that the students do not get sick from drinking the water.
We spent a lot of time with the principal, but we were also able to go in to a couple of classrooms. We met a girl named Monicah Kioko, who is a Peer Educator (someone who educates other students about HIV/AIDS) and wants to grow up to be a Peer Educator trainer or possibly a Lawyer defending the rights of women. We went into her classroom and talked to the other students for a few minutes. They seemed very shy, but once we started handing out ONE bands they were pretty excited.
There aren’t enough teachers at the school. The principal told us they have 10 teachers, two student teachers, and would run more smoothly with sixteen teachers. One teacher’s desk was so stacked with papers and folders that he barely had enough space to work in!
These teachers are working very hard and not getting paid very much. The students are also working hard, and some of them are rewarded by being accepted to University when they graduate, though if they can’t pay for it, they can’t go. Some of them cannot even pay for the tuition at Kitie. Children that are orphaned, as well as others that deserve on the grounds of merit, are funded through USAID, but not very many. 3,300 students throughout the country are funded. There are nearly 6,000 applications waiting at USAID for someone to say, “yes, you can now go to school.”
Despite all of this, there is a demand for teachers, as there are not many people who can teach. We went to a teachers training college and talked to some of the students there, who told us it is very hard to pay for school, uniforms and books, and even if they do get into school and get all the way through (it is a two year program), they sometimes cannot find a job. Some students want to teach where they leave, but there is no demand for teachers where they are, and some want to teach in a different place, but there is a demand for teachers where they live. The Kenyan government has trouble understanding why people don’t want to go where there are jobs, so they make it hard for the new teachers to relocate and find a job. We heard a lot about that from a couple of the students.
After the teacher training college, we went to the elephant orphanage, which was pretty great. The caretakers stay with the baby elephants 24/7, because elephants get separation anxiety, and they feed them milk as well as send them out into the national park. The elephants are eventually released back into the wild, but it is good that they have someone to take care of them until they are ready to do it themselves.
I guess that’s all for now. Tomorrow we leave the hotel at 5 AM to fly to Kisumu, Kenya, so I’m going to get some rest.
Kwa sasa, kwaheri!
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