Clearly I'm not a very good blogger. I've neglected this one for four years now. The pandemic was part of it. No one from Rainbow of Hope for Children visited Kinyambu until February of 2023. At that time four of us went, president Charlie Matt, Donna Kurtenbach, a long time supporter of our projects and Murray Brown, pharmacist from Alberta and my nephew. It was Murray's first time and he is planning a return visit with us again in early 2025. Our 2023 visit was very successful. We saw the great results of the poultry project which had operated through the pandemic and helped many local families to set up small operations to help them earn a little extra income to help their children with school fees and uniform costs. Right now KRECD, the Kinyambu Rural Education and Community Development organization, is completing a classroom for the Kinyambu Special School. This special school is for children with various cognitive and physical handicaps and has only been operating for about 6 years. They will now have 4 classrooms and the one we are building will have a water tank and rain gutters to catch and save rain water. This is really important in an area that has rainfall in only a few months of the year. Climate change is also changing the rainfall patterns which is making planning for planting and water retention even harder. I will try to keep this blog up more consistently and report on our trip in early 2025.
Friends of Kinyambu
Sunday, November 17, 2024
Monday, December 20, 2021
Coping with COVID and Raising Chickens
The pandemic was a shock to the Kinyambu community as to all of us. They have had no outbreaks in the Kinyambu area and Kenya as a whole has had few cases per capita. The biggest problem has been the economic fallout. Many people in the Kinyambu area work in the tourist area which totally stopped for about 8 months in 2020 and has only slowly recovered since then. Of course no one from Canada has been able to visit and may not for a year or more yet.
Added to these troubles, a prolonged drought has hit the area. They didn't get the regular rains in April and they have not arrived yet in November. This has increased the food insecurity there and taken another source of cash which was selling some of their farm produce. This means that parents can't afford school uniforms with the addition of masks. For the secondary schools which are still mostly boarding schools they can't scrape the cash together to pay the fees and boarding costs as well. The government has responded with some extra support but it is far from enough.
Rainbow of Hope for Children (ROHFC) has provided support for the community as well as we can through this difficult time. We have provided masks and uniforms for school children. We have supported the local health center so that they have sanitation supplies including clean water. As an example, we helped them build a roof over one of their water tanks so that the water doesn't heat up in the tropical sun.
On a more positive note, the poultry raising project we funded has been doing very well. The Kinyambu Rural Education and Economic Development (KRECD) group developed this project with our support and financial assistance. The students in the first year have worked with their families to build housing, feed and care for their chickens and learn about management so that they can sell eggs or meat. It's a way for the families to raise a better, more productive, breed of chicken.
Before the pandemic, the local area around the bigger town of Kiwezi, about 10 kilometers from Kinyambu, was becoming a bigger hub for tourism and business. It is at the junction of 2 highways, the main Mombasa/Nairobi highway and another that joins it in the north. There is also a station for the new railway that opened a couple of years ago. When we stayed in Kibwezi for the first time in 2010, a mere 11 years ago, there were only a couple of very basic hotels with poor facilities. Now there are at least 10 with upgraded facilities and better food. All of these hotels need meat and eggs to feed their guests. The town has grown visibly during that time.
The huge Tsavo National Parks, East and West, are not far away from Kibwezi. As an example the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which works with saving elephants and other animals and rewilding them into the huge Tsavo National Park, has located one their lodges at Umani Springs, just across the highway from Kibwezi. Umani Springs in the Kibwezi Forest is one of their elephant sanctuaries.
The first year of the poultry project had 6 participants and the second year of the project will have 12. They will incorporate the things learned in the first year and also share what they have learned with the wider community.
As one example of the learning that has gone on, the poultry expert, who has done several seminars with the students and their families, suggested feeding maggots to the chickens as one way to increase the protein in their diets. One of the mothers did a very good job of this and then she taught others how to increase their maggot production.
We hope that this will contribute to the economic development in the area.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
The painting project - Kenya 2020
The first Safari
Before we got to Kinyambu area to do our project we went on a safari. We decided to do this first because Erin had to go home early. So off we went north to an area that Donna and I had been to years before. As we drove along with our favourite driver, Simon Mburu from A and B Tours, Donna and I kept remembering things, Mount Kenya of course, the second highest mountain in Africa. Not quite as dramatic as Kilimanjaro, but still impressive. The altitude required some getting used to, Nairobi at 1700 meters (almost 6000 feet), then north and up over the equator, also around 2000 meters (over 6000 feet), and the swell of the mountain and down on the other side.
We visited the Ol Pejeta Conservancy and saw the last two Northern White Rhinos in existence (the last male, Sudan, died a couple of years ago) and got to touch Baraka, a mostly blind and very tame black rhino who lives there also. Pretty amazing.
Umoja village
We also visited the Samburu Conservancy near Archer's Post where we had a very memorable experience. The small lodge we stayed at there turned out to be owned by a group of amazing Samburu women who some years before had broken with their strict tribal protocols, left their abusive husbands and set up a village of their own where they can feel safe. Rebecca Lolosoli, the main force behind this whole process, told us some of her story and related the tale of how this group of women, not allowed to own property, managed to get title to the land we were on and built their community. We were mesmerized by the story and hope to contribute to their project soon.
Rebecca Lolosoli |
Nzavoni school
Our first few days in the Kinyambu area where Nzavoni school is located were a flurry of meeting a greeting everyone, getting organized, figuring out how and what and where we were going to do things. The countryside was quite lush for that time of year, normally a very dry period. The November/December rains had been extensive and had carried on into January and even February. Flooding happened all over and affected us too. We had to take a very roundabout route to get to Nzavoni School every day which took a lot of time each day. We were out of the hotel by around 7 am and got to the school at close to 8 am.
The first week the students were all there and excited to see what we were up to. No TV, no travel, and not much excitement in their lives, so a visit from foreigners is really interesting. They helped us and sometimes got in the way in their excitement.
The second week was a break for them so things were quiet. Only Beth Muendo or another teacher was there to lock and unlock and for a couple of days young Ryan, Beth's grandson, 6 years old and also home from school, came to help and mostly play.
Here is the result of our labors. The school was very excited to have these murals and we felt quite proud of our handiwork.
Ryan helps Donna |
One of our relatives donated a lot of toothbrushes and little toothpaste tubes, almost 400 we think, and Esther hauled it all to the school for an activity around that. Chloe, a kindergarten teacher in Canada, had recently done a tooth brushing session with her students and so she managed to get several hundred very excited, chattering Kenyan school kids to learn about tooth brushing and sent them all home with supplies.
A second Safari
We finished off with a short safari to make sure Chloe, who came for the final two weeks of the project, would experience the wonders of Kenya: the amazing animals of course, but also Mount Kilimanjaro and rivers of lava and Mzimu Springs and so on. She saw many leopards, which is a rarity. Each safari is different.
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Kenya and Tanzania, January 2019
The first night in Nairobi |
Waiting for the ceremonies to begin at Nzavoni Primary School |
Everyone danced! |
Nzavoni classroom before and after |
The opening ceremonies for the additions to Ussongo school included a demonstration of different types of African clothing |
Water tanks we funded for Ussongo Primary School |
We drove a few miles out of town to some workshops in which they teach carpentry and sewing to give the young adults some skills with which to earn a living.
Older students learn sewing and carpentry skills. |
Monday, February 19, 2018
A cold day in February thinking about Kenya
Our trip in July was a long anticipated teacher visit to schools in the Kinyambu area. My friend Simon and his wife Beth had both come to Canada early in their careers and found the experience of seeing the world and immersing themselves into another country to be a life changing time. They would love to come back but the Canadian government is very stingy with visas to come and visit here and so we've kind of given up on having Kenyans come to see our schools. But we can still go there and that is what we did.
Three teachers from Saskatchewan and one from Manitoba came with me. We spent a couple of weeks visiting schools in the Kinyambu area. In most of the schools we would pair up with a teacher in an area of interest and spend most of the day with them in their classes. We had brought a variety of teaching resources with us and used these in the classrooms as well as we were able. The teachers of the younger children had lots of fun with balloon animals, games and balls, lots of brightly colored materials that they totally lack in their everyday classes. They generally have a blackboard of poor quality, white chalk and notebooks. They take notes or recite and that's pretty much it. Having some colorful materials and books is very exciting to them.
One of the things we did was bring cash to purchase school supplies for three of the main schools we visited. We had raised this from various groups including a church group in Manitoba. We had a big day driving to the nearest school supply store about four hours away and picking up great packages of textbooks and reference material that the schools had requested.
We were big hits as we presented these to the schools. Students, teachers and parents turned out in the school yards for the big presentations.
We heard from Simon at the end of the year that the students in these schools had done well in their national examinations. They are very focused on these exams. Students can't progress unless they do well. This determines which secondary schools they can attend and which post-secondary programs they can enter. Kenya is trying to move their system to include more creativity and innovation into the curriculum and focus more on skill development rather than just rote memorization. It will take time though but as a culture they can be very entrepreneurial and this needs to be nourished. Here is a website that describes the changes: How New Education Will Work
After our work there we left Kinyambu behind and started a five-day safari through Tsavo East and West National parks and Amboseli which is at the food of Kilimanjaro. These are all relatively close to Kinyambu.
We stayed mainly in a hotel in the town of Voi which was cheaper than the lodges in the game parks but had some traffic challenges.
We had a great time though, lots of elephants, giraffe, lions and antelope and gazelles. We even saw a couple of cheetah. Because of the lengthy period of drought many animals congregated around the watering holes which made them easy to find, for us and the predators which looked very fat!
Two of us came home after 3 weeks and the other 3 stayed and extended their safari to the western part of Kenya, Masai Mara, the Lake Victoria area and through the Aberdares and into the Mt. Kenya area. They too had a great time.
We have started a project to build 3 classrooms and some administration offices at Nzavoni Primary School (see Philip's blog below) and will need to go and monitor that project probably in November of 2018. We love to take people with us. Newcomers to Kenya are always welcome.