A cold day in February thinking about Kenya

This very cold February day has me reminiscing about my time in Kenya this past July and remembering the heat. Not that I really enjoy the heat but -37 isn't that great either. I am not a natural blogger, doing things trumps writing about them in my life and I've been very busy since the end of July but now these cold winter days I feel like I've caught up.

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.