Nzavoni - A School in Need

The last couple of times I've been to the Kinyambu area, I have visited a nearby primary school called Nzavoni. 

 The students and staff of Nzavoni

Last winter we brought them some educational gifts and they sang for us. They sing in their local Kamba language with great joy, welcoming visitors.

Nzavoni Classroom

Nzavoni Classroom

However, the poor condition of the classrooms there struck me both times. On the last visit, in March of 2016, I could see that things were getting bad quickly. We saw a couple of classrooms that had rotten rafters half fallen down, big cracks in the walls and evidence of a large termite mound that was forming in the inside walls. The head teacher's office was tiny and the teacher's workroom was in disrepair. 

Parents are concerned for their children in these rooms, consequently, the school has been losing students to nearby schools, causing overcrowding at those other schools. 

It kept bothering me after I got home and after talking to George Bunz and others at Rainbow of Hope we decided to put fundraising resources into building 3 classrooms and some offices for them. Kenya made primary school education free in 2003 but local communities are responsible for school buildings and maintenance. The government supplies teachers and some very basic school supplies.

There will be a water tank on each building to catch rainwater and we will furnish the classrooms with desks, tables and chairs and blackboards. The offices will have lockable storage for exams and materials and desks and chairs for teachers. Parents will provide unskilled labour and are excited to have a new building for their children.

I and the Kenya group we work with, want to make sure that we don't just focus all our efforts on one school and that we spread things around a bit. This will be a good start. We hope that parents bring their children back to this school and that the standards of education will strengthen.

Monitoring visit, February and March 2016

It's been several months since returning from my latest visit to Kinyambu. It seems to take me that long to process things and get down what the visit meant to me.

Monitoring Team

I had two friends with me this time, new to Kenya, who found the visit quite interesting and inspiring. Roy, my cousin, 10 days younger than me, who had spent much of his work life in northern Manitoba  found the whole trip an eye opener. He is someone who watched every National Geographic Special on Africa but kept saying how different the reality is. A TV show just can't capture the smells, the light, the sounds and the people. Cal, a new friend from Prince Albert, was most intrigued by meeting the local people. He enjoyed the dancing, visiting the schools, getting into the local life and eating the local food.

We met with Simon and the KRECD group on the Saturday afternoon of our visit. They are excited about possible programs we can do to improve agricultural production in the area. Their idea is to get better breeds of chicken and improved fruit trees and give them to the school children who would raise them at their homes. Kind of like our 4H programs. Sounds good to me.

Presenting a laptop

We also visited Kinyambu Primary School where we presented them with 2
computers and a printer and a lot of sports clothing for the teachers and t-shirts that the students can wear while playing so they look more like a team. They're enjoying those and the students are learning to operate the printer too.

Thange School Students

We also went to two nearby schools, Thange where Beth Muendo teaches and Nzavoni. We presented some gifts to the schools and they sang songs for us too.

Nzavoni has some classrooms in very bad condition. The termites have gotten into the rafters and they are almost non-existent. The walls have big cracks and the floors are rough. I came home determined to raise some money to build some new classrooms there which I've started to raise money for.

We left for Tanzania after a few days, driving around Mt. Kilimanjaro  to visit another Rainbow of Hope project.

See you next year, Kinyambu.

Learning computers

The Kinyambu Library is now equipped with computers and printer. Sylvia Ndunge Kyalo and Teddy Muoti lend a hand in printing some work for the headteacher.

Both Sylvia and Teddy are class eight pupils in Kinyambu Primary. They did marvelous work with the laptop and printer after just a few directions on how to operate them.

Post and pictures courtesy of  Mwalimu Timothy Kaija, seen below using the computer as well.

The Canadian Team Helps Finish the Fence and Build the Werbicki Reading Corner in the New Library.

Asante sana, thank you in Swahili, was something we heard often during our time working on Rainbow of Hope’s Kinyambu Primary School project in Kenya. Parents, teachers and students were excited to have us and grateful for the funding and personal assistance that we provided. It was a great first experience for me, taking a small group of Canadian volunteers to work on a project.

We had spent our first day in Nairobi making sure we had some of the resources we needed to spend a couple of weeks working in a rural village far away from banks and supermarkets. Other stops along the way enabled us to buy books and school supplies to be delivered, and lumber, tools and paint for our reading corner project.  

Our partner in Kenya, the Kinyambu Rural Education and Community Development ( KRECD) group, had things ready for us when we arrived on Feb. 20, 2015.  

KRECD chair, Simon Ngumbi and his KRECD directors and Stephen Mulwa and his staff at the school handled the logistics of getting materials and the books we bought to the school. Simon had already ordered the fencing materials that were waiting for us.

Some organizing meetings with Simon, parents and staff were necessary before things got down to the physical labour. 

The volunteer work had two separate components:  

• completing the perimeter fence, half of which had been built a few years before, and 
• building benches and painting a mural for the Werbicki Reading Corner in the library, named after the principal at Cardinal Leger School.  

The Fence

To complete the fence, some trees and underbrush had to be cleared, holes dug and then cement mixed to place around each post. Finally, four strands of barbed wire and chain link needed to be wired on. Our labour was useful, but paled in comparison to the 150 parents in total who came over the 5 days of fence building. 

Their main tools were pangas, long knives like machetes, grub hoes called jembes, and their hands.

 

Women brought their babies and young children and did equal physical labour to the men, carrying water, chopping brush with axes and pangas, and mixing cement.  

The atmosphere was social and cooperative. There was laughing and teasing and much interest in the wazungu, white people, who they were sure couldn’t do any physical labour with those soft looking hands! Their skepticism abated as we dug in to clear shrubs and small trees and helped mix cement.

After a lot of physical effort, the fence now surrounds the school. The young trees the children plant will now be protected from the animals who had been coming in and destroying them. Their previously barren schoolyard will be enhanced with trees.  

 The Library

The library building was completed last year. When we arrived the library was empty except for many bags of maize and beans that were to feed the students at Kinyambu and neighboring schools. There has been a severe drought and rural areas that depend on subsistence farming for their food are in trouble. The county provided the food to the schools so the children would at least get one reasonable meal each day. These bags were soon distributed and the building was ready for the painting and sawing and hammering that went on for the next week. 

The Werbicki Reading Corner soon took shape. Donna Kurtenbach, the designer of the murals, directed the various painters and worked with a couple of students to include them in the process. Johnson drew a huge giraffe and a child sitting and reading and he and Eric assisted with the painting. Julia Laforge, Jessica Van Eyck and I helped with whatever jobs needed doing. 

Charlie Matt was in charge of building some two-level reading benches. With the help of a few parents, sturdy benches soon surrounded the reading corner.

The school staff had to cope with five extra people wanting to eat lunch in the tiny staff room and store their things in the head teacher’s office. We caused constant disruption in the classrooms as we walked by. Visitors are rare in this area and the children were always drawn to whatever we were doing. My specialty, as a former teacher, was controlling the many curious children who crept into the library and hung at every window as the week went on. Julia Laforge spent most afternoons after class on the playing fields teaching students to play a new sport for them, Ultimate, a Frisbee game needing few resources. The energy of the participants and the shouts of delight and excitement could be heard all over the school grounds.

Finally, it was finished. Our last morning at the school was spent on final details and cleaning up. We invited the parents and staff for a “grand opening” in the afternoon.  

The school staff coordinated the opening and over 80 parents lined the room to see the completed projects and look at some of the materials we had bought for the library.

I demonstrated the reading corner by reading a story to a large group of parents seated on the benches laughing and translating when the English was too difficult. There was a wonderfully relaxed atmosphere in the room as the parents and teachers enjoyed some drinks and cookies with us. It had been a couple of weeks of immersion in a very different part of the world and the warmth of the people made us feel very welcome. 

Before we left, each of the Canadians was presented with a gift we could take home that would remind us of our wonderful experience.

            

The five of us went home feeling very satisfied. While we brought things to the school, we went home with great memories.

So the fence is completed and the library is built with some of the supplies in it. What a great way to end the fifth year for the Friends of Kinyambu! All of the people involved--students at Cardinal Leger School, friends, relatives, friends of friends, and just anyone who lent a hand--can be very proud to have helped the students and parents of Kinyambu school enhance their educational resources and experiences. But we aren't done yet . . . There is still more to do and more fun to be had too.

More books and furniture are still needed for the library (and for the classrooms). If you would like to help, you can send a donation to The Alphonse Gerwing Foundation or to The Rainbow of Hope for Children. The addresses are at the top right. 

Stay tuned. We will have some exciting news in the new year!

            

Going to Kinyambu in Feb. 2015

Going back to Kinyambu in mid February!  I'm excited to say that there are possibly 6 of us going and we're going to be working on various projects while we're there.  One will be to help finish the fence that we started several years ago.  We have the funding to complete it now and we will set up a work bee with parents, students and staff to get it done while we're there.

Another part of what we'll be doing is working to set up the library that was built last winter.  We want to set up a reading corner with comfortable seating for the children and a nice chair or two for adult readers.  It is also our hope to start some parent volunteer reading programs with the school.  We want to paint some nice murals on the walls and get brightly coloured pillows for the kids to sit on while they're listening to someone read. The library also needs shelving and tables so that will be part of what we hope to do if we have enough funding to accomplish that too.

Finally, we would like to help with some innovative agriculture programs there.   Schools often grow gardens and we'd like to help set one up at Kinyambu and will be looking at the possibility of a tank to catch water from the rains which only come a couple of times a year.  This could be dedicated to irrigating the garden plots and maybe also some trees that they are trying to grow as well.  Deforestation is a big problem in the whole area where the village of Kinyambu is located.

If we accomplish these things or at least give them all a good start we'll come home very satisfied.