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Published: October 12th 2011
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Arriving in Nairobi, a city unknown to me felt exciting and nerve racking at the same time. Africa was the first leg of our round the world trip and although we had researched we were still unsure what to expect from the volunteering program we had chosen in Kenya.
For our first couple of days we stayed with a Kenyan family in Nairobi together with some other volunteers who had also recently arrived. We spent time getting to know the other volunteers who had arrived from mainly Australia, USA, Canada & UK and sharing ideas for how we could get the most from our time as volunteers. The first weekend of our arrival we went to Sunday Mass at a local church where our host family, Pastor Regina and her husband are pastors. This was definitely the most colorful & powerful church service we have ever experienced! You need to see it for yourself to understand but we were singing and dancing within 10 minutes of walking through the door and the service carried on like that for a couple of hours – a fantastic experience!
After an orientation with Fadhili Community, the Kenyan partner of ‘International Volunteers Headquarters’ the
NGO that we had signed up with, all volunteers that we had met during our first few days waved goodbye to each other as we were sent off to different projects in towns spread all across Kenya. We learned that our project would be an 1.5 hour drive away from Nairobi in a mid-sized town called Thika.
One of my initial worries when signing up for the project was, where will we be staying for the duration of our program and with no real idea of where we would end up living, I prepared myself for a poor living environment . As we drove further and further away from Nairobi towards the town of our placement along the dirt tracks and uneven roads, I envisaged us arriving at a mud-hut home, where where we would sleep together with the family in the same room with bare floors and cook food on an open fire. I got myself prepared to use a hole in the ground as our toilet for the next month and envisaged that we may be able to shower every week or so with buckets of cold water, if enough water was available. Luckily, I was wrong and
very grateful when we arrived at our destination to find that our accommodation was a normal cozy home, where we would stay with our host Ann Waniga and her family, Maggie, Baby Matthew, Grace, Lilian and Maureen.
The school that we volunteered at was 'Jamhuri Primary School'. Jamhuri meaning ‘independence’ in Swahili was the name chosen for the school as it was established in 1967, soon after Kenya gained independence from Britain. The school accomadates 400 children from 3-16 years old and within the school grounds there is also an onsite orphanage where 16 orphaned boys live.
We spent our time working with the school and orphanage for a little under a month. Benn got straight into teaching within the first couple of days and taught students English, Maths, Science, Social studies, Geography and P.E. Once the rest of the school had seen Benn taking his first P.E. lesson on the school field, every class in the school wanted us to take them for P.E.! Super tiring, but great fun!
Our time at the school was full on from the word go. We did not stop for the whole time that we were there and were being
pulled in different directions every minute of the day for the duration of our time. It took immense patience, hard work, positivity and pro-activeness to ensure that we could make our time effective for both the children & teachers aswell as for ourselves.
As for me I took the nursery classes for the 3 to 5 year olds for the first week of the program as I really wanted to spend my time with the younger kids. After nursery duties I would head to the kitchen to help with the lunch time rush, serving food for the orphanage kids and helping to clean up. After the first week I took a slightly different approach and decided to spread my time across more of the ten or so classes at the school. I went through every class in the school giving them an introduction about who I was, where I come from, what it is like in Hong Kong, Philippines and Dubai where I have lived before. The kids loved having us around and demanded that I taught their classes so I gave it a go for the first time with Class 7 who were around 13-14 years old. Nerve
racking at first but I was overjoyed when I had finished the lesson, it had gone well and the kids really enjoyed it.
Once I had the first lesson out of the way I was off and spent the next few weeks taking classes almost all day, every day. It was such an amazing feeling teaching all these wonderful kids. They are full of energy and passionate about their dreams and what they want from their future. To become Doctors, Lawyers, Policemen, Pilots, Engineers, and Teachers were some of the dreams they shared with us. We asked them to make us proud and work hard to achieve these dreams.
I especially enjoyed my photo project when I spent time photographing almost 400 students, one by one, in groups with their best friends and together with their whole class. You can imagine the excitement when I handed out to every single child in the school a picture of themselves to take home! Most of the children live in surrounding slums and many have lost parents and can often go days without a proper meal, never mind having seen a camera up close or a picture of themselves.
It was
a real challenge working with the children and also the teachers. We listened to the everyday challenges the teachers have to go through with their students, some students often starving so the teachers have to buy food for these needy kids. Some students with school uniforms hanging off their backs, full of holes etc, so teachers would help out to assist in buying new uniforms where possible. Some teachers were desperate themselves and we had to deal with situations of teachers asking us for money as they were not receiving salaries.
It was clear to us early on of the children who come from problem families. You could see certain children falling asleep at their desk – solely down to lack of food. Many children were not having their school fees paid by their parents/families and were being sent home and told not to come back until these fees were paid. Some teachers paid these fees themselves if there were children that they really wanted to help. Every day was tough but immensely rewarding.
We tried hard to make an impact to the kids lives by listening, guiding and disciplining them. Since our time in Kenya it feels like
my world has opened up to new possibilities - teaching these children was meant to be.
At the end of our volunteering program in Jamhuri School, the teachers and children held a goodbye assembly for us to sing some songs and say thank you for the effort and love that we had shared with them. Standing there in front of the 400 children, it was very tough to say goodbye. We had made some tremendous bonds with both the kids and good friendships with the teachers. We went back to the school a month later to spend a couple more days with the kids before we left Africa and having now gone back a second time, we knew that this would not be our last..
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MAGGIE MAMA MATTHEW
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A HEART OF AN ANGLE
As i read thru your story it really touched me. I ALMOST CRIED. i am so blessed to have known someone like u. That is surely a story from your heart. BE BLESSED ALOT