By Stephen Birkett
The second week of our expedition is known as the project section, aimed at making a connection with the locals and appreciate the reality of life in Kenya.
The group had said they wanted to work with children so they asked for a project in a primary school.
The project is based in Njoro, a small town about 20 km from Nakuru.
The main source of income here is wheat farming but many residents work at the university, including our host, Ronald.
To our surprise, Ronald was going to accommodate all fourteen of us. His two boys, Stephen (8) and Emmanuel (6) were to be turfed out of their room for the four girls to sleep in there and the eight boys, Charlie, and I were to sleep on the floor of a cleared out store room next to the tiny kitchen.
Next morning we walked to the project in teeming rain and were splattered with mud by the time we reached the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
Ronald is an elder of the church and he and some fellow members started this project. Primary and secondary education is free in Kenya, although many youngsters do attend private schools. Nursery education is not free, however and parents have to pay £12 a month for it. There is very high unemployment here and many people don't have enough to eat, never mind pay for nursery education. The Church provides a nursery school for the children of the poor at a nominal fee of 300/= a month; about £2-50. This does not even cover the cost of their daily lunch!
Our project is to build a couple of classrooms in the grounds of the church. When we arrived the shell of the two classrooms was complete and roofed but it needed floor, windows, doors, ceiling and the walls plastering. This was supposed to be our job but in reality they had employed masons to do the work and we were there as labourers' mates for them. More importantly they were relying on us to pay for the materials out of the money we had raised over the last two years.
The youngsters set to work mixing cement and helping rendering the bare walls.They worked really hard all day. Other group members were working with the children, playing games and teaching them English. By the end of the day the walls were all covered with a coat of cement, as were most of the lads! The Strabane contingent were really impressed by the way the Kenyan men had worked solidly from 8 am to 4pm without a break or a bite to eat. Their pay for a day's work, about £3!
Sunday was a long, hard day, for the boys at least. They were expecting to finish at lunch time so they got started just after eight. The job took longer than expected and they weren't finished until five! The girls had an easier day, a woman came in to plait their hair so each of them had a couple of hours off.
On Monday, Ronald took Paul and me into Nakuru to change money and buy a few gifts for the nursery school. We thought we would have a lot of money to buy things but the cost of building materials and labour has gobbled up nearly all the money we raised.
We bought two doors, cement and paid the builders' wages. My first year citizenship classes asked me to bring a football for the project. I bought a good one at The Sports Centre in Strabane. Ronald said the whole church would benefit because they have to borrow one from the school next door any time their youth team want to play football.
I teach Citizenship and am quite keen to maintain some links between Strabane Grammar and Njoro. I really wanted to create links between Kenyan students and our pupils so I visited the secondary school next to the church. It is a private school. They were delighted to see me and showed me round the tiny school. They had four ricketty classrooms, and practically no teaching aids. The school didn't even have electricity.
The final part was the handover. We handed over our gifts and the teacher read out a heartfelt speech of thanks.
So ends the second week of the expedition.This hasn't been an easy week but this is World Challenge not World Holiday!
