The above photo shows the oldest Primary School class writing letters to their sponsors before going to secondary schools. Nearly all the letters mention the drought that has hit every family very hard. As you can see from the age of the pupils, Primary school lasts many years in Kenya!

We always like to start the newsletter on a happy note but it is a bit more challenging this time. Most people will have heard about the drought in East Africa and our school is in the part of Kenya where the drought is at its worst. Almost all the local population have no jobs, they just rely on raising a few cows and goats and selling the milk, kids or meat. This has now completely gone. Nearly all the animals have died due to lack of pasture. The very few that are remaining are fetching about 1% of the value of a healthy animal in normal times. There are 2 rainy seasons per year in Kenya and the past 5 rains have failed, so 30 months of almost no rain. The next rains are due to start late March. It will be catastrophic if these also fail.

The head-teacher introduced morning porridge at the school as many children came to school with nothing in their stomachs and were finding it difficult to last until lunchtime. Hungry children do not learn well.

At the end of last year, many sponsors donated to a crisis fund to pay for any emergency at the school or with a pupil. In December we distributed food parcels to all the mothers of children at the school. The government had distributed some food earlier to the community but according to some non-Maasai, if you were not of the same tribe as the person doing the distribution, you were unlikely to receive anything.

Surviving off goats is no longer viable in this area. This is the reason why we built the school where we did. The older generation have no skills other than raising goats and cows. We are trying to educate a whole community of youngsters so they have a choice of what career path and jobs they follow. They will have the skills to have an alternative to keeping goats. Hopefully, some will start their own businesses in the area and employ others.

A new class of 25 four year old children will start their long journey of education in January 2024. We are looking for individuals or corporations that can sponsor a number of these children. Can you help or do you know someone who can?

We now have 75 children supported in secondary schools so in this newsletter, we thought we would give more details about Secondary education. There are 4 grades of schools and you go to the grade corresponding to your mark at Primary school. Because the exam results at our Primary school are so good, more than half our children go to the top grade of secondary school, called National schools. All secondary schools are boarding schools, often many miles from where the child’s parents live. Government high schools have a fixed price that they must charge but most schools then try to increase this income by charging additional costs that the child must pay, for example, for building a new classroom or dormitory. These extra costs are hidden from the main school fees so often parents, or us, do not know about the extra costs until the child is sent home from school for the non-payment of these additional hidden fees. Sometimes the children are sent home because the bursar has misallocated the incoming funds. We had 3 children sent on the long journey home last week even though the fees had been paid the previous week.

On top of this, we found out that our sponsored children were left out of many secondary school lessons as these require ‘cash in hand’ payments to individual teachers. As a charity, we cannot provide such payments. To make up for this, during the 8 week Christmas holiday, we provided extra tuition to these secondary pupils in our Primary school. We also purchased a complete set of secondary school books. Together, they really helped the pupils catch up and was much appreciated by the pupils.

Click here to view a list of items needed by a school

Going to secondary school is not for the faint hearted. The parents are giving a long list of items that their child must bring with them, everything from a mattress to toilet paper – see the link above for an example acceptance letter. On the school letterheads, around half the email addresses are wrong, as are the phone numbers. If you look closely, the bank account number on page 2 is different to the one on page 9 (the digit after the 4 is different) so you have a 50:50 chance of paying money to the wrong bank account. I have no idea how Kenyan secondary schools survive in a modern world!

To help with the long list of items, we donated to each secondary school pupil a mattress and a metal box. These large items, along with everything else on the list, have to be transported to the school in a Matatu, a rusty metal vehicle, that passes as public transport in Kenya, with far less seats than passengers. Although every pupil will have a padlock for the box, many pupils complained about items being stolen, either from their box after the lock is smashed or from the washing line.

Our school has been chosen to host a Junior Secondary School (JSS). This means that we have to accommodate grades 7,8 and 9 in addition to the primary school. Until December 2022, JSS was going to be hosted in High Schools, then the Kenyan Government changed it’s mind on the 1st December, giving a whole 7 weeks notice to all the Primary Schools to get prepared. Imagine Western schools being given only 7 weeks notice of new classes, and a new curriculum. Rapid changes in Government direction appear to be the norm in Kenya.

Last year, the team repaired more than 400 broken hand pumps, such as the one above. Since the team started repairing pumps, they have repaired more than 2000 broken pumps, giving water to at least 600,000 people. Most are hand pump like the one above but a handful are electric pumps in schools or hospitals. We have never worked out why charities are installing new pumps whilst so many remain broken.

You are welcome to leave a comment below

Thanks everyone for your support

You can see previous newsletters here

The Osiligi Team February 2023.