STRABANE GRAMMAR SCHOOL WORLD CHALLENGE KENYA EXPEDITION SECOND WEEK Tuesday 31st July 2007 By Stephen Birkett   The second week of the expedition is the project section. The aim is for the young people to make 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. It is a fairly unremarkable African town although it does have the distinction of being about 5k from the oldest University in Kenya. The main source of income here is wheat farming but many residents work at the university, including our host, Ronald, who lectures in epidemiology and statistics there. The main road through the town is tarred but either side is a wide, muddy, rutted, red earthen expanse dotted with clumps of grass and strewn with litter. Shops and wooden stalls line both sides and the colourful population mills about. At one point the road is lined with matatus touting for trade and on the other side men on bicycles offer pillion rides for money. The bus turned off the main road and onto a rutted, dirt road. When the bus arrived at Ronald's house it was immediately mobbed by hoards of kids shouting "How are you? How are you?" They swarmed onto the bus and it was like herding cats to get them off again so we could unload our stuff. The house is simple by our standards, but luxurious by African. A veranda leads onto a sitting room about 4m by 7m with painted walls. It is simply furnished with two sofas, two easy chairs and a few smaller chairs. In one corner an alcove holds a chest of drawers with cupboards above and a concealed television. In front of the house a yard of compact red earth has a small garden with maize, kale and other vegetables growing in it and a couple of hens scratching about. Three sheds for storage separate the garden from the toilet block which consists of two long-drops; pits under a floor with a hole through which you deposit your waste. They are quite smelly and there is no electricity so once the door is closed you have to rely on your head-torch. My first visit was nearly a disaster as my mobile dropped out of my pocket, slid across the floor and stopped teetering on the yawning chasm.   After leaving our shoes on the veranda, we all squeezed in and were welcomed by our host, Ronald. We prayed and then were then given a big meal of rice, beans, Kale and chapattis. 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. The little boys were fascinated by everything we had and dived on each thing we pulled out of our rucksack. They were prancing about with our head torches on and for almost everything asked, "What is that?" It was pandemonium trying to get all the sleeping mats down and the rucksacks stacked, especially with two excited kids running about! It was so cramped that Philip had to sleep on top of a pile of rucksacks! It looked like the 'Black Hole of Calcutta'! As I hadn't slept the night before, I slept like a log but the youngsters had a rough night.   That night there was a terrible wailing from a nearby house. Ronald explained that a neighbour had just died after a long illness. There was an awful noise at midnight; music and laughter. I was furious at our team keeping the household awake. I got up and dressed, prepared to play merry heck at them but there was silence from their room and it was obvious that it was a neighbour having a party. I thought it particularly insensitive in the light of the recent death! Next day I discovered that it was the wake that I had heard and that it would go on for several more nights. Next morning we had breakfast then walked to the project in teeming rain and we were all 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 1500/= (£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! The congregation subsidies the school and pays for the teacher. Needless to say they have nothing in the school. At the moment they operate in an office in the church. There are a few shabby but colourful posters on the wall made by sewing designs onto old opened up flour bags and a huge, colourful poster of Jesus rescuing Peter from drowning on the Sea of Galilee. The 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. This was done by throwing trowel-fulls of freshly-mixed cement at the uneven walls. They worked really hard all day and were filthy at the end of a hard day's work. Meanwhile 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 was really impressed by the way the Kenyan men had worked solidly from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. without a break or a bite to eat. Their pay for a day's work? 400/=; about £3! Hespon, another of the congregation, is a teacher and he told me they get 15000/=, that's about £115 a month! We sauntered back to the town and I had tea and samosas in a café whereas the youngsters had chips and sodas! We left some in an internet café and the rest of us made our way to Ronald's house. At the house they put water on to heat and were able to take a bucket into the long-drop, strip off, and sluice ourselves down.   The evening meal was goats' meat stew and ugali; a sort of stodgy porridge made of maize. To relieve the overcrowding Charlie and I were offered beds in a store room. Charlie declined because he heard there were rats in the room. I took up the offer and had a comfy, rat free night. Without my snores, the boys slept well.   For breakfast we had millet porridge but it was like no porridge that was ever seen in a Scottish house. It was the brown of oxtail soup and runny enough to drink. Once you got used to it, it was very nice. There wasn't a lot to do on the project as the craftsmen were fitting windows, door frames etc. It was amazing watching them work; they built up a layer of wet cement then smoothed it after chipping away any projecting stone. Finally they finished off with a fine plaster. Some of the boys were humping cement, sand and water about but other than that the rest of us were just sitting around, waiting. I strolled into town and went to an internet café. I had problems sending photos to accompany last week's report because they were all too big. Ronald loaned me his laptop and I was able to reduce their size and today I was able to send them.   That night the noisy wake went on until 5-30 a.m.! As the church is the Seventh Day Adventists, they celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday. We were all to be at church for nine. We were rather surprised t see that we Muzungu outnumbered the locals in the church but it turned out that this was not the service proper.  We had come for bible study, it seemed and I quite enjoyed quibbling over the interpretation of an Old Testament story although the facilitators had a very definite agenda and smiled indulgently at my interpretation of the moral of the story of Jacob and Rachel. There was a fifteen minute break then the real service started at about 10-45. Now the place was packed. Unfortunately the service was mostly in Swahili. There was some exquisite choral singing but the sermon was excruciating. It was in English with a simultaneous translation into Swahili but the subject would have been difficult to grasp in plain English. With the strong Kenyan accent and the dodgy public address system it was impossible and I lost track of what he was saying after fifteen minutes. Unfortunately the service was mostly in Swahili. There was some exquisite choral singing but the sermon was excruciating. It was in English with a simultaneous translation into Swahili but the subject would have been difficult to grasp in plain English. With the strong Kenyan accent and the dodgy public address system it was impossible and I lost track of what he was saying after fifteen minutes. and each one of us was surrounded by kids wanting to sit next to us. You couldn't watch some of them, they were going into our pockets, trying to take watches and bracelets off or just feeling our skin and hair. I watched one little boy stroke Trevor's hair for nearly the whole service and Philip walked out of church with a sleeping child clinging to his neck. At 12-30 we staggered out into the sun for the lunch break: have you ever heard of a church service with a lunch break? Now, as a Humanist, I had to grit my teeth to set foot in a religious service but I went against my principles for the sake of respecting our hosts' culture. The youngsters were nearly all practicing Christians but they were almost crying with boredom and begged me not to make them go back for the afternoon session until 4-30 p.m.. Fortunately Ronald seemed to understand that the service wasn't making any sense to them and he was happy for us to relax for the afternoon. In fact the afternoon wasn't more service but meetings and Bible Study. My pupils are beginning to find this intense fascination tiring. The children are not trying to steal things; they are just intrigued by what we have. It has now got to the stage that as soon as we get near Ronald's house kids run up to us and grab our hands to walk along the street hand-in-hand with us. It's bad enough in the street but the youngsters are getting really annoyed as Ronald's children have taken to rifling through their rucksacks for interesting things. I saw Gareth's water bottle being shown off in the street but it reappeared in his bag. Anything edible gets eaten though so I had to speak to Ronald about them.   On Sunday morning the noise from the wake house was just as bad. Ronald explained that the family were not local and that in their own village all the neighbours would spend all night with the bereaved family, singing and making a noise to keep away evil spirits until the burial. In the absence of evil spirits a CD player on repeat mode seemed to do the trick! 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 builders were plastering the walls and laying the floor so the there was a lot of digging sand, carrying water and mixing cement to do. However 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 into tight braids so each of them had a couple of hours off. She was only charging them 120/= to do it but each one took over two hours to do and the girls insisted on giving her 500/= each. That woman probably got more for doing one day's work than she would normally get for a month! To try to get the work finished in time we took lunch in shifts. Ronald's wife, Doris and Hesbon's wife, Naomi are cooking for us every evening. They are preparing some lovely African meals but some of the youngsters are missing their spuds! When they found a little cafe that did chips they were in seventh heaven! I think Doris and Naomi were a bit offended that the youngsters weren't enjoying their food but I chatted to Doris and explained about the Irish and spuds and she wanted to know why we hadn't said sooner. On Monday night there was a huge bowl of lovely, boiled potatoes and the team was delighted! 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 that was ear-marked for the project. For example, today 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. In Nakuru we bought a skipping rope, an inflatable globe, several posters (counting, alphabet, animals, etc.) and a small ball for each child to take home. The team have also brought gifts for the kids like balloons and pencils.   I teach Citizenship at the school and I am quite keen to maintain some links between Strabane Grammar and Njoro. I hope our school can continue to support the nursery project but I really wanted to create links between Kenyan students and our pupils. To this end I visited the secondary school next to the church. It is a private school, as so many here are. They all wear pristine uniforms with crisp, white shirts and bright scarlet jumpers. I felt a real scruff going to see the headmaster in my mud-splattered clothes and filthy hiking boots but they were delighted to see me and showed me round the tiny school. They had four rickety classrooms, one for each year group an" practically no teaching aids. The school didn't even have electricity. I said I couldn't promise anything but that I would ask the new citizenship teacher to make contact.   The final part was the handover when we were formally thanked for doing the work. We handed over our gifts and the teacher read out a heartfelt and stirring speech of thanks.   So ends the second week of the expedition. It's hard to believe that we've been here two weeks already; half-way through the expedition. This hasn't been an easy week but this is World Challenge not World Holiday! The team had been expecting to work with children and some were very disappointed when they discovered that the kids were breaking up for summer the next day. They had not expected to be asked to do so much building work although I and our hosts have been very impressed by how much hard, physical work they, and especially the boys, have put in. We certainly weren't warned about how much money we would be expected to contribute and towards the end some were feeling they were being exploited but most are proud of what they have achieved. They have had a glimpse into the meaning of the deep poverty in this community that no tourist can ever hope to understand. They have lived for the last week in quite difficult conditions in cramped accommodation with no running water and, for the last few days, mud everywhere. Washing wasn't easy either everything had to be done from a bucket of cold water and, with the rain, what clothes we got washed never seemed to dry. Some of the team found adapting to eating African food quite hard others have loved it. There were lows in team morale but they all got through it with good humour and had some good craic on the way. They will each have learned so much from the experience. As Trevor commented, they have so little but they get on with their lives and never complain and they always have a welcoming smile on their face. Another thing that has struck my pupils is just how important faith is to so many people here. Obviously the people on the project are all deeply involved in their church but everyone else we meet seems equally devout; their religion informs every aspect of their lives. This has been an invaluable experience and not one of the team will think quite the same way again about developing countries. On Wednesday we start the third phase which is the five day trek on Mount Kenya which will count as their Duke of Edinburgh's Award Gold Expedition. And there's another interesting cultural difference. When I told Ronald what we will do next week he was bewildered; why would we want to go up a mountain?