A dining room without walls where wooden benches seat 300 high school girls. Classrooms with a single lightbulb and live wires dangling. Playgrounds where boys and girls play soccer with an imaginary ball. Overflowing pit latrines built for 25 students now used by 60, with a cholera outbreak a distinct possibility. School yards where goats and dairy cows graze freely. School communities each with a gate keeper demanding ID from all who enter. Eighty students in a science class with an instructor that has a history of absenteeism, no substitute available.
Administrators who demand extra fees to pay for a school bus, a sign of status. Bursars that routinely send students home for lack of school fees. Teachers who live 400 km away from their families receiving minimum wage pay checks with "be faithful to your wife" written on the back. Head teachers who cannot escape the demands of 24/7 supervision. Government funding amounting to a third of the actual costs.
Free education a myth. Access to education for orphans and the acutely poor a disaster. The ideal of equal opportunity has a tough go of it. Sounds like rural Kenya where students like Ezekiel and Lucy deserve much better.
Ezekiel does his best to stay at the top of his class. A KCPE grade of 356 marks tells the story of a bright and quick learner. Now in his final year Form 4 his grades are slipping. Today is pretty well the same as yesterday. A 5km walk to school, morning exercises at the flagpole, three subjects in a row, a bowl of maize and beans at noon and an afternoon cup of chai at 2:30. Two more classes and then the long walk home. When he is called out of class at break time he anticipates the bad news.
Ezekiel was sent home for arrears of 5,000 shillings, his dreams of graduating from secondary school dashed. Dejected, he took the long way home. Snapping off a piece of sugar cane, he knew it would never mask the hunger pangs that daily attack his body. What bothered him even more was the ever present body odour. One could hide hunger but not the pungent smell of one who only knew a bar of soap to be an unaffordable luxury. Orphaned at the age of 10, Ezekiel's closest relation was a grandmother who earned a little selling vegetables at the market. 150Ksh was a good day's wages, hardly enough to keep Ezekiel in school.
That same day in a nearby school Lucy's absence is hardly noticed. Afraid of ridicule when they see her stained school uniform, and without money for proper sanitary wear or even underwear, she resigns herself to three days at home until she feels "clean". Some of Lucy's friends rely on rags or tissues for protection or they just stay in sick bay at school. Orphaned since the age of eight, no one has ever told her about changes to her body. Once she had to remove her dress to wash out the stain and return to class after it had dried. There was also no soap available and the water supply was far from the latrines. Lucy is used to these days of deep sadness where she remains home alone.
Lucy is now in Form 2. She too scored highly in the Standard 8 national 2013 KCPE exams. In fact, with a score of 375 she stood the highest in the whole region. She was invited to register at a national secondary school in Thika, not far from Nairobi. This was a high honour as it was recognized as the top school for girls in the entire country. Here graduates proceed directly to university. Real toilets, running water and electricity, beautiful play fields and small class sizes all within a manicured secure compound. This was the goal, the dream. It soon became clear that although qualified, Lucy could never be admitted due to lack of school fees that totalled nearly 60,000Ksh. She had to settle for a rural District school, far from Thika's promise.
The class I visited in 2015 had 80 students, double what it should be. A roughly constructed wooden desk accommodates two or three, elbow to elbow. Some windows are broken and the walls need a fresh coat of paint. With no chalk available the boards display work a week old. Teacher or "mwalimu" is professional in every sense, wearing suit and tie despite the heat. I learn he has cycled 15 km to do his duty. He stops a group of boys at the door to ask them why they were late for class. They say they had to wait to have their turn to use the toilets. He understands.
As the lesson begins, I cannot help but notice the torn textbooks. There are not enough to go around and students must share. The lesson that day is on the great engineering feat known as the St Lawrence Seaway and Great Lakes canal system in Canada. Unsure of its relevance to their learning, they nevertheless seem to enjoy my version of Canadian history and its economic and geographical significance. A couple of boys are nodding off for good reason. I rather suspect they are sleep and nutritionally deprived.
The school's head teacher later expresses concern over the safety of students walking to and from school. Young girls are particularly vulnerable in pathways that take them off the main roads. She also talks about the growing crisis of drug and substance abuse in the village impacting on her school. When asked what the school needs the most she indicates a source of clean water. Her priorities are right on, unlike other head teachers I have encountered that would opt for a school gate or a bus.
Change takes time and in Kenya there are setbacks and discouraging realities that prohibit progress in the school system. That does not mean that we walk away from students like Ezekiel and Lucy who endure so much and with just a little help will succeed. We cannot abandon our mission knowing we partner with strong and compassionate educators and people of good will.
Since 2004 CES Canada and CES Kenya have partnered to create scholarships for needy students in rural western Kenya. In return, CES maintains an expectation that high levels of cooperation, communication, care for our students and a focus on selecting the best and brightest students. We seek gifted, creative and motivated students who will emerge as successful future leaders. We also wish to support those schools that are fully engaged in the vision we believe in.
In 2016 CES Canada is there for the Ezekiel's and the Lucy's, all 250 in 24 secondary schools. We invite you to share in our vision and by doing so you make a small part of Kenya infinitely better.
