Some of the pupils at 'Good News School' Webuye.
We were sad to be leaving Bungoma. The Business Training had gone well and we'd been into Makutano School for a few days and visited the women's prison at Kakamega so had been very busy, but we were leaving Geoffrey, Christine, Julius and Metrine behind to move on to Webuye, which is about an hour away by minivan and is more rural than Bungoma. On our last night, Christine cooked us a feast of boiled talapia (fish) with all the trimmings...
The flavour was delicious but it was tricky picking out all the little bones. I'd eaten talapia before, in Kisumu when I visited Kenya in 2005. Kisumu is right on Lake Victoria where the talapia is caught and is very expensive up in Bungoma so we were very honoured.
Being at Geoffrey's home was like being at home by this stage of the trip. We were all excited for the next stage but sad to be leaving Bungoma behind.
In Webuye, we stayed with a family, organised by Valentine our friend (on the left below). She looked after us very well, cooking when we needed it and doing the washing and fetching in water for us. The first night we were there the electric was off and so was the running water so we all washed by candle light in a washing-up bowl of warmish water. Not really as romantic as it sounds after a long, dusty day.
When we planned the trip, back in Autumn 2011, I knew we were going to add another room to the Webuye school. I'd seen photos of the school bursting at the seams with only two classrooms.
This is what the school had looked like back in 2010 when Kate first visited...
I blogged about it here (scroll down past the crazy fund-raising photos of us in 1970s glam rock costumes). When we arrived at the school in week two of the trip it looked like this...
The original building is at the back. Valentine and Dickson had already added on another classroom and built the wooden structure for another room (on the left above). All these classrooms were full! I was looking forward to helping build a new room from scratch and also finishing the classroom above left.
Below is the classroom for the younger children. Ages 3 to 5/6 year olds (approx).
The children have to do most of their learning from a chalk-board.
below is the next age group's classroom. They also mostly learn from the board. As a teacher, I found it difficult to imagine, teaching such young children in this way. When I think back to teaching Reception myself a few years ago, it was very different. The teacher's here are paid about £20 per month and are doing the best they can with what they've got. I remember posting before about how the children in Kenya have to pay for school. If they can't pay (orphans or very poor families) then the child doesn't go to school. Education is very highly valued in Kenya, because the people know that if you can't read, you can't get a better job. It's very simple. At this school, orphans who cannot pay are not turned away, but this is very unusual.
Anyway, in this post I want to tell you about the building work and I'll post next time about the school resources and equipment we'd brought for the school. Below, we are putting in the first posts for the new classroom. I have to laugh when I remember the children just a few feet away, still doing their lessons as we did all this building work!
The wooden structure is being built (love that ladder!)...
At the same time, there were lots of chaps about 100 metres away preparing the mud for the walls...
We were able to help. At this point I was "helping" to hammer on a metal sheet for the roof. It was harder than it looks!
We helped make the walls of the classroom. You 'roll' and 'pat' a block of mud into a brick shape and plop it onto the wooden structure, trying not to leave any big gaps..
When it was break-time the children came out and inspected our handiwork!
Some of the older children helped make bricks...
Two of the ladies who had been on the business training course came along to help. It was great to see them again...
Here's the building after just a couple of days...
The children were really happy about their new classroom...
New desks had been made and were moved into the new classroom. There was still a final stage to go, of throwing handfulls of mud onto the walls to fill the gaps and cover the wood, but that had to wait until the walls were drier and had hardened. Also the branches in the window would be sawn away when the walls were hard and dry. This didn't stop anyone moving in!
I got to hold a teeny baby chick one of the evenings after school. So very small and fragile...
After school we often bought fresh fruit from the market...
Such a beautiful time of day.
I look like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards on the photo below. I know I was tired, but very happy.
In the next post I'll share about the equipment and resources side of things, about the orphans and the small satellite school that's part of this school a few miles away in an even more remote spot. I'm still not finding it easy writing about my trip, but am so happy to be recording what I did. Seems a very long time ago, not just a couple of months :)
