Bye bye Cheptebo.. =(

After a wonderful 6 weeks in Cheptebo it was time to continue our journey. It was very emotional leaving Joesph and Sally as they had become our Kenyan parents, and of course our sister Purity! =( They will be missed greatly aswell all the staff at the conference centre and students at the school! Thankyou guy for such an awesome time!

In addition I would like to apologise for the lack of posts on the blog, time has been limited and we have been very busy.

So we left Cheptebo early thursday morning after a night of very little sleep. Our bus was leaving at 10am from Eldoret which is an hour and a half drive from the conference centre. At 8.20am Jospeh decides to get his car washed and cleaned. We also needed to buy our tickets. Hmmm. Time was short - but thats Kenyan timing for you. But somehow we managed it, spot on time. Well we were.. but the bus wasnt.

School Report

After an enjoyable 5 weeks of teaching at Rokocho Secondary School we have written a report about the school which we wish to share we everyone following the blog and people back home. Many Thanks

Rokocho Mixed Day Secondary

Two years after its’ proposal in 2009, Rokocho Mixed Day Secondary School was founded in March 2011 providing affordable secondary education for children local to the area, in the Kerio Valley, based in one room of the local primary school. With the majority of Kenyan secondary education in the form of expensive boarding schools, with fees of more than 50,000KSH per year, the day school was designed to help local children from low income families to gain access to a previously unattainable level of education. By eliminating the cost of boarding, Rokocho Secondary School manages to reduce costs by over 37,000KSH per child, with annual costs to pupils at 13,000KSH.

The nearest day school in the surrounding area is over 13km away, high up towards the edge of the vast Kerio Valley, which requires high, often unaffordable, travel costs or an exhausting trek to school for most children. This made the development of Rokocho day school a priority in an area where financial issues among families are commonplace and is the main reason why many children miss out on secondary education and consequently leaves many of the children uneducated and forced to remain in the valley with few career prospects aside from manual labour and subsistence farming.

Rokocho Secondary School is predominantly attended by children who, after completing primary school, could not afford to continue their education and so dropped out in search of work to support their family or save for one more year of education.  But this new school has offered them an amazing chance to further their studies and allow them to pursue any number of opportunities through extending their academic achievements.

The school is currently attended by 11 of the most dedicated and devoted students whose days start at 6.20am and finish at 6.00pm. These pupils have fantastic dreams of careers, such as becoming doctors, political journalists and engineers, and are determined to make them a reality. They are undoubtedly the hardest working students we’ve met, teaching themselves when unreliable teachers don’t attend, spending what little break time they have studying or revising and during lessons they listen intensely and try their hardest at every task they are given.

At the present, Rokocho Secondary is funded solely by the few donations of local people and housed in Rokocho Mixed Day Primary School which was built by volunteers in 1983 and funded by donations. It currently has 255 pupils ranging from nursery age to ‘standard 8’ (the finishing year of primary education in Kenya) taught by 9 primary and 3 nursery teachers which are paid for by the parents. From the 14^th of June, the government grant which fed the pupils one meal of maize per day ran out which forced children of all ages to attempt walking home, eating lunch and walking back within the one hour lunch break. Often living kilometres away meant that it was unlikely that they made it home to have a sufficient lunch but maybe a piece of fruit, if they made it home at all.

The secondary school currently has a public status and relies heavily on the school fees and donations from the parents, who struggle to feed their families, to feed the students, pay for school equipment and give the teachers, who volunteer their time, a token amount to subsidise mostly travel costs.

Although this school has only recently opened up with a modest start, big plans are in place to encourage more children of the local area to attend. These plans are predominantly reliant on the government changing the status to a state school and providing a number of qualified teachers, which will still need payment from the parents. Although its’ current reputation for helping the students succeed will also promote it to the local area and it is expected that there will be an increase of students next year because of this. Form 1 which is currently made up of 11 students, ten of which will move up to form 2, is said to increase to 30. Form 2, which currently does not exist, will be made up of those who move up as well as other local children at that level who currently attend more expensive or hard to reach schools.

The secondary school, although presently housed within the primary school, owns 7 acres of land which will be used to build brand new school buildings. This land will be used for 4 classrooms, a laboratory, a library and an administration block. However, these encouraging plans may be somewhat unrealistic with a whole series of complications and lack of resources and money.

 Firstly, where we would rely on the government for, such as funding for even the most basic building requirements, it is expected that the student’s families foot the bill, as government support comes only in the form of providing partially paid teachers. Furthermore, the raw materials necessary to build the complex would require funds far exceeding any amount that the parents of the children could ever afford.

Lastly, even if donations could surmount the building costs there are far greater necessities that need addressing as we experienced when we arrived. What was initially planned to be one month of assisting local teachers and helping the children learn became more of an uphill struggle to ensure these brilliant students could achieve their best. With subjects having an average 1 book per class, we found that there was a real deficit in learning resources. With money donated from our families and friends we managed to ensure form 1 had at least 1 book between 2 students for a class size of 11. With the money left over we tried to equip the class for next year and bought 2 books for each subject. Although this will allow them to access the material, it is nowhere near sufficient and in the UK would likely be grounds to close the school. We identified textbooks for from 1 and 2 as a priority for the donated money for two reasons.

1)      Form 2 would be without textbooks for likely the whole year which would likely cause many students to drop out, as they would be wasting their money, and those who remained would be forced to repeat the year as without sufficient knowledge to pass the end of year exams they would be unable to progress to form 3. Therefore they would have to pay for one year of education twice with money they do not have.

2)      Textbooks are the students’ primary source of educational material. This comes back to the problem with public school status. Due to the lack of government supplied teachers, the school relies heavily on teachers from the primary school who volunteer when they have a gap in their busy schedules and local university students who give up their time to help the children. Unfortunately this means that there is a tendency for the students to have to teach themselves when the volunteer teaches are unable to make it to class.