Education For All Children Blog

Nancy and I are so grateful and proud of EFAC's first year with 43 kids in high school and university. What a great start! Now comes the tough part - how do we sustain the effort?

One thought I have and on which I welcome comment is to create an open communication between donors and students. This is challenging since Africa has little communication infrastructure other than pencil and paper. We can have the students write a quarterly donor letters to mail to donors. We can also ask donors to write to students. But will this be enough to create a bond between donors and students?

I am looking to go beyond snail mail. Maybe a blog for each student where we can post grades, teacher recommendations, pictures and even videos. Donors, their kids and maybe their kids friends can post comments and pictures. Here is where I live. This is my dog. All of our students are away from home. Many are orphans. They crave connection. What fun to know you have someone who cares about you in America! When the students visit African Nazarene University each year for the mentoring program, they can go on their own web site and post comments. When the university mentor visits the school, he/she can print a web site to give to the child.

Of course there are privacy issues to be dealt with. All communication should go through EFAC but in a way that it does not stifle spontaneity.

I am open to any and all ideas.

Rod

Labels: EFAC Progress

We visited the Straehe Girls’ School where we sponsor ten children. This school is four years old and is patterned after the renowned Straehe Boys’ School. It caters to the poorest and brightest students in the country. These girls are amazing. Each one has her own story. For example there is Prideluck who spent 24 hours traveling to the school because one must walk for hours to find the intermittent transportation where sometimes you can wait for days for the first leg of the journey.

Margaret’s eyes welled up when the headmistress asked how her family was managing to find food given they live in a drought area. Margaret replied that they wait for the government to bring maize. They get the grain every three months but it is always gone within a month. Now she doesn’t know if her family is eating at all. Yet she outperformed 90% of the Kenyan population in her KCPE exam.

Sadia is a Muslim whose mother died and her stepmother made her the slave of the 12 person family. Somehow she scored the highest of any girl we have in our program.

These girls will be the next leaders of Kenya.

Straehe Girls’ is headed by an amazing woman who has spent her life as head of the top schools in Kenya and now her mission is to make these girls leaders in their communities. She will prevail.

Labels: Partner Schools, Visiting Kenya

Rongai is a poor bush type of town in the Rift Valley. We have one amazing boys’ school in this area. Please view their web site (rongaiboys.org). This school is a private school run by the Franciscan Brothers and is able to keep their fees low by having the boys farm and care for the livestock which includes slaughtering the pigs twice a week. It is a caring and high performing school where eight of our serious students reside. All of these boys are from the Rift Valley and Brother Francis personally visited each home to tell these boys of their acceptance. These boys will all spend part of their holidays working at the school in order to earn money for some of their necessities and to instill in them that they are active participants in making their way through the school. About 70% of students make it to the top universities. Rongai Boys’ School places in the top 5% of schools in Kenya
In Rongai we also interviewed and were able to add the B’hati Girls’ School to our list of top performing schools. We now have six schools spread out over three central areas in Kenya. As we track the progress of our first scholars we are already preparing for 2010 scholars. What an exciting time it is for EFAC and all of our supporters. Thank you for helping to change the world one child at a time.

Labels: Partner Schools, Visiting Kenya

After a long drive to Meru we met with the eight boys who we sponsor at Kaaga Boys’ School. Three of these boys are from Samburu which is an outlying nomadic area. There was initial concern that these boys were in culture shock and would not even look at Mary when she visited but they have made incredible adjustments in the three week period they have been there. The head of school said they totally began to fit in once they donned their uniforms. We spent a lot of time talking with these eight boys and their biggest concern was that they had no funds to return home during the three one month holidays and many of them have no place to go when they do return. We are looking into transferring the boys who have no home to our other boys’ school where there is a holiday plan for the boys which includes housing and work during the holidays. These boys were all ready to talk about their lives and how fortunate they felt to be in school. All our scholars feel that God has intervened and therefore there was a miracle. Every one of you donors is responsible for this transformation. Thank you from all of these talented and fortunate children.
From Kaaga Boys’ we visited two other extremely well performing schools in Meru and visited with the respective heads of these schools and secured places for next year’s students. These schools will almost guarantee our students of university acceptance.

Labels: Partner Schools, Visiting Kenya