Eleven Days in Kenya: Ripped Pants and Bruised Egos

Today, I was able to sub for grade four. I was looking forward to this because last year I subbed for this class when they were grade three and I like them a lot. We spent a lot of time working on telling time in long form using the terms "past" and "to." So, if it's 2:15 it's fifteen minutes past two. And if it's 7:38, it's twenty-two minutes to eight. Even though this was review, they struggled with it. We worked on this for a total of close to two hours.They were done by lunch time.

Ng*eya - grade 1, ecd, songs, soda and mendazi w/ teachers, pants, face

(I use an asterisk in the school's name to prevent this blog from appearing in any Google searches of the school.)

After lunch, we went to Ng*eya Primary School with the CPA teachers. We visited Ng*eya last year to see what an average public school looked like, but it was still a great opportunity to see another level of education in Kenya. So we saw a school that's poorer than poor in Wells of Joy School in the slums, an average school in Ng*eya, and a stellar school in Cornerstone. Although, Wells of Joy might have been poorer than Ng*eya, I feel that the teachers, staff, and even to an extent the facilities were better at Wells of Joy.

Ng*eya is huge. It's a K - 8 school with a student population of well over 1,000. In each of the ECD (Kindergarten) classes we visited, there were 80 - EIGHTY - students per class. That's the story at the school - terrible student to teacher ratios. I was paired with another teacher from our team to visit a first grade classroom, but the first class we visited had no teacher. Prefects were leading the class in lessons. We asked to see a class with a teacher and the second one we visited, the teacher was taking care of a child that looked to be her own. He was too small to be in the first grade. So she was preoccupied and we were awkwardly standing at the side of the room. I asked to be shown an ECD class and we joined up with another small group of our team that were being sung to by the kids. This was a blast. Those kids were so excited to see a bunch of visitors. Just making eye contact with these kids sent them into a fit of giggles. After hearing the songs and speaking with the teachers, we met in a classroom after dismissal to share sodas and mendazi (sp?) with some of the Ng*eya teachers.

We were sitting at desks that were barely being held together with nails that weren't hammered all the way in. So when I sat down on one of these nails, I promptly ripped a hole in the back of my pants. It wasn't as bad as I initially thought, but man, those are my favorite pants. As we were opening sodas I thought, I know, I'll pop this soda open on this loose nail on the side of the desk. I'll be resourceful. No. As I worked the head of the nail under the cap, it exploded off the bottle and hit me square in the face. Great, I've ripped my pants and now I have a bottle cap shaped welt under my right eye. This is going great. The cap was moving quickly enough that it still had enough momentum to hit the ceiling after hitting me in the face. I was humiliating myself in front of these teachers. After talking with the Ng*eya staff for a few minutes, we said our goodbyes and loaded up to head to Cornerstone's newly purchased land. Oh, and as an aside, later on that night, the button on those ripped pants - my favorite pants - popped off. I have some serious pant surgery to do when I get home. :(

CPA land - Bob and Julie story

We drove to the land that CPA purchased a couple weeks ago and on which they plan to build their new school. This was awesome because this was something that a lot of people had been praying for for a long time. I won't spend time on the details of how they acquired this land, but here are some bullet points:

1. They were expecting to pay at least 400,000 shillings per acre. They paid 375,000 per acre.

2. They were looking at five to ten acre plots. Their plot is twenty acres.

3. They wanted something easily accessible from the highway. The plot runs along the highway for 260 meters.

4. The land they purchased was frozen from being sold by the goverment since 1988. Just this year, the government lifted that freeze.

5. There are giraffes across the street.

God is faithful. Not only did He provide what he promised he would, He provided it in a way that no one can take credit for except Him. The goal is to break ground by October and be in the new building by January 2016.

Listening to the story of the acquisition of the land

Bob and Julie are still raising capital for this project. Please contact me if you are interested in donating.

Finally, we ended the night with chapati (thick tortillas) and samosas (Kenyan Hot Pockets) from Fave Grill. I love that stuff. We listened to Boniface, the spiritual father to the kids at NV, tell us the story of how he met his wife. We heard this last year, but he's very funny and it's a pretty incredible story, so it was worth hearing again.