We visited one of our partner schools in the Mara region last month. It was early morning, still cool, and the children were arriving on foot from the surrounding villages. Some of them had walked more than an hour. They arrived in pairs and small groups, talking and laughing, and hung their bags on hooks outside the classroom before filing in.
The classroom itself holds about forty students. It is a rectangular block building, concrete walls, a corrugated iron roof, wooden benches that show years of use. There is a chalkboard at the front and a small shelf of books along one wall. The shelf is new. We helped fund it, along with the books sitting on it, earlier this year.
The Teacher
The headteacher, a woman who has been at the school for eleven years, walked us through the building before classes began. She pointed out the repaired section of roof over the rear classroom, which had been leaking badly through the previous rainy season. She showed us the new benches in Standard 4, where students had previously been sharing seats meant for two among three and sometimes four children. She did not say much. She did not need to. The changes were visible and she knew we could see them.
What she did talk about, at length, was her students. She knows each of them by name, knows their family situations, knows who needs extra time after school and who is quietly struggling at home. She has been doing this with almost no support for most of her career. The materials we have been able to provide have changed what her days look like in practical terms, but her commitment to those children predates anything we did by a decade.
What the Children Said
During a break period, a group of Standard 6 girls asked us through a translator what our organization did. When we explained, one of them considered this for a moment and then said, through the translator, that she wanted to be a doctor. Another said an engineer. A third said she wanted to teach, like her teacher.
The conditions at this school are still genuinely difficult. Resources are still stretched. There is more to do than we can currently fund. We want to be honest about that. But sitting in that courtyard watching children play during break, having just come from a classroom where every student had their own exercise book and a functioning bench to sit on, it was not hard to feel that the work is worth doing and worth continuing.
We are grateful to everyone who makes it possible.
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