During the rainy season, the unpaved roads make students’ travel to school especially difficult. The vast majority of students have to walk to school, as there is neither public nor school transportation. At times parents lack sufficient money to pay for their child’s school tuition (the government only pays one third of the cost).
“I walk alone in the dark 4 kilometers so I have to get up at 4 in the morning to get to school on time. Whenever it rains, walking to school is hard because the roads become mud.”
Extended families who share the same residence or compound are very common in Kenya. They are what westerners might call a “safety net” for relatives who need material support - one student sadly described herself as “a half-orphan”. Many of the parents of the students are subsistence farmers: one is a shoe cobbler, one mother works on a large farm owned by “rich people” on a seasonal basis, etc. Wages are very low and accessible markets for vegetables and cottage enterprises are scarce.
“My elder sister got married because my parents at the time were not able
to get her educated.”
Kenyan communities are generally strong, depending on the resources available to them at any given time. The schools that our donors have assisted often are their primary sources of clean water and information about sanitation, health, disease, and nutrition for the students and their families.
What the students told us about their challenges - before our benefactors investment:
“The school was very dry and dusty with a poor [student] population…Our school population actually has increased nowadays. Many students are transferring into our school because we have plenty of safe water for drinking.”
“The best thing is that they truly improved our health status and reduced any frequent attack by diseases. Safe water helps us not to get diseases like typhoid.”
