Kenya trip - August 2005
relayNET volunteer, Peter Wells, recounts the story of his trip to Magunga Primary School August 2005
Introduction
Let's start with some honesty, an often underused trait, why did I go to Kenya? I went for two reasons. Firstly, the obvious one: I went for others, i.e. I wanted to help, I wanted to give of myself to a wider community than just my friends and family. The second reason is also obvious but not always stated: I went for myself, I wanted to learn things, I wanted to challenge myself, I wanted to experience things.
I want to encourage other people to go on future volunteer trips with relayNET. The best way to do that is to engage both of the motivations – going to help others and going for yourself - which tend to lie behind an individual's decision to go on such a trip.
This account presents a volunteer's account of the August 2005 relayNET trip to Magunga Primary School and addresses both of those motivations as both were achieved during the trip. It's quite a long account, a lot happened in those three weeks, but hopefully it's interesting and will give you a good insight into the kind of events likely to happen on such a trip, to use a cliché “there's something for everyone”.
I would like to start by saying that we had a great team of people, a team comprising both the volunteers from the UK/New Zealand and the relayNET’s local representatives in Kenya. Without this team spirit very little of what we achieved would have been possible and the experience would certainly have been less positive
As you would expect the trip was not always pleasant: we were often stressed; we were often dirty and in filthy conditions; we were always tired – well I was anyway; we felt in physical danger on more than one occasion – it's the team spirit and what you get out of the trip that helps overcome those problems and helps make it a beneficial and enjoyable experience.
One final piece of introduction, I am not a schoolteacher by profession, in fact I am an IT/telecoms consultant, so I felt that this team spirit was even more important to myself as it gave me both the confidence that I wouldn't fall flat on my face and the confidence that I could help.
Fulsome praise and introduction out of the way, now on with the description of the trip…
Magunga Primary School Magunga Primary School is located just outside a small town called Katito and is a forty-five minute bus ride south-east of a major city called Kisumu. Kisumu is the third largest city in Kenya and is located in the west of the country on the shores of Lake Victoria. Kisumu was our base for the two weeks that we spent working with Magunga Primary School. |
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Magunga Primary School is in a very poor area of the country where there is no electricity and little rainfall, where 20-40% of adults are HIV positive and where one in four of the children had experienced the death of one or more parents. Just take a moment to consider the range of those percentages for the incidence of HIV and it shows you just how poorly this area is served.
relayNET have worked with Magunga Primary School for several years, for example by helping fund the installation of a water standpipe within the school grounds and assisting with the development of a school garden. This prior contact meant that we were instantly welcomed and had good local contacts to help us understand how we could best the school and community.
In the first half of 2005 a tornado struck the area that, as well as damaging various other local buildings, damaged the primary school buildings leaving them structurally unsafe.
 Temporary school block |
When we arrived these buildings were demolished and the land had been cleared whilst the community attempted to raise funds for new buildings. All teaching was taking place in a group of small, old classrooms that were previously used only for the smallest children. RelayNET, the local community and the school authorities were all trying to raise funding for new buildings. Some draft plans had been drawn up, but work had not yet commenced. This was all to change by the time we left. |
To travel between Kisumu and Magunga Primary school we took a daily journey on a matatu, matatu is the term used in Kenya to denote a small public bus. Matatus proved to be a great place to meet people and we all know that it's nice to meet new people. In a strangely similar fashion to London public transport, although for different reasons, people were initially reticent to talk but we found that once you struck up a conversation, say, about the weather or the difficulties that the Kenyan constitution would face in getting approval from the voting population – casual topics like that, that people would then eagerly talk to you for the rest of the journey. |
 Matatu |
Obviously this was a good way of getting to know more about Kenya and the differing opinions about what could be done to help out with some of the major problems within the country – education, malaria, AIDS and corruption to name but a few. Discussing the information I gained in these conversations with the other volunteers and with the local relayNET representatives certainly helped me in understanding where I thought I could best help.
Starting at Magunga
Parking the matatus for the moment, let’s go back to the school. relayNET’s local representative is a man called Rashid Miruka, Rashid looked after us throughout our trip whether it be through organising our visas to enter and work in the country, arranging our initial trips to and from the school or in introducing us to the school teachers and community.
Rashid took us to Magunga on our first day to meet the teachers, meet the schoolchildren and finalise the planning of our activities. We worked with too many teachers to mention them all by name but I would like to stress the contributions of the headmaster Mr Odhiambo and the deputy head Monica Aluoch.
School events
Each of the school days that we were teaching the children we split into two. The mornings were spent teaching sports activities whilst the afternoons were formed of arts and craft activities. The afternoons were far too hot to do any sport... Some of the activities were: • art for personal development |
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 Sports day |
 Rugby |
Whilst the sports and arts activities took place one member of our group, Tanya, was hard at work with both the community leaders and schoolteachers in drawing up plans for the new school and with the schoolchildren in working on the school garden. |
| The planning for the new school certainly seems to have helped in producing a design which is much more suited to being built in phases as money is gradually raised and, hopefully, structurally stronger following some frenetic email conversations to acquaintances back in the UK. |  School plan |
 Garden |
Meanwhile in the garden new plants were purchased and planted; clay pots were purchased to help with water retention and creative thinking was applied to how to use plastic bottles and bags to assist in getting water to the roots of the plants. Water retention was and is critical as the Katito area is extremely dry. Typically it only rains during the two rainy seasons which are separated by four/five month dry spells. The area does have a very varied climate as just forty-five minutes away in our hotel in Kisumu we were experiencing tropical downpours. |
I would like to think, and do believe, that we “made a difference” with these activities. This difference can come in many ways, for example helping the children realise that wuzungu (white people in kiswahili) were happy to engage and talk with them as equals, teaching them new skills, encouraging mixed-sex and team activities, and also in helping the children realise that their teachers were right in that they can also achieve many things that they may not realise, that even if rugby is regarded as an upper-class sport in Kenya that they can both be good at it, well better than me anyway, and enjoy it.
Did we benefit from it? Yes, each of us in our different ways of course but we all enjoyed this work immensely, at the end of every day we were both exhausted and smiling. The schoolteachers picked up new ideas that they could take back to the UK; the non-schoolteachers improved their teaching skills; we all enjoyed working with the children – you have to enjoy the company of children to be able to do this - and we all learnt a great deal about the country from our talks with the schoolteachers and children.
Community Events As well as working with the schoolchildren various community events occurred whilst we were present. Firstly a harambee, the Kiswahili word for “come-together”
and in this context meaning a fund-raising event, was planned to
take place to raise money to rebuild the primary school. This event
comprised speeches from many dignitaries, including one from our
own Natalie; some quite amazing dancing and singing from the schoolchildren
– including songs written by the deputy head Monica about
the problems that AIDS causes in Kenya; an auction where another
of our group The following day Rashid had arranged for two
other charitable bodies, Anamed and a local solar cooking organisation,
to teach the local community about natural medicine and solar cooking. |
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 Solar cooking  Artemisia |
The natural medicine course was presented by Rashid and the Anamed staff and included extensive tips about a plant, artemisia, which he grows locally and which helps combat malaria. This was followed by a talk on a whole variety of other plants and medicinal tips, for example some seeds that be used to clean water; a plant that combats the effects of asthma and a technique to extract the poison from snake bites. Rashid has invested significant efforts in encouraging the community to use these natural medicines as a method of encouraging self-sufficiency and reducing the reliance on expensive medicines. Two days later I had the pleasure of taking a walk around the community with Rashid. It was clear from the questions that were being asked of him that this talk had had an impact on the community and will have a beneficial effect in the future as more people grow and use these plants. That kind of immediate feedback was quite common throughout the trip, I'm not sure what caused the feedback to seem so quick but it was another feature that made the trip a positive experience as we could quickly see that what we were doing or participating in was helping within the community. |
The solar cooking was taking place in parallel with the natural medicine talk. The apparatus comprises a pot painted black to absorb heat, three stones to raise the pot off ground level and increase air circulation, a plastic bag to contain the heated air and cardboard coated with reflective paper to focus the sun's radiation on the bag and hence heat the air that circulates around the pot and is absorbed to heat the food within. Simple when you think about it.
The area around Katito has been deforested over the years and has no source of electricity. This means that the community members currently face a twenty kilometre round trip to buy charcoal to feed traditional fires. The solar cooking apparatus would eliminate this need but, unfortunately, requires more time to cook food than a normal fire (three-four hours compared to one) and also costs the equivalent of about four week's charcoal for a small family. These devices were again extremely popular but I can see the cost and time requirements slowing down their uptake.
Oh and I should also say that the cake was gorgeous whilst the vegetarian stew that we prepared was extremely tasty but contained just a few too many chilli peppers. Our star chefs had coincidentally disappeared when the time came for tasting the stew but it would an outrageous and unjustifiable slur to link these two facts.
On the following day we presented a workshop titled “Education for Non-Violence”. This is a series of workshops prepared by relayNET based on the philosophy of the New Humanist movement. These were challenging, extremely challenging, as we took it in turns to present workshops to the adult members of the community on meditation techniques, valid actions, discrimination, tribal violence and virtues. I will admit that at first I was slightly sceptical of how effective these workshops would be, especially as many of the adult members of the community do not speak English, but it did work.
Within a short period of time I found myself surrounded by a group of middle-aged ladies discussing how we had been discriminated against – one's skin was too black, another was younger than the others, another was illiterate, they all laughed at my baldness – and found that by simply offering up the opportunity to talk and share their problems we were again helping people.
That session ended with a complete reversal where Monica started to discuss white-on-black racism in Britain and it was that that sealed the two-way nature of the event. So many NGO trips seem to be a one-way push of ideas rather than a two-way discussion and the fact that we had that two-way exchange happening was something that I found pleasing and positive for the future as the community will continue to benefit from the presence of remarkable individuals like Monica – someone who is also the local representative for the teacher's union, runs a women's health clinic and runs an orphanage for children too young to attend the primary school in her spare time.
I could discuss these workshops at even more length, the topic of “night-runners” that also arose when we meet a student doctor in the Masai Mara for example, but I'll just end by saying that the community has asked us to do more of these workshops over a longer period of time when a group returns to the school. They may feel a little strange, they may look a little “new-age” for some people's tastes, but they do work.
Leaving Magunga
As a wind-up to our time at the school we organised traditional British sports days. One focussing on the sports that we had been playing with the children, giving the children a chance to demonstrate their new skills to their friends followed by a subsequent sports day aimed at the younger children and containing fun relay events.
It's been a long while since I've been at a school sports day and I can honestly say that I shouted myself hoarse whilst giving encouragement to the kids playing rugby, whilst Lisa shouted herself hoarse in trying to teach the basics of a Mexican wave. I won't try to explain the Kenyan wave that evolved at that point in time but do watch out for it at future international sports events.
The second sports day culminated in a tie-break decider of a three-legged race. If anything this generated even more hilarity than the parachute we had used earlier in the week had done and was an excellent use of the ever present and, unfortunately, non-biodegradable plastic bag.
We ended up with the presentation of certificates to children that had either won events in the sports days or produced exceptional work in the arts and crafts section before an emotional farewell resulting in a gaggle of children following us back through the community as we made our way to the bus stop.
As I said at the beginning, I have never taught before but I think I felt more than a little of the emotion that a teacher goes through at the end of the school year when they wave goodbye to some faces and wonder which ones they'll see the next time round.
Crash
So, back to Kisumu in a matatu. We were happily talking away about the certificate presentations and discussing what to do with our remaining time in Kenya when suddenly - bump - our matatu side-swiped a lorry whilst trying to overtake it. At this point we experienced the outcome of the laws of physics as applied to a small, light van colliding with a large, heavy lorry as the matatu veered off the road and started careering into the bush.
From this point on we have varying recollections. I recall swerving around trees whilst a goat went “baa” under my seat, Janet recalls the women sitting behind her praying, Natalie recalls looking for a better handhold whilst Lisa recalls hearing copious amounts of swearing. (Tanya and Naureen had already left us to go on safari so were undoubtedly in the lap of luxury at this point but we're not envious, oh no.)
We did stop safely, despite our fears that we'd overturn, and found ourselves several hundred yards from the road, by a broken matatu, miles from the nearest town and anyone that we knew, as darkness grew in and as the fact sunk in that all of the passengers, including the goat, had been fortunate to walk away from the crash.
What else could we do? I took up smoking, ineffectively it turned out as I dismally failed to light but still destroyed Natalie's last but one cigarette, whilst we frantically flagged down passing vehicles in an attempt to get a lift back to town. At this point we noticed a lorry parked nearby with a broken front-axle, we glared at it and took some shaky pictures as we looked for our next ride. Another matatu stopped and we climbed on-board. Surprisingly the conversation was stilted for the rest of the journey back to Kisumu. |
 Matatu crash |
Safari
We decided to take four days travelling back to Nairobi by road via various safari parks – I'm still not quite sure how we managed to persuade everyone to continue to travel by road. This was intended to act as both a well-earned bit of relaxation and a way to see and experience more of the country.
I don't want to go into too much detail about this part of the trip, you can read about safaris in any holiday brochure, but the trip exceeded my expectations and was a marvellous experience in itself including :
• two days in the Masai Mara watching the wildebeest
migration
• watching a lion prowling through a rock escarpment
• seeing giraffes looming over trees like an out-take from “Jurassic
Park”
• being mooned by zebras – literally, they loved to turn their
back(sides) to us
• being shot at with a bow and arrow by two Masai children
• climbing a hill with a Masai to watch the sun go down over the
Mara
• seeing, hearing and, most vividly, smelling millions of flamingos
at Lake Nakura
• white and black rhinos
• hippos in Lake Nakura from a vantage point where we subsequently
learnt that a tourist had been killed by a hippo two weeks earlier
• rock-climbing and gorge exploring in Hell's Gate Mountain Park
All that and we still spent at least four hours a day on the incredibly bumpy roads. (Mental note for next time: take a cushion.) I'm not sure if I would have gone to Kenya purely for a safari so this was a huge bonus for the trip and was cheaper than I expected.
We organised our safari locally and luckily found an extremely interesting tour guide in the form of Ali who does work with the local Muslim youth in Kisumu and, rather spookily, knew the cousin of a friend of mine from London - even carrying her business card in his wallet. I could insert the usual cliché about it being a small world here - it's not, it's actually quite large - but this is a new addition to my “Bumper Book of Coincidences”, a book that is expected to take the Christmas stocking filler market by storm any year now.
Nairobi
Upon arriving in Nairobi we met with James, relayNET’s representative in the capital. In a similar fashion to what we experienced in Kisumu and Magunga James was incredibly open and detailed in discussing his life, the issues that he saw within the country and what he was doing to help people in and around Nairobi. He runs a cybercafé in Nairobi, called Footsteps, that can be found just to the north-east of the city centre – somewhere well worth visiting if you ever go to Nairobi.
During our stay in Nairobi James took us on a walk around Mathare, one of Nairobi’s slums. Before we set off he recommended that we take minimal valuables and no cameras. Personally I left mine behind not through risk of theft but more because I believed that I would see things that I would not want to capture on film. If only it was as easy to erase some of the mental images that were seen in the slum. This was a totally different type, scale and concentration of poverty to that which we had previously witnessed.
Merely yards from sports grounds owned by large, multinational companies were tens of thousands of people living in small, tin shacks with no power or water, with sewerage outflow pipes running through the area and down into a small stream where people were collecting water to drink and cook with, where animals with distended stomachs were grazing on mounds of discarded garbage. This walk was an incredible insight into life in the underclass of a large, 3rd world city like Nairobi.
On the brighter side, as we walked through Mathare a huge group of children began to follow us each calling out “How are you?” and looking astounded when we actually replied either in kiswahili with “Mzuri, habari?” or in English with “Very well, how are you?”. Clearly very few other white visitors to this area attempted to engage with the children.
My abiding memory of Mathare will be when we stopped by a stream, where James pointed out an area on the other side of the stream, just ‘over there’, where the children carry guns and therefore somewhere we wouldn’t be going. As we talked about what we had seen so far we saw, just over to one side of the clearing that we were standing in, that someone had taken the time to chalk up the alphabet on the wall of one of the shacks.
It should be noted that the shacks in Mathare are gradually being demolished and replaced with large blocks of rentable rooms via a German-funded development organisation. Unfortunately from the research I’ve been able to perform since being back in the UK this redevelopment project appears to have been ongoing since the late-90s and still has a long way to go.
Coda
So, we reach the end of our trip. Did I learn anything?
Yes. About myself, about the problems facing people in Kenya – both in rural and town communities, about what various people want done to help them, about what I thought was the most suitable way to help, about what I could do to help, about so many things that despite writing this many words I haven’t articulated them all. Let's put it this way I would not forego any of the experiences, even the matatu crash, the “chilli stew” or the sights of Mathare.
Did we help people?
Yes. The praise and thanks are still coming in from Magunga. Tony, one of relayNET’s directors, recently visited and bought back a lengthy report from Monica praising our efforts and a variety of pictures showing that the rebuilding of the school was well underway, that arts and crafts were back on the curriculum and that the school garden was still flourishing.
Should you do a trip like this?
Let us know what you think and feel free to contact relayNET for more information.
Would I do it again?
Oh yes.
Peter Wells
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