Kendy’s project

One of the employees of Plan in Marimanti, Kendy, whom I went to visit schools with is trained as a special needs teacher. In the district of Tharaka she has found 600 children that needs support, she knows about 300 more. She is sure that this year she will hit the 1000 mark. In Tharaka Plan has increased the opportunities for children with special needs to access quality education. But still almost all of these children does not get an adequate education because the system is not made to accommodate them, they need special things to get through school like braille machines, magnifying glasses, glasses in general and simply, the support of a special needs teacher. In the United States special needs is a term used in clinical diagnostic and functional development to describe individuals who require assistance for disabilities that can be medical, mental or psychological. Types of special needs vary in severity. People with autisms, blindness, dyslexia, Down syndrome, ADHD or cystic fibrosis may be considered to have special needs for example. However special needs can also include cleft lips and or palates, port wine birth marks or missing limbs. This means that the support that the children needs can vary greatly from one child to the next.

Where I was staying in Tanzania a girl named Aika was staying as well. Aika’s mother had died long before giving birth to her little brother and as she was the breadwinner in the family, her father couldn’t take care of her and her brother and sister. The family I stayed with took her little brother in first almost right after he was born on the urging of a volunteer midwife who had been present at his birth, then a few years later when they learned how bad a condition his sisters were in, they took them in too. In a few years she will finish her primary education. I have heard the grandparents of the family, the heads of the family, talking about whether they should send her to high school or not. The thing about Aika is that she is slow to learn and easily forgets things. As she doesn’t get any special help and this is reflected in her grades. Another of the reasons that the grandparents were thinking of not sending her to high school is that it is expensive and why should they send her to school if she doesn’t learn?

According to article 23 in the Convention of the Rights of the Child: “a mentally or physically disabled child should enjoy a full and decent live, in conditions which ensures dignity, promote self-reliance and facilitate the child’s active participation in the community. 2. States Parties recognize the right of the disabled child to special care (…) to ensure that the disabled child has effective access to and receives education, training, health care (…)”. Aika and all the other children that Kendy has found has the right to an education and to special care. Special care that they do not receive as it is, but they should and maybe someday they will.

Old ways, new ways (mud vs. modern buildings)

Let me tell you a story about a Masaai. He was the son of the village Maasai chief and his first wife. But he had lived a long time away from home in a big city with cars, electricity, and big comfortable houses. As the time goes by he gets more and more accustomed to square houses and decides that the houses in the village, which are round, one roomed huts with a straw roof and no electricity, will no longer be enough for him. But he doesn’t know if he wants to live in the village with his family or in the city with all its comforts. So he decides to build his own house in the village, and it will not be round, oh no, it will be square. But it goes further than that, he wants a tin roof, two rooms and an extra wing for his bedroom. He wants the comforts of the city in his village. At first I thought that he needed the city, that because he needed so much that his father never needed, he would not return to the village. But after I have given it some thought, I think what he was doing was natural progression. Though we don’t want to lose tribes like the Maasai, which I don’t think we will for a long while yet, what he was doing was developing. We need to develop to progress.  I still don’t think he needs a square house with two rooms, a tin roof and an extra wing in his village. But many places needs more than mud houses.

In Tharaka I visited two schools with Plan. In the first one there were students waiting to talk to me, so I got a quick tour of the grounds before talking to them. The school had many new buildings, built with Plan funding. In the second school the students had already left. But that meant that I could walk around and see the different buildings they had. They had an old classroom made of mud and new buildings made of concrete. The building made of mud was literally falling apart, whereas the one made of concrete was stable and safe. The second school is located an hour and a half in car away from Marimanti, the biggest city in the district of Tharaka. But even Marimanti is small and very few out by the second school has cars, most walk and a few lucky ones has bikes and the electricity doesn’t reach that far. This means that if something were to happen it would take a long time for help to arrive. So out there concrete buildings are very important for the children’s safety, it also makes for better classrooms. But it is not just classrooms that needs to be better, it is also the dormitories. So that the students’ parents can send them to school and let them stay there, with the knowledge that nothing will happen to them while they are there, that they will be safe. Because children and especially girls that walk alone at night, and during the day, are vulnerable to rape and other dangers such as snakes and wild animals.  

The children of Sakina

All of the children.

Let me introduce you to the children from the day care/kindergarten that I volunteered in one month in Tanzania in the part of Arusha that is called Sakina. There were two Nasaras, the smallest one took to me instantly, and every time I walked somewhere she would follow. Azra has two sisters: the bigger Nasara and Najma. They always stayed late because their mother had left them, so their father had to take care of them by himself, but as he worked at a garage it was better to stay in the kindergarten than to go there. Doreen was quiet, but she always had a smile for you, especially when you needed one. Noreen was the beauty queen of the kindergarten. Every time I saw her she had a new hairstyle and that is saying much for kids with practically no hair. Tamali taught me to count to twenty in Kiswahili. Johnson was always wearing the same clothes. Most of the children wear a school uniform or half of it, but mostly they change it up a little. During three days he also wore the same holey socks. He hardly ever got in fights, he was one of the good boys. Jackson, like the rest of the boys, thought he was too old to play with girls. Angela was a quiet girl and she didn’t say very much. The others sometimes just called her angel. Julieth liked to sit by me, she always seemed like a princess. Joyline was one of the oldest children. Whenever we tried a new game, she was always the one who tried first. Daniel was always very serious and usually sat quietly playing. Bryan was one of the boys, but he was a bit smaller than most of the other boys his age so sometimes he had to fight a little harder. Ibrahim was one of the smaller kids, but I could never figure out his age, because he was so small, but so bright. Ibrahim had the biggest smile you could ever imagine, and he liked to smile all the time. Dereck was quite a bully, and would get that look in his eyes of resistance if you tried to interfere. Pruspa used to cry a lot, but when he smiled it would melt your heart. Cathbet always had an innocent smile ready and he was surprisingly good at drawing. David was one of the older boys, but he never used his age to bully anyone, he was always very sweet. Salma was best friends with Joyline. Joyline tried everything first, but Salma went right after her. Elizabeth was the oldest in the kindergarten. We called her Eliza and she was shy, but always ready to explore. She was supposed to start school in the fall, but they rejected her, even though they had said she would get in. Khadija, we once tried a game about trust, but there wasn’t a whole lot of trust and Khadija ended up walking into a wall. Gosperi was a quiet little girl who didn’t say anything. Simon was the youngest boy, he always wore a hat. He was quiet like Gosperi, but when he warmed up to you he was yours. Esther was a little bully. Gillian was clumsy and shy. Eunice had a lot of energy she didn’t know where to put, she always called me teacher and had an adorable smile. Andrew was usually called Biggie, he was a big bully with eyes that pretended innocence, but they never fooled me. His dad owned a big white car and he probably lived in a big house.  Betty always came to the kindergarten with Tamali, she was always really sweet. Najma and Nasara looked a lot alike and might have been twins, they are Azra’s sisters as well and they both loved to play. Oscar was the oldest boy and he usually stood on the sidelines. Joving smiled by pressing his lips into his mouth. William didn’t know any of the songs the children would sing, he cried easily and all the time until he got his way. Janeth was like Angela, but in a more smiling way and she always wore a scarf. Vanessa liked to repeat what you said to learn new words, she is HIV positive.

Employees of Plan

A Plan funded water tank.

Plan has been in Kenya for over thirty years. Plan has eight Program Units: Kwale and Kilifi in the coast, Machakos and Tharaka in the eastern part, Homa Bay, Kisumu and Bondo in Nyanza and an urban program in Nairobi. The urban program mainly targets the urban poor, all the rest are based in the rural areas. The overall goal of the Plan programs is to have transformed institutions and societies that respect and fulfil rights of all children in Kenya. The Plan headquarters of Tharaka North are in Gatunga, the Tharaka South headquarters are in Marimanti where I have been. The district of Tharaka covers an area of 1570 sq. km and has a population of about 130,000 (projected from a 1999 census), an average household in Tharaka is five. Tharaka North has 61 primary schools, 56 of those are public schools and five are private schools. In the public primary schools there are a total of 15,272 students, where 7,525 are boys and 7,747 are girls. In the private primary schools there are a total of 827 students, where boys accounts for 421 and girls for 406. Tharaka South has 99 public primary schools in them there are an estimate of 13,327 boys and 8,974 girl, making it a total of 22,301 students in total. There are 24 secondary schools with a total population of 2,122, where boys account for 1,252 and girls for 870.  There are many factors impeding learning in both Tharaka South and Tharaka North some of which are: long distances to schools, gender disparity in access to schools, unfriendly learning environment, understaffing in schools, school levies, inadequate skills in gender responsive pedagogy, high drop-out rates for girls, inadequate support to children with special needs, discrimination of children living with disabilities, corporal punishment, child labor, child sexual abuse, etc.

The people trying to do something about this are, in Marimanti, Plan’s thirty five employees. Only one of the employees lives permanently in Tharaka. All of the rest of the employees lives far and wide over Kenya. One of the employees’ family lives in Kisumu and another’s close to Nakuru. They visit their family as often as they can, but as it takes a long time to get back and forth so they cannot do it too often. They are all given housing in Marimanti, and are therefore not chosen because of where they are from, but because of their qualifications and many of the employees has been to university. They have improved the learning environment in some schools through: improvement of the schools infrastructure, provision of school furniture, provision of learning and instructional materials, capacity building of teachers in curriculum delivery methods, mentorship program for students, capacity building of teachers on gender responsive pedagogies, awareness creation and parental education on importance of education and Rights of the Child, child protection sessions with students, etc. I visited two schools with two of the Plan employees and I could really see much of what they have achieved on a physical level, they have built classrooms, and set up a lot of water tanks. Water tanks are very important in this area because there are no river nearby, so they are completely dependent on rainwater. All of the thirty-five employees of Plan Marimanti, and Plan employees all over the world deserves a good cheer, they are changing things for the better for children everywhere.

The look in their eyes

Every year between 500 million and 1.5 billion children experience some sort of violence, often in school. Violence in schools happens everywhere, every day. Violence in schools can for example be bullying and corporal punishment. 90 countries legally permit corporal punishment in schools. Girls are especially vulnerable to rape, exploitation, coercion and discrimination perpetrated by students and teachers. The consequences include unwanted pregnancies, poor performance at school and high dropout rates. An eight years old girl from Paraguay has said this about violence in schools: “our school principal punishes us very hard. She makes us go down on our knees over small stones or bottle screw tops for over 20 minutes and also she often pulls our ears.” A fifteen years old girl from Uganda has said: “our teachers should be there to teach us and not to touch us where we don’t want or to solicit love favors from us girls. (…) I feel like disappearing from the world if a person who is supposed to protect me instead destroys me.”

At the preschool where I volunteered in Kenya they sometimes used a stick to discipline the children. The first time I saw it I flinched back as if it was me that was being hit instead of one of the children. The teacher could see that I did not condole this, but she just laughed it off, I knew that you cannot make them change unless you give them an alternative and there is always an alternative to violence. So I planned to give the supervisor of the preschool an article I had found about one of Plan’s campaigns: Learn Without Fear. The article was from a project in Kenya and I thought that was good since that could make it more personal for them. That was naïve and it in no way achieved what I wanted. The article starts out by explaining different forms of violence which occurs in Kenyan schools and had been going on previously on the project the article was about. Before going on to explain the method they used to combat the violence. The violence which occurs when a child does something he or she is not supposed to do. It was simple really, they introduced a system of yellow and red cards much like in football/soccer. But the supervisor and all the other teachers who were by now reading as well could not look past the beginning and see the solution. They kept saying: “this is child abuse, we don’t abuse the children, we just discipline them,” ‘ken’ them, they called it. I kept saying that I wasn’t accusing them of abusing the children, it’s like they don’t notice the reaction of the child that they are ‘kenning.’ Some cry even before they are hit, some sit quietly but their eyes betrays them, blinking madly, mostly they try to get as far away as possible. I do not understand how they can’t even see what they are doing, they don’t cause any long lasting physical scars, but nonetheless violence in schools has devastating long-term consequences. I know it is not as bad here as some places and they do realize that corporal punishment in schools in Kenya is illegal and bad, but still they do not believe that is what they are doing.  I will never forget the look in those children’s eyes.

I came at a bad time to change things, as the school was almost over as soon as I began, but I left the roots of a plan for the next volunteer. A plan that centers on praising the children and awarding them with stickers when they do their homework well or sit nicely. Because as it is, it seems that even the children who do the homework well gets hit as an afterthought. When the children has nothing to aspire towards, why would they aspire at all? If the children end up associating working or school with something negative they probably won’t try at all in the future. Schools should be safe havens were children can run off to and forget about all other worries, not adding more worries, children have the right to be safe in school.

The normality of child marriage

Lucy.

Two years ago one of my friends and I made a project in school in a course called theory of knowledge. The question we posed was: to what extent does culture define our sense of what is normal? We had decided to focus on child marriage. Social norms are explicit and implicit rules specifying what behavior, values, beliefs and attitudes are acceptable within a society or group, they are neither static nor universal. Which means that they change over time and vary in different cultures, social classes and social groups.  Into the presentation we integrated the story of Praveen. One of her neighbors, fifteen years old Maryam, was fortunate enough to have parents that did not force her to marry while she was still a child, but let her fulfill her dream of becoming a software engineer. Maryam from Pakistan participated in the annual session of the Commission on the Status of Women held in the UN in New York in 2012. There she told the story of twelve years old Praveen.  One of the first things Praveen did when she entered her husband’s house was to look for toys. Then she ate the tomatoes her mother-in-law had given her to cook. After that she was quickly sent back to her father. Maryam explained than now “Praveen’s weeping all day. She’s too young to comprehend the meaning of marriage and divorce but she’s old enough to understand that her life is ruined”. Close to 10 million girls worldwide like Praveen are forced to marry older men when they are still only children.

Lucy, one of the girls I talked to at the school in Tharaka, said that they needed better dormitories. One of the reasons they need dormitories at all is that most of the children live far away from the school, so, if they lived at home, they would have to walk long distances to and from school. At which point it would most likely be dark. After dark, and in truth also during the day, some of the problems that children can face are snakes, wild animals and rape. In the second school I visited there was no children because of the holidays, but I got to see their dormitories. The toilet was maybe ten meters away. Even at that short distance I was told that rape might take place, maybe it already has. If the perpetrator agrees to marry their victim it is no longer seen as abuse. The young girls want to get married because they think that it is a ticket straight out of poverty, but it hardly ever is.  They will end up with the lives of their mothers and their mothers before that. In our presentation we found that culture and heritage shapes or defines our sense of what is normal to a great extent, but, as I said, social norms can change over time. The acceptance of child marriage in many countries are changing with the help of girls like Maryam, but it needs to change faster. All the girls told me that they did not plan to marry before high school, but they would have said that even if they were.

Dreaming the dreams of others

The girls from the first school I visited.

I have always had many dreams and I believe that dreams bring hope, that someday we might just be able to fulfill them. But what happens when your dreams aren’t your own, just repetitions you have heard since before you can remember? When can you tell the difference between the dreams that you have for yourself and the expectations of others?
                      One of the first evenings I spend in Tanzania this autumn I asked one of the children I lived with, a girl some fifteen years old named Aika who was prone to laughter and smiles, about what she wants to do when she finishes school, she said that she wanted to cook. I thought about it for a moment and asked: “Here?” She answered in the affirmative and pointed to the kitchen. Then I asked her if she didn’t want to be a doctor or a pilot. She said maybe a pilot. I was a bit disappointed, because I thought that she should have, I had imagined that she would have bigger dreams, aspirations. But she doesn’t really have that much of a reason to have bigger dreams, for her cooking for the family would be a great honor. Her dream might have been the most heartfelt that I got on my entire trip.
                      In Kenya I volunteered at a pre-school in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Nakuru. The class that I helped with was the top class, the ones getting ready to go to Standard one. As I was there in November they were getting ready for the Christmas break and starting primary school in January. That meant that they would have a graduation, for the graduation day every class would perform a couple of songs with dancing. My class had a song about dreams: “I have a dream, I have a dream that one day, one time I’ll be a doctor. I have a dream, I have a dream that one day, one time I’ll be a teacher. I have a dream, I have a dream that one day, one time I’ll be a driver. I have a dream, I have a dream that one day, one time I’ll be a pilot. I have a dream, I have a dream that one day, one time I’ll be a mother. I have a dream, I have a dream that one day, one time I’ll be a father.” A doctor, a teacher, a driver, a pilot, a mother, a father, that are the dreams that this song wants for them and I am sure that they will all remember them if they are ever asked if they have a dream.
                      In the end of November I visited Plan in Marimanti, Tharaka in Kenya. We visited one of the school projects there. As they were already on vacation only 30 of the 300 students were present, only girls. I talked with some of the braver girls from class six and seven. All nine of them were going to high school after this and I asked them what they wanted to do after that, what they dreamt of doing. Evelyn was the first to step forward, a sixteen years old girl in class seven with eyes wiser than her years. She has four sisters and three brothers, all of whom have been or are in school. After high school she wants to be a secretary in a bank. Lucy, a fifteen years old girl also in class seven with a cheeky smile and a shy demeanor, wants to be a doctor.  Fifteen years old Sacondina from class seven who has three brothers and two sisters and like playing volleyball and science also wants to be a doctor. Sixteen years old Penina wants to be a lawyer, fourteen years old Ndoris wants to be a doctor, thirteen years old Dhmaris wants to be a secretary in a bank, fourteen years old Ndibora wants to be a lawyer, sixteen years old Ruth wants to be an engineer and fifteen years old Gerevina wants to be a pilot. None of them have ever been outside of the district of Tharaka and none of them are planning to leave anytime soon. And as far as I can tell, there isn’t a university in Tharaka. I really want them to have these big dreams, but I cannot help wonder if it isn’t the dreams of others. Dreams that others expect them to have.