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.