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J u l i a B l a c k
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On June 26th to July 12th, a group of 25 students grade 9-12 from several places around the world including Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Canada, the US, and Egypt went to Kenya. For the first two days we were in Nairobi. We visited a giraffe sanctuary and went to a local market. Then we took an 8 hour bus ride to a rural village called Salabwek. We stayed in big tents with four people per tent, in a mobile camp site right near the school. Each day we woke up at around 8 and had breakfast (alot of pineapple, mangoes and passion fruit) and then we would walk over to the school. The children would run up to us and want to help us build which was really cute. With the help of two construction men from the town, we started off building the foundation of two schools and then we built up the walls on one of them. Whenever the kids had recess we would play soccer (with a ball made out of cloth), tag, duck duck goose, boom chicca boom, and lots of other games that didn't involve alot of talking. The youngest kids spoke Ma, which is the local language. Once they reach about 6 or 7 they learn Swahili which is the broader language of Kenya, and then they begin to learn English at 9 or so. The school that we were building has kids as young as four and they range up to age 16 (or grade 8). Then, they can continue on to Secondary School, although not all of them do. The town is made up of small houses made up of cow poo and mud, which makes a very concrete building material. They have straw roofs. Most families have two of these buildings. One is the kitchen - made up of a place to burn coal (the stove) and the other is for the parents to sleep. The kids sleep in the kitchen, often with the cattle. (This is because it is part of the culture and tradition that parents can not sleep in the same room as the children.) Each family lives off of 6 liters of water per day (to put this in perspective a toilet uses about 7-15 liters each time it flushes). They get it from a small water hole in the town. They have to boil their water because it is so dirty. There isn't a proper water source for 40km. All 1,000 residents of the town rely on this one source. From this, they have to bathe, cook, drink, and give to their cattle. Part of the work that Free the Children does when they go into a village is to build a water project. This consists of a large container that collect drainage from the gutter of the school. It is filtered and there is a pump to get water out. In a drought period, this container would hold enough water for the entire village to love off for four months. The problem is is that there hasn't been a proper rainfall in Salabwek since May of 2007. |
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