Report from our school -
February 2022

Our grade four and five children during weekend tuition

All our children are in school for third term in our school calendar year. The school term is short but highly demanding academically. Apart from the normal learning process, this term is a little unique. All our Grade 3, 4 and 5 children have been sitting for their national assessment exams since Monday 31st January to 4th February 2022. All the other children have also been sitting for their mid-term assessment exams. Our children in Grade 3, 4 and 5 did exemplarily well in the national assessment exams. We are all very happy that our children were able to answer the questions in the exams quite well. This shows the quality of the work we are all doing here to give the best to our beloved children.

On corona pandemic we are all very lucky so far. None of us has caught the virus up to now. We are all
observing the health guidelines to stay safe.

Positive and Negative developments around the school:

NEW WATER TANKS AND SOLAR SYSTEM

We are very happy to report that out of our Swiss supporters’ generosity, apart from their immense
financial support to cover all our running costs in our school, our Swiss supporters’ also gave us enough
money to buy two new 10000 litres water tanks and also repair our solar lighting system. We are all very
grateful for this invaluable support. ‘’Water is life’’ and the two more water tanks will go a long way in
providing our children with more water for our school use.

JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL

We wish to say a big thank you to the Board of Nafasi Sawa Kinderstiftung for agreeing to support us to start our own Junior Secondary School in the year 2023. We got a phone call from the government asking us to start planning to start our own Junior Secondary School. This was big news to us. Our children are already so happy and looking forward to joining our own junior secondary school in January 2023. The government sent us two possible names for our Junior Secondary School:

• 1. Dr. Albert Schweitzer Secondary School – Seme
• 2. Albert Schweitzer Nafasi Sawa School – Seme

We are still waiting to get the approved name from Nairobi but generally we are all very happy together
with whichever name the government gives us. We are soon starting the registration process.

LCD PROJECTOR:

Our children and staff were very happy to get digital learning device (LCD Projector). Big thank you to
our Swiss supporters who made this possible.

Challenges for the school management:

The biggest challenge we have at the moment is the future of the new education curriculum. Since we are in the year of our General Election year, some Presidential contenders are saying during their political rallies that they will scrap the new education curriculum and revert to the old system of education. This leaves us in the middle of things. The same new curriculum case had been taken to Court but we don’t hear of the Court case anymore. We have to continue with our preparations for the future developments of our beloved school.

Another recurrent challenge is the upsurge of omicron corona virus. This poses a real challenge since we
don’t know how far this will affect us as a school in case any of our children or staff gets the virus.

Another challenge we have as a school is the number of sick children almost everyday. We are in the tropical Africa where diseases like malaria, measles, diarrhea/vomiting, bilharzia and other tropical diseases are very rampant. In a day you can find more than five children falling sick with malaria which is the most common and most dangerous disease. This makes us take the sick children to health centres which are a little far from us or we give the sick children pain killers to keep them in school for some time since they are never willing to go home. This is because if we take them home they will miss food which we provide at school. They are never happy going home during school time. In view of this we approached one of our Swiss supporters (Miaca) to help us put up a small school clinic where we can take our sick children for medical attention. We’re looking forward to her response on the same.

General News from the country:

Our General Elections are earmarked to take place on 9th August 2022. Our politicians are all over. They run across the country selling their policies to the electorate every day. Life is not the same to common people in areas they visit with their political rallies. We are still 6 months from the elections but there is a lot of violence and hatred among people. We are worried that the elections might not be peaceful.

OUR CURRENT ACTIVITIES:

We are all in school without big school extra curriculum activities. The term is short and all inter school activities are not taking place this term except for school academic tours to different parts of our country by our children. Since the beginning of this term our grade 4 and 5 have gone on school tours to different places including going across the Great Lake Victoria on waterbus and water ferry in line with their learning modes of transportation on water. These academic tours are very helpful to our children and help them a lot in learning.

VISITORS:

We were expecting some of our Swiss supporters to come visiting our school at the beginning of the year (January & February) but this hasn’t been possible due to the upsurge in omicron corona virus.

We’re hoping to welcome them any time when things are ok.

SPECIAL THANKS:

We are all very grateful for all the support we’ve been getting from all our Swiss friends. May God bless
all our supporters.