Report from our school -
May 2022

Our Junior Secondary School Classrooms

All our children are in school for 1st term in our school calendar year 2022. Our first term started on 25th April and will end on 1st July 2022.The school term is short but highly demanding academically since the whole syllabus which would have been covered in three months is to be covered in approximately two and a half months. All our Grade 6 children will be sitting for their national assessment exams at the end of this year in readiness for joining Junior Secondary school in January
2023. We are sure our Grade 6 children will do well in their national exams at the end of this year since all our teachers are doing a very good job with all our children in their respective classes from Nursery to Grade 6.

On corona pandemic in our country, we are still all observing the health guidelines to stay safe. Our Government stopped usage of face masks in all public places but we are still urged to observe precautionary measures since the virus is still there with us even though the infection rate has really gone down.

Positive and Negative developments around the school:

OUR JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL

We wish to report that out of immense financial support from our Swiss Foundations (Albert Schweitzer Verein/Association and Nafasi Sawa Kinderstiftung) we have been able to cover all our running costs in our school. We also wish to report that from March this year Nafasi Sawa Kinderstiftung has given us financial support to build our ‘Junior Secondary School’ on a big piece of land which they helped us buy from the community earlier on. This is a big step in helping our little children continue with their learning in our school beyond the primary school level. At the moment our two classrooms for grade 7 and 8 are almost complete. We shall start building the Ecosan Toilets from Wednesday the 11th May 2022 after assembling all the necessary building materials. We have brought bricks for the Ecosan Toilets construction. Since the day we started building the Junior Secondary School , our grade 6 children have been asking the Director to get in touch with Barbara and let them thank her on phone directly for building them the secondary school. We hope one fine day we shall make this possible for them. They are very happy and grateful.

Lorry delivering bricks in readiness for Ecosan Toilets construction on secondary school compound

NEW UNIFORMS AND NEW TEXT BOOKS:

We wish to thank all our Swiss friends for their invaluable financial and moral support to our beloved school. Out of your immense support we have been able to buy new school uniforms for all our new children who joined our school in April and also for our grade four children. We have also been able to buy new text books for all our children in different class.

Challenges for the school management:

CHANGE OF STAFF:

One challenge that we had at the beginning of this school calendar year in April is the staff turnover.
In the middle of April before we reopened school for this new school calendar year which begun on 26th April, two of our staff were recalled back to government college for retraining on new Education curriculum (CBC Curriculum). This is a real challenge to our management since we had to advertise and recruit new teachers to cover the positions left. Teacher Eric who was our school head teacher and Teacher Milka were recalled back to college and in their places we recruited Teacher Charles
and Teacher Vitalis. We therefore promoted Teacher Lawrence to become our new school Head Teacher and Madam Beryl to be the Deputy Head teacher.

Another challenge we had since the beginning of this year is the rise in the number of sick children in our school. During rainy season we usually have acute outbreak of malaria and measles among our children. This is as a result of stagnant waters which come as a result of the rains which therefore act as breeding places for mosquitos. We have had so many sickness cases. We still hope that one day we shall have our own school clinic where our sick children can get treatment without taking our children 4km away from our school for treatment.

General News from the country:

It is politics, politics and politics here. Our General Elections are earmarked to take place on 9th August 2022. The political temperatures are very high. We are all worried how it will be after the election. There are signs that the elections will not be peaceful. Our politicians run across the country selling their policies to the electorate every day. The politicians make huge promises to lure people to vote them in on the election day. We are waiting to see what happens after the polls.

OUR CURRENT ACTIVITIES:

We are all in school giving all our children the best for their educational growth. We hope all school extra curriculum activities will be back for our children to start practicing for the competitions which our children love so much. The term is short but our school academic tours for all our children will be on as we did last term. We highly cherish these academic tours since they are very helpful to our children and help them a lot in learning.

VISITORS:

We are expecting some of our Swiss supporters to come visiting our school any time after our
General Elections on 9th August 2022.

SPECIAL THANKS:

May God bless all our Swiss friends. Without their big hearts we wouldn’t be where we are.