2nd Dispatch from Muhuru

Jambo!

We have been in Muhuru for over a week, and the lessons and experiences have been incredible. Many of us on the Duke team, including myself, have been shocked by our experiences both in and outside of the classrooms here. I’ve visited classes at Rabwao Secondary School, intending to observe teaching methods utilized by the teachers, and had teachers hand over the chalk, and walk out, expecting me to teach. I went to the teacher’s lounge, where a teacher claimed he was preparing final exams (his excuse for skipping class), and found him reading the newspaper.
Muhuru bay has the worst exit exam scores in all of Kenya, and it is easy to see why. There is absolutely no accountability at this school. First of all, Rabwao is a public school, and the government chooses what teachers the school may hire. The implication is that while there are good teachers in Kenya, few want to work in a poor, rural environment like Muhuru, which lacks luxuries such as electricity. The Kenyan Government reserves good teachers for public schools near large cities like Nairobi, leaving small villages like Muhuru stuck with teachers who often don’t even have credentials. There is no reward for improvements in student performance, so teachers are free to continue poor teaching habits, come and go as they please, and take days off if they feel so inclined.

In the Kenyan system, 11 classes are taken each trimester, and a teacher has 40 minutes to complete a lesson. Students have little class time, but with so many classes, they have far less time to comprehend their lessons outside of the classroom. A math teacher assigned a difficult homework problem, and when approached by Patrick, the teacher was unable to complete the problem. How can students learn if their teachers don’t even understand the material they are teaching? Teachers assign homework, but never correct student’s work. I remember from my high school Calculus classes, how helpful it was when my teacher went over homework problems. Patrick is working to address the issues observed by the Duke team, by offering a teaching methods course in conjunction with the Computer training being offered to teachers in the coming weeks. I am looking forward to seeing his program, and am cautiously optimistic that it will help Rabwao students in the long run.

Last week, I helped distribute Stayfree pads from Johnson and Johnson, serving over 120 women from the community. With the help of Rachel Gartner (Washington University in St. Louis) and my translator, a student from Rabwao, and I was able to educate women on the proper use and disposal of the Pads, before distributing them. Women had walked miles to get the pads, and they were all smiles when they saw that a male student (me) was educating about them! It is a testament Muhuru’s lack of wealth, seeing women walk so far to receive items valued at 255 Shillings ($4.00). Many women even attempted to come back for more pads, but were turned away once I noticed that they had returned to the long line for the pads. Pictures will be added to this blog shortly, as our Internet speed is quite low here in Migori (an hour outside of Muhuru). On Tuesday I will be distributing pads to female students at Rabwao Primary School (standards 7 and 8), as many girls flooded our table last week when we were distributing pads to adults in the community. April and I are extremely excited about giving the pads to the girls, as well as educating them about adolescence, education many adult women in the community never received.

We are now teaching computer classes for our second week, and the students from Rabwao are so enthusiastic! We now have Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, which is an invaluable tool, and a major improvement over our nonsensical songs about home keys and different letters. Rachel is leading the computer classes, and each Duke student has been showing so much team spirit (teams 1-7). I am teaching Team 3, a group of two girls (Lucy and Adline) from Form 3. While Lucy is a fast learner, Adline initially had some trouble with releasing her finger after each keystroke. They are both a pleasure to teach, and both have passed the first lesson in Mavis Beacon. Both the solar panels and the 7 laptop computers will serve the Rabwao student body well into the future, and will improve each student’s chance of success after graduating.

Oriti (goodbye),
Mike

1st Dispatch from Muhuru

from July 15, 2007

Hello all!

This is April, and I update you now from Migori, a town about an hour away from Muhuru Bay that puportedly has electricity, though right now I'm sitting at a really old computer in about a walk-in closet sized internet cafe where the power and the lights are out and the computer is run by a noisy generator outside. We rode in a taxi on the way over here and crammed 11 people in it. Just to get a visual, please everyone stop for a moment and envision really uneven dirt roads with lots of holes and giant rocks sprinkled with small children running about to school, people on bicycles carrying lots of wood and women carrying jugs of water on their heads. Now imagine with 10 people and a baby flying at 100km/h. Death ride. No joke. Luckily we were ok and we didn't hit anyone (except for we almost nailed a cow that just barely made it out of the way).


We've been in Muhuru for 5 days now. It's incredible. This is the second go round for me, since I came last year. I think i had gotten so wrapped up in the logistics of WISER, that i had fogotten how beautiful it is here. We've made a habit of hiking up to the top of this really high rock to watch the sun set. We can see a lot of Lake Victoria, the Kenyan countryside, as well as both Tanzania and Uganda from up there. It's breathtaking. Sometimes it feels like paradise.

But the truth is, we don't have to walk far for it to begin to feel like Hell either. Children (anywhere from 4 to 9) with no shoes and bloated bellies from lack of food fish with bamboo sticks while standing in the lake which we won't touch -- for fear of parasites--just so that their families can have a reasonable meal. Old women, bent over from carry huge jugs of lakewater on their heads for miles to water the crops that they try to sell to make money. It's hard to deal with often. It is a sort of extreme poverty to which I am unaccustomed. And though all of us came out here with one suitcase prepared to "rough it" for 6 weeks, the truth is, I've begun to feel quite spoiled. We live in a house made of plaster with a tin roof. Granted the roof doesn't touch the walls, but it feels really luxurious after a day of walking around in the plains around the lake seeing only small mud huts with roofs of thatch for families of 6 or 7. Our one lantern for the 11 of us, which is our sole lighting source after dark, seems excessive as we walk past the night study rooms at the school where all of the girl students share one for everyone.

All that aside, we have seen some incredible and really inspiring things. This past week (on our first full day in the village) we were invited to Shining Star Primary School, with children from nursery school age to grade 5, who were awesome. They were prepared for our visit and performed several traditional Luo (the local tribe) songs and dances for us. It was a great welcome to Muhuru, as the kids dressed up and used traditional Luo facepaints and instruments in their performances. We tried to give them some entertainment of our own as we taught them the hokey pokey and showed them our own rendition of Row, Row, Row, Your Boat.

We also had an incredible community meeting this past Friday. The purpose of the meeting was to get together with the greater Muhuru Bay community and both share with them the latest develpments and plans, but also really to just get some feedback from them and to make sure that all of their voices and concerns were heard. There was a marked differenece between the community meeting this year and the one from last. Last year we gathered in the Dining Hall of Rabwao Secondary School and the meeting consisted of us broadly talking about currenty problems with girls' education and a few of the community members' responses to that. This year, we met on the land donated by Dr. Rose's father, where the WISER school will be built. We moved a bunch of chairs and benches with a truck (see Kelly, Mike, and Patrick) out under a big tree which overlooks all the land and had an astonishing turnout from the community (picture). This year we were able to share with them real concrete plans about the school and its development, after which we broke into smaller "focus groups" so that we could really hear what Muhuru had to say. We got a lot of valuable feeback from them about ways we can best work with the community, but what i found most exciting was that we found overwhelming support. Muhuru is genuinely excited about the project that we have begun and all of us are looking forward to working with them in the future. One of the points that was emphasized most was that WISER is not just a school for girls, but a community center meant to benefit the greater Muhuru Bay community. It was overall a great meeting which ended with everyone eating together. The boys, to dispell any rumors about gender and cooking, helped prepare the meat and then served the village (picture).

In general, we are still having a great time and learning a lot every day. Look for another update soon!

April Edwards

-Post from July 15

Jambo! NAIROBI!

Today is our second day in Nairobi. Yesterday 36 boxes of Stayfree pads arrived at our hotel (1296 10-packs). Thanks to Johnson and Johnson (J&J), these products will prevent the girls of Rabwao Secondary school from missing a week of school each month, due to lack of hygienic products (and subsequent social stigma). The meeting was a huge success, and we were provided with handouts and a large chart on the female reproductive system, to aid our adolescent health course. We’re unsure how we will transport so many boxes from Nairobi to Muhuru Bay!

After our meeting, we rode in a taxi to the Yaya Market, only about 2km from our hotel. We took a ride in a taxi, all six who had arrived thus far: Prashant, Elise, Sunny, Lucy, Patrick and me. The Yaya market was entertaining and colorful, the best barterer from our group had to be Patrick, even though he was decked out in a Kenya shirt, marked out as a tourist and teased by just about everyone. At one point, I was out of shillings, and vendors approached each of us, "friend, brother, I want to show you something, come here". One vendor said he'd trade several items for the pair of jeans I was wearing. I've been at an open market in Israel, but in Nairobi, there are no limits to what people will do. I was decent at bargaining, but that didn’t prevent me from paying 1500 shillings (about 23 dollars) for three small ebony wood animals. Patrick, of course informed me that another vendor had tried selling the same animals for 200 shillings a piece. I’m just contributing to the Kenyan economy via my naïveté.


Around 11:30 last night, our group of delayed travelers arrived: Sherryl, April, Tyla, and Kelly. They were very excited to see us, and they looked bright-eyed and bushytailed after 3 days of travel delays. Today we are all restless and ready to get to Muhuru Bay, but we must buy more supplies, so it may be a day or two until we depart Nairobi. In the meantime, April has taken possession of the guitar I brought, and is having nonstop song sessions in the room next door with the other girls from our trip. I for one am enjoying one of the last real showers I’ll have for six weeks.
-Mike