Robin Pilcher

I’ve just got back from two very different weeks in Kenya, hence the slight blip in the blogs. The second week (and the initial reason Kirsty and I were to be going there) was spent with friends on the island of Lamu in a house that was fronted by an 8-mile stretch of beach that we had completely to ourselves. In contrast, our first week was spent helping out at an orphanage and a primary school at Timau, a small township that lies in the leeward shadow of Mount Kenya. We were actually set up as guinea pigs by student GAP year company, Africa Ventures, to see if there might be call for a more ‘senior’ age group to take part in their schemes. AV wanted to call it Denture Ventures which I riled at immediately, seeing I’m still in possession of all my teeth. More appropriate would be something about ‘shedding years’ because that’s exactly what seemed to happen to us.

I won’t go into huge details about it all, but it has to be one of the most enthralling weeks I have ever spent. The kids in the orphanage, aged between 10 and 16, were there because of HIV, sectarian violence and general poverty. Peter and Frederick had both witnessed their parents killed in front of them, and Frederick, aged 14, was still traumatized by it. Doreen and Anne had lost mothers to AIDS and Anne was HIV positive herself, but being treated. Fridah, aged 10, was brought in by the police two years ago. She has no memory of where she came from or who her parents were. Yet, together, these children, 14 boys and 10 girls, formed one of the strongest units I have ever witnessed, supportive of each other and loving to those younger members. And never, for one moment, was there a smile off their faces.

The credit for this has to go to Mrs. Esther Mwiti who started the orphanage in 2002 and continues to fund it out of her own pocket. She is a remarkable woman with a deep faith and enormous energy, even though she had suffered a life-threatening illness not so many years ago. And she has been clever enough to surround herself with some quite remarkable people to help – Grace, the project administrator; Joseph, the scout leader and ex-international marathon runner; Peter, the church deacon, who leads some pretty raucous services with a good bit of ecclesiastical rhythm in his own movements.

We walked with the kids most mornings to their primary school about 4 kms away, and were joined on the way by a fair amount of the 630 pupils. The Kenyan government granted free primary school education after the last election, a magnanimous gesture but one that has proven totally impractical, as schools designed to cope with 200 have had to stretch their walls to cope with more than double that amount. Mia Moja was no exception. Class sizes were 40-50, children squeezed into desks, their writing hands the only thing they could move, and yet you could tell by just looking at their faces that they were there to learn.

A couple of observations:

• The 10-year-olds were learning exactly what our 10-year-olds would have been learning.
• They would have come to school in the first instance only speaking in their mother tongue. They would have had to learn English and Swahili in their first two years.
• They loved singing so I taught them the song ‘Michael row the boat ashore’. In explaining the song, I asked them which river Jesus was baptised in. Every hand in the class went up. I wasn’t really aiming to go on this line of questioning, but I thought I’d just seen how far I could go with it. So I asked who baptised him. The answer was immediate. What relation was John the Baptist to Jesus? They knew that as well. And they learned the song in fifteen minutes.
• Back here in Scotland, I’ve just today given a talk at the local primary school for their Book Week. I told this story to the head teacher and she said that there was no way any of her children would have known the answers to those questions. It makes one wonder a bit, doesn’t it?