Mercy Children's Centre, Kenya: 2009 Year in Review

By Lili and Lew Fulton

Dear all,

Although we Fultons haven't been to Nairobi since March we have been in good touch with Charles and Pius. I figure now is a good time to update y'all about how we are doing at the Mercy Children's Centre.

Thanks to donations from many people, with especially important contributions from Carol Bohnenkamp and Acton Presbyterian Church, we are managing to maintain our operating budget of 2000 dollars per month and have been able to feed the kids and pay the teachers for another academic year. This is no minor undertaking and we are proud of ourselves and very grateful to you! I have to remind myself that each day spent in a safe school is a major accomplishment in the lives of our kids and even our teachers. Though we also have to remember that we give each teacher only 45 dollars a month to live on. And, of course, they are allowed to eat lunch with the kids (which, given the rising price of food, these days all too often only consists of rice or corn meal).

(As a side note: you can rent a room in the slums of Nairobi for as little as $15 a month so we hope $45 is a living salary. On the other hand, just to illuminate the disparity in life in Nairobi -- our modestly appointed by very well placed house cost us $1500 a month to rent when we lived there. And Sadie couldn't find a safe place to live for less than 700 a month when she went back to visit. That is because we wouldn't let her live in the slums -- these people are living at a comfort and security level that we really couldn't accept).

Meanwhile, in Bumala some great things are happening thanks to efforts by Charles, Pius, the teachers tehre - and also to One Child's Village (especially Todd Lorentz and Cristelle Audet). They have led fundraising efforts and funded an expansion of the campus out there. They have bought another 3 acres of land adjacent to the school (so we now have 5 acres in total for growing food), built a volunteer guest house/dormitory, two additional classrooms, a computer room with 6 computers and Internet, a sewing room with 3 sewing machines.

One Child's Village has also invested in major capital improvements, including better kitchen facilities and a 12-hole latrine out in Bumala. Finally the campus is even getting electricity installed throughout the entire complex. It is an amazing advance in this region to have electricity in our school so that now we can have computer classes and maybe even a movie night. (That bit was funded by a grant from FAWCO). But since their money has been completely earmarked for capital investments, our monthly operating costs remain funded out of the $2000 per month mentioned above. For more on their projets and vouter program You Can check out www.onechildsvillage.org.

In the long run we hope to move all our students from Kawangware to Bumala because the countryside setting offers a much healthier environment to grow up in. We are hesitant to make the jump however on the grounds that in Kawangware most of the students have extended family who are helping to raise them. Almost everybody would be very happy to send their children off to a boarding school up country largely for the obvious reason that this would cut out their costs in helping with the children's daily needs. The families of the kids would be more than happy to trust the Mercy Centre to take over full financial responsibility of their nieces, baby brothers or cousins. But for us the financial commitments to making this move would be large and irreversible -- once we take full care of the more nearly 300 kids full time they will truly be our wards. So in the meantime we are continuing to operate the school and pay rent in the slum (including for 25 of our students' accommodations) because it is working and for now that is all we can afford.

So for the short run while One Child's Village is making major capital improvements in Bumala we are experiencing added costs in Kawangware. The new baby classes keep coming in as our original kids grow up. Charles and Pius have been told that they cannot bring in every underpriviledged child they meet in the slum and it is very hard for them to keep the class sizes down to a manageable size. Logically, there will always remain this tension between providing a solid education and healthy childhood to the relatively lucky few who are adopted into our school or spreading our money more thinly to a larger clientele who we ultimately can't afford to keep. Don't forget that Kenya has 1.5 million orphans and no government programs for them.

Back in the states we have established another website and a charity entity which allows tax free donations to the ‘Friends of the Mercy Children’s Centre’ out of Piedmont California. Check it out at www.friendsmcc.org

Finally, while Charles and Pius feel a strong pressure to expand to more little kids Lili can't stomach the idea of letting the big kids graduate and head out into their wide world without our help. We have an 8th grade graduating class this December of 7 students. We paid their way to another charity based private school for the last two years, and they are sitting their exams now. They are roughly 14 years old and will get the Kenya primary school certificate if they pass their exams. To send them to secondary school will be very expensive, and to not send them to secondary school will be very hard.

Then next year's class of 8th graders amounts to about 15 kids and each younger class grows proportionally. The future is frankly far from settled. We are working on several different fund raising schemes but it is quite a challenge to keep up with our rising costs. Clearly we have already bitten off a very big project here and we need all the help we can get in chewing it.

So thank you in advance for any donations, or even fundraising ideas or leads you can help us with. Remember every last cent of the money that is sent to Friends of the Mercy Children's Centre is spent directly on the children.

Donations can be made directly via paypal on www.mccentre.org or sent by completely tax deductible check to Friends of the Mercy Centre, 172 Wildwood Ave, Piedmont CA 94610.