Lili's trip report to MCC Kawangware, Sept 2012

This is Lili's post reporting on her trip to MCC Kawangware during September 2012. (We also hope to pull our photos together soon and get those posted. Might end up on our Facebook MCC page: "Mercy Children Centre Kawangware")

I am grateful to be able to announce that there is no drama coming out of Mercy Children’s Centre Kawangware these days. Our institutionalization process is going smoothly and all involved are behaving very professionally in order to maintain our mission.

Warning: 2-pages of philosophical and policy discussions follow:

We constantly struggle to stay within budget given the seemingly endless needs of our 200+ students and their teachers, (but anybody who has raised children understands this reality). Still the bottom line is that, thanks to your donations, our kids are doing well: they get lunch every day and they are following the Kenyan national educational curriculum while they enjoy their school community and even some enrichment programs like football, music and dance and even some craft classes.

Inflation remains high in Nairobi and the teachers are again having trouble meeting their basic cost of living from their tiny salaries but they are still devoted to caring for and educating their classes and everyone seems very happy to be part of the Mercy Centre community. Gone are any remnants of jealousy or secrecy which had gotten a bit out of hand under the guidance of our previous headmaster. Since January of 2012, the new directory John Wafula; the new financial auditor Andrew Omondi and I are diligent in our quest for transparency and team responsibility and so far this is paying off. Frequent teacher meetings where we discuss everything, even sensitive topics, have been very beneficial to a strong shared work ethic.

I just spent almost two weeks in Nairobi and I also got to visit the 8 graduated secondary school students who are staying at Green Valley Academy in Limuru (a neighboring town to Nairobi) and to talk to a couple of the other high school students. These kids are very aware of how lucky they are to get a secondary education and they are serious about working hard enough to take full advantage of their opportunity. In fact our secondary school sponsorship program is going very well despite the heavy management load it involves so that now we are up to 16 students being individually mentored and sponsored. We plan to sponsor four more students in January (the three top grades from MCCs 8th grade class and one returning 16 year old student who dropped out to have a baby in March but who is keen to repeat her Form I now that she has found someone to look after her son). These students will need individual sponsors (at a cost of roughly 50 euros a month) but we are so hopeful that together we can find them sponsors that I have already promised ‘scholarships’ to our three top students to send them to secondary boarding school. (It is worth noting that our 8th grade class amounts to about 15 kids and they all want desperately to go to high school so as long as we have Jacob Kwembo volunteering his time, care and expertise in student mentorship and sponsorship our expansion potential is only limited by donor generosity. These teenagers are lucky to have all of our attention but Jacob has proven exceptionally good at looking out for them, understanding their needs and guiding them towards personal adult responsibility.)

Mind you my rosy prognosis for the future of the Mercy Children’s Centre would seem surreal to you, if you were to visit the school. Our lunches are minimal and of dubious nutritional content, especially when you consider that for many kids this is all they eat in a day. The children don’t have any kind of health care, they wear tattered uniforms and often ill-fitting shoes and the ‘campus’ is shockingly unattractive and dirty to the western eye, but these are the everyday realities of slum dwelling in Kenya. We do not offer the best school in the world, just one that is good enough to guide these disadvantaged kids through a tough childhood towards a self-reliant, caring adulthood. It is the community and the shared sense of careful responsibility that is our greatest strength and you can’t measure that….but I can assure you that is it thriving.

Because of the changing nature of our community, we have decided to close our dormitory in April of 2013. Ironically these apartments, which were originally developed to house the most abused and neglected kids of our community have, over time, morphed into a relative prestigious residences for the lucky few children whose families have managed to get them accepted at the dorm. The three meals a day and comparatively secure living and studying arrangements offered at our dorm have led to a situation where there is strong competition among all kids to get into the dorms. We have also determined that all the dorm kids can be relocated safely. We have therefore decided to close the dorms and to spend the money instead on a healthy porridge breakfast for the whole school. This policy coincides with a realization that even AIDS orphans are generally welcomed into some kind of extended family in Nairobi so that all our kids presently have somebody who will share their very humble homes with them. We are realizing, with relief, that the term ‘AIDS orphan’ no longer carries the Oliver Twist type stigma that it did just a few years ago, and that the African tradition of ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ is still alive despite its near drowning under the tsunami of the African AIDS epidemic of the turn of the millennium.

With an AIDS infection rate leveling out at roughly 10% in Nairobi, and with ARVs becoming increasingly available, the tradition of extended family care is again able to be called into service. None of our children are fully homeless. We are proud of the community support that has always sustained Mercy Children’s Centre and I am proud to say that we haven’t destroyed it (which can happen by rendering the significant personal sacrifices called upon by the local supporter network irrelevant) with our western largess. Most Nairobi slum dwellers struggle to provide a comfortable life for their families, they are willing to work very hard to facilitate their livelihoods but they will also happily step back and let rich westerners take over the care of their hungry nieces, nephews or grandchildren if they think that is best for all. I don’t think it is – I believe these kids need their extended families, need to feel like valuable children of Kenya and need to belong to their hometown. So I am happy that we foreign donors to Mercy Children Centre haven’t trodden too heavily on the local community culture. The Mercy Centre is an indigenous community school supported by the local teachers, shop keepers, land owners and professionals. We foreigners are helping with the material support that is needed to make the whole orphan education project seem both possible and valuable to the community.

Thank you all so very much for your support.