But you can't write that in your college application

After last year's cuffuffle I'm back with BigCorporate, helping their highflyers apply for places and funding at highly selective US colleges.  We kicked it all off with a three day whistlestop tour workshop - from Who am I (and how do I describe myself), through College Choice and what matters to me, Sounding Credible, Effective Communication, Analysing Essay Questions, Brainstorming Essay Topics, and Critiquing Anonymised Excerpts from the group's essays and applications to the scheme.

It's the third applications round I've worked on the programme, the second time I've run the workshop. I feel I've got more idea where the students are coming from, and the likely mismatch in tone and topic with the US-based system. Yes I see a key bit of my role as encouraging students to reflect on who they are and what matters to them.  In particular, in encouraging highly disadvantaged students in this very stratified society to believe that their work experience hauling 20 jerrycans of water 5 kilometres to their village by hand to sell, shows them in as positive a light as their more favoured peers describing their experiences in business to business roles. That the measures they've taken to earn their school fees to keep themselves in school are so laudable - keeping twenty chickens for four years and selling the eggs daily at market after school, so piles of pennies may be hoarded and produced at the start of term. How moved I was reading about the initiation ceremony - six weeks in the arid bush with his same-age peers without food or water - for the Maasai student whose family had rated booklearning over teaching him basis survival skills. By the time his more-skilled peers taught him how to trap animals and to find water, he had got weak and dizzyheaded. But how great his sense of achievement at the end of the period, equipped with the skills - and the deep-rooted friendships - for manhood.

But as I get more confident in the culture I also seem to be taking on an assertive tone as with my own children - 'No, you can't go out dressed like that!' 
'No, that isn't a suitable essay topic for college applications.'  Or, as I've been trying to say it,
'I realise thats an important experience and it isn't a difficulty in Kenya, but there is issue x, y or z if you write that for a US audience.'

It's something you do as a careers advisor in your own culture too.  In extremis, you're meant to be the friendly intermediary, the one who takes a deep breath and tells the candidate for a mock interview that chances of success might be higher if they remove the baseball cap and stash the gum before the interview.  Who reflects back that the hawklike fierce look in the eye and the directive stabbing finger illicited by the last question might need to be toned down a little if you're to get the dream job as Father Christmas.  But it is easier at home.

One of the potential essay prompts is Evaluate a significant ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.  One student wrote about the rampant cheating at examtime at her school, and her eleventh hour decision not to participate.  I know from another Kenyan friend, a medical student, how extensive cheating is in university exams in her college. 
'You write my answer on this topic in the exam, and I'll write yours on this second one, and then we'll swap papers, so we only need to learn half the topics' explained her friend. 
Not exactly what you want in a doctor, someone who is strong on the bones of the foot but lacks specifics on any organ from the waist up.  But highlighting quite how widespread and value-neutral cheating is in some schools here - at least when its not the high school leaving exams - doesn't help the case of our applicant or of her peers.
'No, you can't write about cheating, that's an expulsion offence in the rest of the world. They want to be clear that you report academic facts as you understand them. That you are 100% ethicial on this. What if you'd done 20 years scientific research that turned out to be fruitless? They need to be clear that you'd write it up accurately, despite your disappointment, the failure and blind alleys, so that others could learn from your experience.'

Or an essay on climbing high trees to steal birds eggs.  Definitely value-neutral, even perceived as a laudable way to get protein in Kenya.  But a whiff of reckless lack of concern for feathered species in the well-fed UK/US setting I fear.  I explain about protection of rare birds, of criminal offences, of the existence of bird wardens camping out to protect certain rare nesting birds.  Reader, the class howled at me in laughter. 
'That is a job?' they said in disbelief.  For the gulf is wide.

Evaluate a significant experience and its impact on you.  No, you can't write about your religious conversion experience in this setting - though of course that would be an interesting essay to read at another time outside this process, I hasten to add.  Unless possibly if you are applying to an evangelical college.

'I'm a loner and like to hang out with people who are more successful than me so I can learn from them.' Top marks for self awareness but how do we think this comes over to the reader?  How can we focus on what you think you'd contribute to the class?

Describe yourself.  Hmmm. I understand that rhyming poems are really popular in Kenya, but Literature is an academic discipline too.  Unless you've read really widely from poets of the 20th and 21st century in English, - you understand how rhythm impacts on meaning - leave that to one side.  You know regular rhyming poems are largely confined to birthday cards now in English?  That's not really a branding you want for yourself.

Many of the students don't have a single book in their houses. There aren't public libraries. Many attended high schools with a maximum of 100 (text) books on the shelves for a thousand students.  They - their families - have never been able to afford newspapers until the start of their internships.  So they haven't had a chance to read widely in the classical canon. Possessing even one secondhand book is quite a source of pride.  'I love reading' they write. 'I love Danielle Steele and J K Rowling.'  Or they quote from John Grisham or from Jeffrey Archer as a source of wisdom in their college essay. 
'It's fine to say to me,' I say, 'but you are trying to show you are the top students and thinkers in your country.  These authors that we all enjoy reading for relaxation, they aren't respected in an academic context.' 
Better not to say anything at all here too I caution - because many of the US readers just won't understand the context here.

In Kenyan classes - as in large lecture theatres in UK inner city new universities - it's quite ok to show your utter boredom with the topic and facilitator before you.  But again, I want them to know how that comes over to the person dancing around, giving her all seeking to spark engagement with learning. I want them to understand this is a competitive process and the depth of enthusiasm you demonstrate is one of the assessment criteria.

'If you want to show yourself as engaged with learning, as academically curious, how you behave matters.'  Of a workshop of 50 highflyers only 5 brought pen and paper to a three day workshop covering complex new ground, - and because paper, pens and handouts are expensive we don't provide them either.  
'How you sit shows me alot.  So please, pick yourself up, don't lie with your head on the table. If you hold your head in your hands it suggests a lack of interest and engagement. When someone is talking you please need to listen, not to read your book, as that suggests you think you have nothing to learn from them.  All this is really going to matter if you get to interview stage.'
'Learning is an active process not a passive one. To be selected you have to be willing to express yourself, to articulate who you are, to speak up. And this is meant to be a safe place for you to practice doing that.'

Yes we came together as a group. Yes I got more accepting.  Yes though the facial expressions of many were still impassive - even fairly glum - by the end of day three, the written feedback was very positive. But for me the bit I relished was sitting as a sole non-Kenyan fly on the wall when our returning freshmen, our applicants of the initial year, now our student mentors who have finished their first years at Harvard, UPenn, Williams, and the like, spoke of what had struck them in US culture.
'There no one carries a cloth handkerchief.  We here are told it is the polite, sophisticated, thing to do. But there they all use tissues. Really!'
'I've learned different ways of behaving there. When someone tells a really lame joke, if it were here I'd give a mocking laugh. We all would.  But you can't do that there. You have to say: 'That's really funny!' Even if it isn't.  Quite, quite different.'
'The language people use. You often hear people say 'Fucking this.' 'Fuck you.' It doesn't seem to mean much. You need to get used to that.  To let it wash over you, but not use it yourself I'd say.'

'It's just amazing the opportunities.  What you can choose to do.  Having a choice, being able to pick your modules for yourself.  I could have been studying Spanish in Argentina this summer, but I decided I really wanted to come home instead.  Being surrounded by people from all kinds of backgrounds. The libraries. The resources, the books, the newspapers just lying around in the student centres.  They even have pianos in the dining halls at my college, - often people just sit down and play while we're eating.  They're really really sharp.  There's a feeling so many things are possible.'

That's what I wish them all, choices. That they may experience that many things are possible, whether they study in Kenya or abroad.  And that maybe, by learning how others outside Kenya are so impressed by the simplest details of the resilience needed to succeed in this harsh environment, that they may come to value themselves for it too.

Career Guidance & the Bits I Don't Say

Many of my mid-life expat career guidance clients have had very negative experiences with career guidance - 'career advice' as it was in the 1970s and 1980s.  Computer programmes, tick boxes and prescriptive answers which didn't fit.
'Things have moved on since then' I say,
'Now we're about a space to address what you want to.  A one-off to practise for an interview - or a place for you to reflect, to download, to debrief. To hear yourself without being judged. To polish your words on what you offer. To maybe see your life at work from a different angle, to ask yourself different questions, to see your experiences and expectations afresh. To plan a path forward which is effective and feels right for you.'

Career guidance is secular. And it matters that it is, that I don't foist the bits which nourish me on the deeply held, different truths & experiences of others.  But in this land where the working lives of many are deeply insecure, deeply unprotected, deeply oppressive, some of my clients have a great deal to struggle with.  Plodding on still seeking work after seven years unemployment, when the extended family depends on you finding work, and there is no social security. Or moving on from a job, where you've been working alongside the most precarious in this society, a job which has taken your all, so you no longer see who you are, or what you offer in this world.  Or the pressures that you place on yourself when good grades, a small toehold of a job, are the way out of the tin hut in the slum, shared with the alcoholic father who drinks what little money there is & who terrorises the family.  The support and listening they need is different from that of the vast majority of my student clients in SmallTownUK. And there aren't other peers, other guidance professionals here, to swap notes on how to do this best in an African context.

Sometimes it reminds me of the not-knowing-a-way-forward I felt as a 19 year old working on a ward of a German hospital. An internship I'd found to improve my language skills and because I didn't want to be an au pair. But I was placed on the cancer ward, and so my first extended stay abroad was alongside others who were scared, were dying, were in pain and sometimes were isolated, overlooked by families who were too scared to be with them.

I'm grateful I've found an experienced supervisor to help me adapt my practice to the needs here. I'm putting more limits on what I offer and on what I expect.  But I feel it matters to be present alongside what my clients describe. They deserve more than glib answers, prerehearsed tactics which hold true elsewhere, but not here.  What are the bits I hold to be true for me, whether I say them at work or not? 

For many career guidance is about logic, about clearcut paths to the next job. That's great if that's what you want. I support that too. But which are the poems which are too quirkily off-beat to place on my professional website - but which for me are part of this work too, if they speak to you?  Where am I amidst all this?  Yes lots of my clients are getting jobs, good jobs. But how do I define what I am doing for those who don't, who maybe won't ever in this society, what do I trust that this service maybe offers them at this stage?  What are the bits I want to say to myself, but it wouldn't be appropriate to say to my clients?

'[...] This working implies an engagement which allows the [client] to experience levels of interest, sympathy, intimacy and rich conversation which are profoundly nourishing in themselves and do not require an end product to validate them.'
Clarion

'My ministry is about listening, affirming, encouraging and supporting (..) This is a ploughing ministry, an attempt to help turn the soil, so that God's seeds waiting within can sprout & grow in each of us.'
Michael Wajda

'Trust the story that you are in... Trust that there is also great freedom to grow in this stage of your story and that it will nurture what is to come next.'
Nancy Bieber

'Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun & the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes, over the praires & the deep trees, the mountains & the rivers
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean, blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely
the world offers itself to your imagination,
Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting
Over and over announcing your place in the family of things.'
Mary Oliver

'It is not a place that claims to have all the answers but one which rather encourages questions.'
B P Dandelion

'True faith is not assurance, but the readiness to go forward experimentally, without assurance. It is a sensitivity to things not yet known...'

Underappreciated Music Teachers of the World, thank you

Supporting a child through the early stages of learning an instrument ain't fun. Even at the intermediate stages. There's chasing them to practice. Sitting impassive through painful renditions. Hovering strategically, reminding them to practice the tricky bits not just the easy bits. Ferrying to and fro. Sitting in dark carparks waiting for them to finish the lesson or the ensemble or the orchestra. Forking out for the lessons. Sitting through long, long teatime concerts of them and their peers at a still fairly basic level.  And then, one day, sunshine breaks through!

With Firstborn there were special moments of helping her with viola practice, playing in harmony together in the early morning. Special moments, it became clear, which only I appreciated. As we were moving to Kenya the viola mysteriously appeared on the pile to be listed and sold on ebay.
'Pleeeeeease can't I give it up and just do the flute.'
Downcast mother. Oh well then.

But as she's moved up the school, the music concerts given by her year have become more pleasurable. Even far more pleasurable. And last night's one, given by their prep school and the successor high school, was truly enjoyable. An ethereal Kenyan boy soprano, solidly robust in statute, angelic voice. Watching sixteen and seventeen year individual singers, who have found the right song for them, who are so supremely themselves as they perform, who have found a platform to be themselves at their peak, to engage the audience in their interpretation.  Immensely moving.  As different in nature as slogging away at scales 'to pass grade two' as it can be.

These school concerts feel a little like time-series nature photography.  I remember these stars from last year. Engaging, confident, competent, but a tad more diffident then.  And now, wow, what a difference a year makes. What a difference these young people will make, whether as singers or elsewhere in the world.  I'll remember them. I relish being there to take pride in their success.

'Voice' is one of the big topics in NaNoWriMo, - National Novel Writing Month. Keeping on writing at that draft novel to find your voice, that tone and insight which is profoundly you.  It's also at the heart of career guidance for me. What the practitioner catches from the client's words, and reflects back to them, so the client hears it maybe for the first time at a deeper level and gains a deeper insight on themselves and their uniqueness.  And, I hadn't realised it till yesterday, at its best, its profoundly at the heart of music teaching too.  Helping a pupil find the right piece, the right song, the right technique which catches, embodies, magnifies where they are at. Conveys it to others. Creative, will of the wisp work.  Beautiful. Potentially life changing.
Thank you music teachers of the world. I'd guess many are caught in a cage of half hour lessons and grade one scales: 'Don't forget the F sharp', - as many of we careers advisors are caught in servitude of CV checks and duty appointments.  But sometimes the sun shines through.

'To listen another's soul to the condition of disclosure & discovery may be almost the greatest service a person can perform for another.'
Douglas Steer



  

Honesty and Integrity

Yesterday we returned two days early from our Easter break. After a marvellous two days in Meru National Park, where we'd spotted three cheetahs (a mum and two cubs), a jackal, and a lioness, we'd decided nothing in our drizzly second stopoff could match this, and returned to our own beds and home comforts.   Just as well as it turned out, for unpacking the car at home we discovered we'd left the tent poles behind...  Suspicious minds might suspect sabotage from the less-camping enthusiastic parts of the family, but lets not go there now.

SecondBorn rushed out to chat to the guineapigs, to assure them of our continued affection. They were hungry, with no food nor water in their bowls, despite the generous provisions left with the guards on our departure. I asked for the remaining food back. One solitary carrot and some dry pellets were produced, from what should have been several apples and some seven or eight carrots, enough for two guineapigs for another two days. One of our trusted guards must have taken the guineapig provisions home to eat or sell.

I can understand the impulse, particularly if he feels his own children wouldn't mind an apple or two.  The price of food has risen massively recently.  Guards aren't well paid, though ours get added benefits including a food allowance. But this food was given for the guineapigs, who can't get out of the cage to get their own. It was given in trust, for the animals. I understand the impulse, even the belief that animals matter less than humans, but its stealing to act on it. It makes me furious. As I said in my subsequent pep talk, we try to treat staff well, as family, and you don't steal from your family, particularly if you're a guard.  I can understand all the factors, but it rankles disproportionately. It's about trust not carrots.

I've been told recently of two others in my life, whom I like and trusted, who've taken far bigger missteps from positions of greater power than the above. Staying honest is far more difficult when you need more now, or feel your current affluence is transitory, or feel you deserve something which you haven't been given.  When you don't believe anyone notices that you are in need anyway. The gap in income distribution between the small minority of the rich, and the significant majority of the poor, is massive in Kenya, one of the most unequal countries in the world.  I read last week that I think 57% of Kenyans surveyed have had to cut back on meals at least once in the last year, have been unable to afford the most basic foodstuffs for three daily meals. Again it puts the missing carrots in a different perspective.

And we all like stories with happy endings, a strong narrative arc. I read the Kenyan papers most days, and yes, while many of the items describe the pressures of poverty or mental illness - the father who killed his son with a panga, the mother identified as a witch, the man sentenced to two years hard labour for stealing 4500 KSh (£40) - the in-depth feature attention of the broadsheet journalists, and the readers, focuses on the good luck stories, rags to riches. The student who did well in exams, the internally displaced woman who was lent 130 ksh, (£1.20) as a business start up loan and set up her own chappati making business, which is now thriving.  I'm guilty too. We all want to hear the good news and successes, not the pains, underhand deals and difficulties on the way. Certainly not the stories of those - the vast majority - for whom there are very few silver linings to their clouds, who are stuck, still stuck, maybe ever stuck, in a morass of poverty, unpalatable choices, opportunities blocked. We focus attention, as the Germans put it, on the parsley sprinkled on the top of the potatoes, not on the experiences of the vast majority, the potatoes.  So then there's a great pressure I think, to spin a good yarn, even if its not true, to put yourself on the side of the parsley not the side of the potatoes.  And the more we all focus attention on the good luck stories, fictional, airbrushed or not, the more it estranges the majority from their own day to day experiences, their lived reality.

Don Helder Camera, a Brazilian bishop noted: 'When I give bread to the poor, people call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.'  Newspapers, - costing 40 KSh/day, - a family daily income for many in the slums - are by their nature, bought by the affluent.  It's not good business, I'd guess, to startle the horses too much with your analysis.  But I can't help thinking these rags to riches stories perform the function of the lottery in UK, - offer something to dream about, tangible proof that there is a way out of the current day difficulties (for a tiny minority), a sop for the masses, fairydust in February.

Working on student employability in UK I used to segment the 'market'.  Eager beaver students, high performers, sussed, already in action, they'll get jobs anyway. Fun to work with, engaging, great case studies, yes you can help them to up their game, but infact, working with them won't impact on your indicators, they'll find work on their own. Focus attention more on the tail, the reluctant learners, those who struggle, and by helping them achieve what employers need you can make a significant difference, to them and to their life chances.  Here in Kenya, though I advocate for equality of access to our services, the decisions are different.  If you can only work with a few then you work with 'the best'.  There are so many from whom we are already averting our gaze, we focus on those capable of getting our attention, who spin a good line. Like a mother with more children than she can cope with we give up on hopes of equality of opportunity, support to all who need it in measure with their needs, to offer support just to those who push themselves forward.  Where in UK employability work might mean working with those with a youthful conviction for a drug offence, to help with disclosure and telling their story, here my Kenyan colleagues are less forgiving. One strike and you're out. Youthful experimentation and you're out. There are so many we have already chosen not to help, if you misstep, you're out too.

But for me there's more to careers work than helping people get the job, than helping them access the elite university. Here, where so many have had so little parental attention, I am truly discovering the importance of helping people feel centre stage in their lives. Helping them reflect on who they are as an individual and the context in which they grew up. Which are their life stories, their values, the episodes which have made them who they are?  An awareness that might nourish them through their lives. And this matters for all, matters even more for those who maybe won't bask in society's praise, for the reluctant learners, though of course, what they want is help to get a job. 

Telling bedtime stories is one of my favourite bits of motherhood.  When the children were younger, what they loved were stories of When Mummy was a Little Girl (and naughty), and stories from their own salad days, - accounts of the time when Firstborn would play at trains in cardboard boxes with all her stuffed animals behind her, when SecondBorn would make dens from sheets, from throws, from anything, and would sit besheeted, beneath the washing line or between the beanpoles in the garden for hours on end.  Ok, not deeply significant stories maybe, but proof that someone had been watching them.  Caring and treasuring them. Remembering. Proof that what they do and did and how they did it, was significant, mattered, made a difference in the world. 

As a careers advisor here I've found myself drawing on different stories from my past. It's a contentious issue in career guidance, disclosing issues from your own past. The focus is meant to stay entirely on the client.  You really don't want to play the role of the old buffer who never stops telling stories from her own experience, completely alien to the client, distorting the structure of the interview. But I think, here, where my clients have so little access to people with degrees, to foreigners from outside, its acceptable in restrained moderation.   And I find that the stories that I'm disclosing are those painful bits from my past, AntiHero Catrin. In particular my failures. When discussing university application strategies and success rates with individuals, spelling out that 8% success rates mean that 92 highflyers out of a hundred didn't get in to Cornell last year, the client nods dispassionately. Thought bubble, this won't mean me.  But then out pops my story - how I too had been a good student, but how despite that, despite wanting it badly, I didn't get in to Oxford University, and how I cried for three days on hearing the decision.  That its their decision to apply only for highly competitive colleges, but to be aware this is a risky strategy, and here I am, with a good life, but an example that in competitive processes we don't always get what we may feel we deserve.  Look of stunned silence on student face.  Of course, growing up in Kenya, of course they know we don't always get what we want or might deserve.  What I think stunned, repeatedly, was someone in power disclosing her failures. Where she fell short of her ambitions.  A story which tells of a different reality to rags to riches and magic wands, - of fallbacks, contingencies, stepping stones, pick yourself up, dust yourself down, snort loudly into the disintegrating tissue and on we go.

For some students it's a revelation that in the eyes of others, outside, to have stayed honest, to have performed well, when you grew up in a rural village where most people were illiterate, and you went to a less-favoured regional school without many books or any computers, this is a major achievement.  It's reframing what success means, to something personal. With the cards that you have been dealt, your life has been a major success. You can be truly proud. Don't look at those more fortunate and judge yourself by their glittering prizes, what you have done, with your cards, is significant success.  It's about being there, being present in your life and choices. And about analysis too. About asking why the poor have no bread, why your regional school has no books. About analysing and questioning society's views of success and how it represents them, and about speaking up on our stories, our missteps, saying sorry, putting right, acknowledging painful realities, making it possible for others to speak of their pains.

Quakers believe that all of life is sacramental, that each moment of each day is God-given. While I can believe that for my own, mostly fortunate, life, I have difficulties with that testimony here, where so many have such difficult lives and choices.  I wouldn't want to say it to others, less fortunate.  But what it does mean for me is that it matters that we tell our difficult stories and struggles, at the right time, if it feels appropriate.  That we don't airbrush out the less palatable hard parts, that it isn't just the highs, the successes, the sunny uplands of which we should tell, but also the dilemmas, the griefs, the absent fathers, the university rejections, the jobs we just couldn't hack, the tussles with children, the unsalubrious jobs in credit control and cleaning student flats of maggots, the, at times, frantic paddling beneath the water.  I think of my friend here who sometimes works as a prostitute to meet her children's school fees.  If this is her reality it matters that she has someone with whom to share it. Someone who's willing to listen on equal terms, not as a social worker, but as a friend who's had unpalatable choices too, though not of this magnitude.  We're not peddling snake ointment and myths here, we're sharing life experiences, and we're making sure we're leaving in some of our key learning points, the authentic bits of the recipe which might really make a difference for others, even if they don't always show us in our best light. 

Starring Centre Stage

Applicants to American colleges persevere through a laborious application process. First come the SAT 1 tests, centrally marked multiple choice assessments of critical reading, maths and writing skills. Then SAT 2, subject specific tests. Then the forms, lists of courses taken in termly breakdown, extra curricular activities & levels achieved, athletic prowess and coaches' attestations, that Little Catrin can indeed run a 3 minute mile.  But central to it all are several essays on topics of your choice.  They are, the guidance says, seeking to 'personalise the form, to offer a window on who you are'.  500 word autobiographical vignettes on you at your best.

At first reading the prompt questions look anodyne enough. 'Write describing a person who had influenced you, and describing the influence they have had.'  'Write describing a life changing experience or an ethical dilemma you have faced.'  But this is a tricky act to pull off.  Typically, I'm told, these essays aren't the product of a sole author. An American friend who studied at Harvard and went to an elite high school, noted that she had six adults, two of them Harvard graduates, critiquing her college application essays. 

I always advise clients to imagine the competition. So in this case, imagine WellGroomedHighFlyer, daughter of two Ivy League grads, now lawyers both, from suburban town USA.  What will she be writing on, - on the life changing time with her exchange family in Mexico?  Her prowess and experiences in the first violins of elite national youth orchestra?  Which are the welltrodden topics the assessors will be blenching at reading yet again?  Now think what you would be contributing in different experience on a US campus. Which experiences express the heart of it for you?

And face to face, one to one, the Kenyan students seem to get it.  I've had such moving conversations these last few days, as students sift through their lives, and identify who they are and what has made a difference for them.  The student from Dandora, where the community lives on Nairobi's rubbish and toxic waste dump, who only got to high school thanks to a chance Irish sponsor. She spoke of the experience of growing up in a slum. Of sewage running down the streets, which, when it rains, reaches your home.  Of 15 families sharing their toilet. Of her peers with little to live for, now enmeshed in drugs, but how they turn ashamed from her, when they are on a high, wishing they too could have a sense of a future.

Another girl, an elected peer mentor at high school.  The government introduced guidance and mentoring initiatives a few years ago after riots in high schools.  She spoke of the stresses her peers brought to her, - money problems, homesickness, worry about siblings left in unstable situations at home, talk of suicide.  'Suicide, really, how often was that mentionned though?'  In her two years as a peer mentor there had been several suicide atttempts by girls in her year, and over ten students had discussed feelings of this magnitude with her.

The pressures of poverty run through almost every story.  Around a third of the students have described domestic violence and alcoholism. I'd say over half have lost a parent.  One lad describes losing both parents by the time he was eleven, and how he and his younger siblings set up house alone, until a member of his church came to bring them into his home at the height of the post-election violence. Living on a knife edge.  One lad's story hinges around his father breaking his leg.

'I didn't really understand why this was so important?'
'Because he was the breadwinnner. With a broken leg he can't earn. So we couldn't buy food, and we had to leave school.' 
Another girl speaks of how she, brought up by her single mum, has learnt to juggle the family finances.  From age 8, she, and her younger brother, would take Thursdays off school each week. They would go to the weekly market, where they would hawk paper bags to the shoppers.
'You split up to maximise sales. But it means you are more likely to be harrassed by the shoppers who will think we are streetchildren.' 
Again, I'm counselling against stories at full strength. This isn't Oprah.  We're not going for the Pity Card. You are highly qualified applicants who are applying as equals. Identify the heart of your story and focus on that.  But nonetheless.

But many others seem to lack confidence in the weight of their own experience. Have maybe never basked in the reflecting glow of a parent's eyes. Lack insight into how different things are elsewhere, and how laudable their survival, and survival with spirit and honour truly is.  Reading one lad's first draft of his experiences at athletics training camp, I plough through to page three, when he mentions that this was a pre-Olympic training camp.

'Really? Are you THAT good?' 

'Well no, no, its not true. I just thought it was more interesting like this.' 

Another writes of being presented with a (fictional) honour by the elders of her tribe, when authentic articulation of the person she is, is what is called for.  I really see its difficult for any teenager.  It's harder still between cultures. But in guidance theory, this is the fantasy stage, before a grounded sense of individual identity has been won through trial and feedback. 

British Quakers pose Advices and Queries which are read out loud in Meeting for Worship each week, for each worshipper to reflect on, privately, in their own lives.  

'Seek to know one another in the things which are eternal. [..] Remember that each one of us is unique, precious, a child of God.'

Yes, where we can, it would be good to support successful college applications, and this is the key, lifechanging objective for our students.  But more important for me, I'm coming to see, is this insight at the heart of the US applications process, that each individual is unique and precious, that each has a valued story to tell which deserves a hearing.  It's a privilege to be present, as some realise what their story, or what today's story, is, and the great deal they have to be proud of.

Guidance without Safety Nets

Two days into a part time job with Big Corporate, supporting high flying Kenyan students apply to universities in the States, and reflecting on how careers guidance is different here.


- there aren't publications to refer onto. No 'Now pick up a guide on CV writing and another on networking and don't come back till you've read them.'  We have one reference publication on US colleges, picked up by a colleague in Singapore airport. That's all.

- there aren't colleagues to refer onto either. No 'Now thats a tricky query, let me check with my colleague who specialises in that area.'  No other careers advisors in the whole country. Or not that I've yet met. We have a sparky team of Kenyans who themselves went to Ivy League colleges, - but its very different knowing what you yourself might write, and supporting another to hone their story.

- our clients are spread all over the country - we'd have to be very opportunistic to see them face to face - and most people can't afford access to the internet - at Big Corporate it's restricted to managers only - so information on the web is barely accessible.  We have one phone in our office, shared between four.

- the right to education, seamless transition, the European conveyer belt progression from one educational stage to the next, is not something to be taken for granted here.  One of the highflyers - top A level results in his district -  only got to progress to secondary school, which is always fee paying, by queuing and making representations to the District Education Officer, who personally underwrote his fees in an act of charity.  Others got top results despite school records which make it clear they missed terms here, and sat out years there, because family finances were going to get the older sibling through secondary school first.  Still others have references which show they taught all the classes to their peers a year below them for two terms, due to teacher absence.  What happened to their own classes while they were teaching others?

- Where middleranking UK universities might see outreach work as seeking out young people who are the first generation in university in their family, here this is an almost certainty. One lad writes of growing up in a village of mainly illiterate villagers.  Another of overcoming childhood kwashlikor, caused by malnutrition. A third of working as a street hawker to raise money for his siblings' school fees. One writes of growing up in a polygamous family, one of 27 children, with very little parental attention.

And yet, I'm seeing, in many ways, the job IS much the same - helping people identify and articulate what matters to them, who they are and have faith that this is acceptable. Helping them identify what they could contribute in a new setting, and how to communicate it convincingly.  Nurturing confidence in a setting where the pitfalls can be devastating.  Helping manage expectations and broaching fallback plans. But without the safety nets of 'This is the assumed knowledge'. 'This is how we do things here.' Just listening, responding, and reflecting back, - invaluable where many have had very little access to personal attention.  Trusting in the process. Trusting that supporting people to consider how they can get their questions answered from their own resources, help them imagine alternative scenarios and visions, and how they might feel in them, helping them learn to ask better questions for their lives, IS of use in this country where there are few safety nets and only handfuls have the security of trial runs.