PTA Difference

Today was the meeting of the school Parent Teacher Association where we decided which charities we'd be allocating money to this year. And as we each presented the projects from our year group's charities, the difference in material circumstances between UK normality & Kenya became so visible.

The children's home 5 minutes down the road, visited by my mate K today. It's the dry season, and their well is exhausted. They are spending money they would have used for food to buy water at present.  Please could we help deepen their well?

The project run by a mum at the school, an eye doctor, to offer eye tests to 200 Nairobi streetchildren, and then provide probably up to 25% with glasses, made from frames/lenses donated by the school and community.

The local school opposite the children's school.  540 primary aged children and 7 teachers, two of whom are the Head and her Deputy. A third of the children are orphans.  We pass these children coming to school and walking home each day.  We exchange greetings, but our lives are so different.  I remember once opening the boot to our car as a group of tots walked past. I'd just done a grocery shop, not much, two carrier bags full of vegetables.  Carrots, potatoes, onions, bananas - locally grown vegetables - overflowing.  The children crowded round, open mouthed. 'Look, look, look.  Look at all the food she's got there.'  Beyond their wildest imaginings that one person, one family, could buy that much food at one time, could have enough surplus in the kitty to buy more than they need for one day.   Chastening.  Last year our school changed the uniform and some mums delivered cast-off uniforms and outgrown shoes to them.  Today they reported back on the looks of pure delight on the faces of those children - orphans first, then the rest - who received a new hand-me-down set of clothes.  We're planning a welly boot and umbrella collection for them before the rainy season.

Kamili, the mental health outreach charity, set up by a mate and fellow school mum.  Mental health is nowhere near the top of the government's health priorities, yet the need is dire.  Some clients walk from Lake Victoria, some 150 miles away, for the monthly clinic and medication.  The story of one woman, both of whose brothers were schizophrenic. Untreated schizophrenics before the advent of Kamili, wearing her down, regularly throwing hard-earned food and clothes into the cesspit.  And now, one year on, how her brothers, with access to medication, can dig the shamba, even earn some money.  And how the woman herself has blossomed in relief.

A second children's home, with which SecondBorn's class was twinned last year.  A group of us had given money each month to help meet the food bill. A Friend from our Quaker meeting in UK had sent them £60, which had paid for chemotherapy for a child with cancer.  Their dilemma then, how could they take the money meant for food for all to pay for medical treatment for one?  The home sent their apologies today. They hadn't managed to put together a project plan yet, they were knocked for six that the child who had had cancer is ailing again.  Oh, the dreadful hand to mouthness of it all.

Even the KSPCA has more serious issues here. Yes, we'll be funding food and shelter for 10 stray dogs for a month. But why does it matter here? Not just because life as a stray dog is no fun for the dog, but also because scavenging dogs spread disease. The stray dogs in Ongata Rongai, 30 minutes drive away on Nairobi's outskirts, have rabies. And scavenging dogs, whether rabid or not, are more likely to bite passing children, spreading other diseases too.

And the hard choices. We, a wealthy school, are in many cases the lender of last resort, the national clearing bank which could underwrite a major project.  Is it better to fund one hearing aid for a profoundly deaf child, so that they can go to school, or with the same money, to fund glasses for 50 streetchildren?  Who else would fund the hearing aid? Yet think of the benefit for 50 children.

So, if we have children, if our children are clothed, fed, have access to water, have a parent alive; if they have the glasses they need, or access to healthcare when in distress, well then, by the standards of the majority of the world, we have everything to be grateful for, and much that we owe to others less fortunate.

Dreaming Spires & Sweaty Fantasies

Educational choices have dominated many chats with mates over the last eight years. Before the kids were at pre-school, we agonised together about primary schools, who got in where, and weighed up how many of the similar-sized kids on the playground would live closer to PrimeChoicesOne, Two & Three.  Then came the long slow burn to secondary school. Faith school, closest comprehensive, exercising furtherflung choice, running the risk of falling short and getting SinkSchool, single sex lottery, or the high wire exams and auditions to PreDreamingSpires?  But then we dodged the secondary bullet by leaving UK at the end of year 5, for the land of prep schools (ages 7-13), and a heady year of naive bliss.

Uh oh, but now, part way through year 7, when UK mates are leaning back, feet under - or even on the table, here, brows are ever more furrowed, conversations heated, and we're back into the fray. And here the dilemmas are more complex still: stay with British curriculum (work towards GCSEs to make transfer back to UK easier, continuation of lots of sports, but either 90 minute commutes each way plus a very long day or weekly boarding); switch to the international school (close, well resourced, but on American system till International Bacc, so no pre-GCSE preparation, and no chance to strut those hockey skills so honed over the last year. American accents and misspellings. And completely completely different holidays, so in the summer ChildOne would be off from Labour Day till mid August and ChildTwo from end July till mid September). Or, Apocalypse Now, out from the nest, boarding in another country - South Africa, UK.

Each camp has its advocates and groupies. And there, like a pinball between them all, I bounce, bewildered by the terrifying implications, which go beyond the colour of the uniform and what-did-you-think-of-the-Head? to our babe-in-arms having compulsory Monday-Friday sleepovers each week.

Get a grip, I thought. Get school visiting again. Why not start smallscale and scope the issues with a talk on Boarding School: the UK perspective run by a visiting marketing director from UK public school at a nearby hotel? We KNOW we're all staying in the same country, so it won't startle the horses in the way the more realistic options might.

But at the posher end of the market choosing a secondary school can become a Lifestyle Choice for Parents, the stuff of glossy magazines and unlived aspirations. Kick off: sushi and smart canapes by the lit swimming pool of DesignerHotel. And I grew spellbound by the pitch and the opportunities. Not that this had been the stuff of my dreams, nor those of FirstBorn: 'we have two shooting ranges, one for claypigeons, one for rifles'... How much can termly extras run to? 'Well, it all depends. Some children bring their own horses, so of course the additional charge of livery on site can be considerable.' But wow, 20 music ensembles. 26 pupils competing at national level in a sport. Truly personalised teaching: a semi-pro icehockey star who is shipped all round the country for his matches and has his timetable fitted around his availability. Stellar exam results for a student body that doesn't take entrance exams. Whopping fees of course. And children leaving home at 13 to spend those weekends when the school is closed with for-profit guardians.  But a pandora's box of a pitch, which opened my mind to lurid never-before-dreamed-dreams of an addled & dangerous kind.

Next morning at work, our highflying students present themselves en masse. They've come to Nairobi from all over the country for the first of their two SAT tests. They've each come top in their district in the Kenyan exams, but high SAT scores would increase their chances of a scholarship to a US university.  Where US students would have been doing practice tests over the last two years, where schools hire SAT coaches and send students on summer workshops to improve scores, many of ours have pushed the boat out to club together in threes to buy one practice manual. Tensions are high. You have to mark your SAT paper with the colleges to which you want your results sent.  It costs 800 KSh - around £6 to add each extra name after the test - a sizeable amount for the students, so in reality today is the last day to change their choices. But without access to internet, reference guides, prospectuses or guidance, for most, today is the first chance they've had to discuss their choices, and the realism of their choices with anyone.

70 students, 5 networked computers, one with access to a printer, some statistical handouts we'd compiled and 3 reference guides, one from 2000 and two I bought on amazon and shipped in from abroad.  Half an hour on the computer per student to research a bit further. The students attended workshops we ran in the summer, where Kenya's Harvard grads spoke of their experiences, and so we fear a massive spike in applications to Harvard. Last year they accepted 4 Kenyan applicants. What if we can't persuade a spread of applications to maximise success for all?  What about fallback choices?  If it's all a punt in the dark anyway, why not go with four dream scenarios, - Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Cornell - the so-called Ring of Death option, who take 1 in 10 applicants. Or do you dare to break away from the crowd, wildly enhance your chances of entry, but possibly end up as one of 5 international students at a small college in the Mid West?  How would YOU go about prioritising universities in a foreign country in a few pressurised hours?

'Sweaty' is the word used by US admissions tutors for applications with too desperate a yearning tone. And the day was a sweaty, though a very moving, one. A day to seek to manage expectations. To remind students that whatever happens now, study abroad could remain an option for later, for postgraduate level. Telling students, seemingly for the first time, how much they have to be proud of. Yes, for their exam success, but more that they achieved them from a low-rated, low-resourced district school. To encourage them that their time as a peer counsellor working with other students with HIV is an application essay well worth writing. The student who kept chickens and ran a market stall selling his eggs after school to pay his secondary school fees. Students speaking of how their teachers were scared and reluctant to write them references, fearing that they wouldn't be able to do it well enough, that admissions tutors in the US would laugh at them. We'll be phoning reluctant referees next week to talk them through the process. Coaching applicants through the hidden heffalump traps of the questions. How 'why do you want to go to Yale? means 'Why (that isn't cliched) and what do you offer to us?' 

Its the stuff of dreams. Will we get Cinderella to the ball?  Our students are brilliant, determined in a way very few in the UK need to be, committed, and such impressive individuals. But the forms require sophistication, polish, and an ability to package your story. Here's hoping that native wit, determination and the best possible try with the resources you have might just win through for a few.

Happy furry animals

One week on since the launch of Operation Menagerie. Looking back, the relatively smallscale introduction of two guinea pigs and two chickens have meant considerably more challenges in Kenya than they might have in UK.

First source your animals.

The few petshops here have fish and hamsters. Street hawkers wander up and down with rabbits and puppies. I've been scanning notice boards for at least six months for a trail to a chicken, guinea pigs, or, in a dream scenario, a guineafowl or two. Like much in Kenya, it turns out to be much about who you know.

I asked our friendly butcher to check with his chicken suppliers whether they could save two hens from the chop. I enquired at the local egg shop and asked them to pass on a message. I followed a wild goose chase to the densely packed business district, where a friend of a friend maintained hawkers sold chickens. One friend had bought them from a man who ran a battery farm in his back garden, but that didn't sound like a happy start to life. Another's home help had bought them in her village and transported them 5 hours by matatu - but she wasn't going home for a while and it seemed a very big ask.

In the end entrepreneurial endeavour won out. I suggested to the chicken coop seller by the side of the road that she'd massively expand her market if she supplied chickens too. 'When would you like them by, tomorrow?' So her father, who makes the chicken coops in a village outside Nairobi, travelled in by matatu with the newly erected coop and two soon-to-be-resident protesting chickens in a box under his seat. They had red combs - don't say they're trying to palm off two cockerels on me - but I did negotiate sale or return if they turned out to be male & non-egg-laying.

Action Guinea Pig was kickstarted by a friend texting me a number from a noticeboard. A delightful Swedish woman was offering as many guineapigs as we wanted, free to a good home. Unusual for Nairobi, I thought. When we rolled up on Saturday morning I realised I'd misunderstood the scale of her plight. Having started with two guinea pigs as pets for her daughter three years ago she'd been unable to get them accurately sexed, and they'd proliferated. Three years on, having supplied most of Nairobi's expats, she still had fifty guinea pigs, now in a walk-in run in their garden, linked to a second run in their garage by a Heath Robinson plastic pipe. 'We keep the sexes separate' she said, as a boy jumped over the chicken wire to the girls, and back again. 'But we can't be held responsible if it turns out that the one you take is pregnant.' A nod is as good as a wink, we chose males. A friend who was another grateful recipient from the same source took girls home, for one to give birth the very next day!

Then house your pets, safely.

There is a yawning chasm between the websites written by guineapig aficiandos, mainly in the US, on appropriate lifestyle choices for guineapigs, and any semblance of reality here where so many humans live poorly nourished, on the street. The websites talk of the joys of guineapigs living inside the house in runs made of plastic cardboard (corex) lined with fleece to keep them warm. And we do remember fondly how nice it was to have our guineapigs in the dining room, wheeping wildly whenever the fridge door opened. Hence a day spent on an increasingly zany scavanger hunt for corex. Approached department heads in supermarkets with Dulux signs made of corex (belong to the manufacturer, not for sale); copy shops and sign makers; an art materials shop; and with increasing desperation, an architects, all in vain. Lateral thinking - a rigid paddling pool? - excluded - imported, they cost £140.

So, and don't tell the website authors, our guinea pigs are housed outside, in a wholly original, exclusive guinea pig house, made to my design on the back of an envelope by the chicken coop maker (further extending her market). Then the fundi workman, the only person who could source the timber for their run, needed daily lifts 30 minutes each way, to and from our house with his timber, while I sourced and shifted chicken wire.

And then what do they eat?

And what do they eat when food is so expensive here, our guards aren't exactly well nourished, and we've just held a sale which only raised three months' food bill for our partner orphanage? Here the chickens are easy. Even Nakumatt, the Waitrose equivalent, has 20kg bags of layers mash on sale in every branch. Tasty treats - roasted maize or dried fish for calcium - need a trip to the market but basically easy peasy.

But the guinea pigs. Oh dear. Nearest source of hay was initially an hour's drive each way in Karen, till I did a deal for two bales with a riding stables. And the websites are strident. Guinea pigs need guinea pig pellets. No substitutes. But we're in Kenya, so are they closer to rabbit or hamster pellets? Supplemented by peelings and sukuma wiki (spinach) from our vegetable patch. But the sukuma wiki had been being eaten by the guards for lunch, and, in a don't ask don't tell initiative, sold by the gardener's wife in her market stall. I guess a few leaves a day don't make much difference, but poaching from human mouths to make sure that guinea pigs get their five a day isn't easy.

We've had our Benny Hill chase scenes at twilight, six of us to catch a chicken and put her safely to bed. And again the next night. We only ever managed to catch one chicken, squwacking wildly, the other preferring to roost in the shrubbery, and one week on, thats where she has opted to stay, with the other now happily snoring in the coop when we come to shut the door. But there's nothing to beat the excitement of searching the coop to discover an egg, and the growing At Ease-ness of chickens who now let us get within a pace before making for the safety of the shrubbery.