This is the time of year when we begin the process of accepting new children into the HOPE Project, my ministry in Mombasa which provides educational assistance to vulnerable children, for the following school year. The academic school year in Kenya begins in January and assistance for the new children accepted into the program will begin then. The focus of the project is to assist orphans infected or affected by HIV/AIDS. Typically, to be accepted into the program, the child must have lost one or both parents to AIDS and the remaining parent or guardian must be unable to finance the education of the orphan. That is, there must be real need.
Candidates to the program are usually referred to us by community health workers, who work in the candidate’s community. Once a child is referred to us, we conduct an initial interview with the parent or guardian in our office to gather basic information. We then schedule a home visit to get a better and more detailed understanding of the child’s home environment, how the parent or guardian supports the family, and how they currently pay school expenses (assuming the child is currently in school). Florah and I have been busy doing home visits for the last several weeks across a number of different areas of Mombasa. We usually only do a few home visits in a day, in the morning before it gets too hot outside. Also, some of the homes take a while to get to and from, so this also limits how many visits we can get done in a day.
The homes of HOPE children are pretty much all single room. Some are made of stone, but others are simply made of mud. Some have real floors, but many just have dirt floors. The roofs are usually made from corrugated steel. Most of the homes have electricity, but only one or two lights. The electrical wiring is all out in the open. There is obviously no sense of electrical safety codes. The homes don’t have running water. The families have to go buy and carry back plastic jerry cans of water to use for cooking, bathing and washing clothes. The rooms typically only have one bed, no table, sometimes a sofa, which is usually in pretty bad shape, and a few plastic chairs. The mothers cook in the room on a “jiko”, which is a small, portable, charcoal-burning stove. There is a community bathroom that is shared by the residents of the compound. Clothes are washed by hand outside and hung to dry on clotheslines that are strung across the entrances to the building.
During the home visits we ask a number of questions and document the parent or guardian’s responses. Using the information obtained in the home visit, we write up case profiles for each of the candidates. These will be presented to the HOPE board for approval. Decisions as to whether candidates are accepted into the program are made based on need and circumstances. The number of students we can accept into the program is limited by the amount of money we have to fund the upcoming school year. We sometimes run into cases where information we were given to us by the parent or guardian was not completely truthful. While no one we do home visits with has an easy life by any stretch of the imagination, it’s a disconcerting when someone misrepresents things.
We typically don’t take any pictures during home visits. If we take pictures and for whatever reason the child is not accepted into HOPE, the parent or guardian many times will feel that the visit was just a photo op – that is, simply for publicity or to raise money. While I don’t have any pictures of from the home visits that Florah and I just completed, I do have this photo of a special home visit that Florah and Coralis did at the end of April.
A few weeks ago, Kathy arranged a day trip for her, Mike and I to visit the north coast of Mombasa. None of us had really explored that part of the coast before and it was a good opportunity for us to do something together. Plus, we all needed a break. Kathy arranged for a driver to take us up the coast and explore different sites. As the plan was to leave early in the morning, given that we all live in different parts of Mombasa and local travel is problematic in general and unsafe very early in the morning, we decided to stay together the night before the trip, which was going to take place on a Friday.
Late on Thursday afternoon, I left home to meet up with Kathy and Mike. As I wanted to avoid, going to town late in the day to transfer matatus/minibuses, I chose a route that required two transfers, but avoided “town”. The first two segments of the trip were uneventful. As I boarded the third matatu, which had come to a stop in an area that had a lot of water as it had rained that morning, I did my best to sidestep the water and got one foot in the matatu and began to climb in. As I was climbing in the matatu moved forward. Losing my balance and surprised by the sudden movement, I lifted my head and smacked it pretty good on the top of the door. I was seeing stars, but was able to step down out of the matatu. However, there was blood everywhere. I didn’t know what to do. There is really no hospital around, at least one that I would consider going to except as a last resort, and it was starting to get dark. Not surprisingly the matatu just drove off once I got down. I guess I should be grateful that they waited for me to completely step down before taking off. A number of motorbike drivers were coming up to me wanting to drive me to the hospital. First of all, I wasn’t going to ride on a motorbike in the middle of rush hour in my condition. Secondly, I think they were more interested in getting a fare from me than my physical condition. I stand out wherever I go, but at this point I really stood out. Everyone in the area was looking at me. A few people come over to try to help. One even offered me a facecloth. As it looked fairly clean to me and I had to stop the bleeding, I took it. I would have to worry about infections later. After applying pressure for a few minutes, I could see the bleeding was stopping. I really didn’t want to have to go to the hospital at that time of the day, so I made up my mind to just continue on to meet up with Kathy and Mike. By that point I had blood all over my hands and face. Luckily, I had somehow managed to not get any blood on my clothes as I had my head bent forward. A very nice young lady came over with a bottle of water and helped me wash the blood off my face and hands. The guy with the facecloth wanted the equivalent of about 20 cents for the item. The young lady wanted to pay for it, but I was able to reach in my pocket and find the exact change. With the facecloth pressed across the top of my head to prevent any more bleeding, the young woman made sure I was able to board a matatu that would take me to where I needed to meet up with Kathy and Mike. I thanked her profusely and learned that she was from Nairobi and was going to school at Mombasa Technical University.
After getting of the matatu, I had about a ten-minute walk to where I needed to go. However, about a third of the way there, I got a call from my friend and coworker Florah wanting to know what happened to me. How in the world did she know I had a little mishap? Florah lives about an hour from where all this occurred. It turns out that a motorbike driver, who saw me bleeding all over the place, recognized me as the guy who used to live with Florah’s sister Anne’s family, who live about fifteen minutes from where the mishap occurred. He called Anne, Anne called Florah, and Florah called me. After convincing Florah that I would live, I had to call Anne and do the same with her.
After a few minutes, I got to where Kathy and Mike were waiting for me and explained what had happened. By then, the bleeding had pretty much stopped. Luckily Kathy is a nurse. She washed out the wound and although she thought my wound probably warranted a few stitches, I would be fine without them. She added that without stiches, I’ll probably have a little scar on the top of my head. I told her that I was devastated that my modeling career was now over. My head was sore and I had a slight headache, but a few extra strength Tylenol resolved those issues.
By morning, I was ready to hit the road with Kathy, Mike and Jacob, our driver. Our first stop was Gedi – a coastal town on the Indian Ocean. It took us about two hours to get to Gedi. In Gedi, we took a tour of the ruins there. Gedi has an archeological site featuring the ruins of a walled town that includes a mosque and several stone houses, some of which I assume would be considered palaces by the standards of the time. The tour guide told us that about 800 years ago, Gedi was thriving trade center. Now, not so much.
The rest of the day consisted of exploring a number of costal communities. This included the Vasco da Gama pillar in Malindi. The Portuguese explorer visited Malindi in 1498 on his way to India. While in Malindi, he erected the coral pillar which we visited. We had a nice lunch in Watamu, which is a popular resort town, in a restaurant right on the ocean. Driving back, we wound our way through many other towns along the coast. We left the house a little after 8 AM and didn’t get back until about 7 PM. It was a long day, but we had a great time.
The schools in Kenya are currently on break between the third and last term of the year and the first term which starts at the beginning of January. The break goes from the beginning on November until the end of the year. During the three yearly term breaks, we run tutorials for our HOPE students four times a week. As I mentioned in previous blog posts, during tutorials, I usually work with the secondary school students on math and science – chemistry, biology, and physics. The students really struggle with these subjects. Not only are their school classrooms overcrowded, but the children are not exposed to any supplemental materials like videos and graphics to help reinforce the concepts. As our students don’t have computers, smart phones or internet access, what they get in school is all they have to learn by. With the introduction of a flat screen TV in our HOPE office, we now have the capability to incorporate these types of supplemental learning materials into our tutorials. The students really like the computer based lessons. The hope is that over time, the use of technology in our tutorials will lead to a better grasp of the subjects by our students and better grades in the classroom.
Last week, a bunch of the primary school students approached Florah and asked why I only work with the secondary school students. I’m not sure it had anything to do with me, but more the fact that they wanted to watch videos too. When Florah told me that, I said let’s do some sessions with the primary school students too. When Florah asked them what they would like to learn about. They answered the human body. OK, I thought. I’ll do some sessions on organs and human body systems such as the circulatory, digestive, skeletal, and muscular systems. This will be great. I’ll use some diagrams and find some videos that describe how each system operates. This is exactly why I wanted to have the flat screen TV. For the circulatory system, I’ll show diagrams and videos of how the heart and blood vessels in the body deliver oxygen and nutrients are delivered to all the cells in the body. For the digestive system, we’ll follow the path of food entering the body through the mouth and evacuating the body you know where. Perfect.
Well it turns out that when they wanted to learn about the human body, what they really meant was reproduction. Yes, I can imagine the snickering and wisecracks from my family right now half a world away. After composing myself, I said that I can do this. After searching around on the internet, I found a good video to use called “Asexual and Sexual Reproduction” by the Amoeba Sisters. If you want a quick refresher on the biology of reproduction, the video is just a little over five minutes, look it up on YouTube!
I first played the video straight through. Although all the classes in Kenya are taught in English, the students are much more comfortable speaking in Kiswahili. Between some technical terms, like gametes, and how fast the speakers on the video must seem to talk, the video was a little difficult for them to understand. I tried to imagine me watching this video in Kiswahili. It wouldn’t reflect well on me. When the video finished and I started asking questions, it was like pulling teeth. I was able to get some responses, but not many.
We then went through the video a second time. This time I would pause the video about every 10 – 15 seconds, explain things in my own words and then ask them questions. Although it took them a while to warm up to this approach, the second viewing of the video resulted in a much better outcome. As we proceeded through the video, I would tie things back to stuff we saw and heard earlier in the video – constantly reviewing, but continuing to push forward. The students understood that their DNA came from their parents, but not why their DNA was different from their parents or different from their siblings. I really wanted them to understand how sexual reproduction leads to diversity and how important this is in the evolution of a species. If you are interested, view the last part of the video – the segment with the grasshoppers. J
I have to admit that when I thought about what I’d be doing when I came to Kenya, teaching about reproduction to a bunch of primary school students wasn’t on my radar. The Holy Spirit certainly leads us in unexpected directions. As Pope Francis is keen on saying, “the Holy Spirit can be unpredictable” and “makes unthinkable, unimaginable choices.” That’s for sure. But, as the pope also says, we must ask the Lord for the grace of docility to the Holy Spirit in order to follow the Spirit’s lead. That is my prayer.
This whole experience is a learning process for me as well. No, not the biology of reproduction. I’m talking about teaching. I’m pretty good at math and science. I also taught a lot of technical seminars in my time at IBM. However, my experience has always been teaching at a more advanced level. I don’t have a teaching certificate and was never formally trained in any formal method of teaching. My approach to teaching is simply to try to articulate and explain how I think about things, my understanding of how things work, how I understand specific concepts and how I approach problems which employ these concepts. When learning something new, I usually have to break thinks down into simple terms and build from there. I’m hoping this same approach will work in my interactions with our students. All I can do is continue to learn and try to get better at what I’m doing.
Last Saturday was Joel’s birthday. He turned seven. I miss him a lot since moving into my own place. As I have to teach tutorials on Saturday mornings not too far from where I was living with Richard, Anne and the family (but about an hour from where I currently live in my own apartment), I often stay at their house on Friday nights. On the way there last Friday afternoon, I picked up a few things for Joel’s birthday – a Transformer-like action figure and a soccer ball. He has been telling me for the past two months that it’s his birthday. Now it had finally arrived.
As I had to head home after tutorials, I asked if I could give Joel his presents in the morning before I left. I had successfully gotten them into the house and hidden under the bed without him seeing me. On Saturday morning, we all ate breakfast as a family. As I was preparing to leave to go to my tutorial session, they insisted that we have Joel’s cake before I left so that I could celebrate Joel’s birthday with them. So a little after eight in the morning, we sang happy birthday to Joel, he blew out the candles, and he cut the first piece of cake. We all all ate Joel’s birthday cake, drank soda, and had cookies and candy before I left. It was great.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate them making me part of Joel’s birthday celebration and going so far as to cut the cake in the morning so I could be there. Not that I wanted them to do that, but the fact that they wanted so much for me to be there means so much to me. They always tell them that I am a gift to their family, but from my perspective, they are a gift to me. They opened their home to me and share their lives with me. I love them like family. If I got nothing else out of my time in Kenya, my relationship with them makes my coming here all worth it.
God is good.
