Easter School Update & Report
We hope all is well with you, your families, and your teams in your respective countries. Here at school, all is well and we have had a positive start to this year despite the many challenges we have had in the last year due to drought and high inflation.
Despite the challenges, we were able to open school on the 23rd of January this year. The first term of the year which will be ending on the 21st of April this year has been full of positives and we are optimistic that the rest of the year will be a good one.
At the beginning of this year, we were able to admit new students in our primary and the girls' secondary schools. 80 pupils in their first year of primary school and 20 girls in their first year of secondary school were admitted in February and thus far they are having a good time and learning as is expected of them.
In total, we have 779 students in our primary school and 169 girls in our boarding school. Getting students for both schools has been a challenge, especially for the girls' boarding school because of our location as a school and also because most families are leaving the slum and looking for other places and means to support their families away from the slum. Also due to high inflation and the high unemployment rates in Kenya and especially the slum communities in urban areas and Nairobi, in particular, most people are not so keen on education as was the case previously.
Poverty levels are still high in the slum and as a school, we are working and looking into ways of seeing to it that the children from the slum have the much-needed education that will be able to transform their lives and that of their families in the future.
We are still working with the community in their groups to help them support each other as we offer them the training and workshops they need to come up with ways to support themselves. we have continued to support families in need to start up small businesses and also link them to microfinance institutions to help them get loans to support their small businesses.
The school's Saturday feeding program has been on since the school reopened. We are still feeding between 1000 and 1200 children every weekend. We are grateful for the support we receive from this program as without it children are forced to stay without a meal during their weekend stays at home.
In March of this year, we hosted a group of 26 volunteers from Europe and the USA. This is the first big trip since the covid pandemic started. We had a good time and thanks to this and many more to come we hope that we will get more people to share our stories and in return, we will get support for most of our programs.
We can say that these three months have been good and we hope for more in the coming days. This coming week, the students in both schools will be doing their end-of-term 1 exams, and thereafter school will be on break for two weeks.
We are grateful for the support we receive and continue to receive. Your contributions go a long way and they are very much appreciated by us all here.
Thank you and best regards,
