Dead novelists society

It's been a really weird day with the weather today – the most torrential downpour mid afternoon. I feel very sorry for anybody that was caught out in it. It meant that I was stuck in the office so I decided I would do a job that I have been meaning to get round to for a while.

All of our work in Kosele depends on the support of sponsors and donors from the UK, so it is very important for us to keep good records about the children's circumstances. With a hundred and thirty children coming to our school as 'day scholars' it is a challenging task. As we open new classrooms next year we will be able to provide education and a feeding program for even more needy children in the community. I digress. This afternoon I set about typing up some of the children's stories and was struck, again, by how awful some of them are.

When I was about twenty I had plans to become an English teacher, so started a Combined Studies degree course in Northampton which included English as one of the subjects. We studied a number of the classic authors, and during the course of my first year I read a lot of books by Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Reading through the notes that our staff had made about the children's cases this afternoon was very much like reading Dickens and Hardy. Stories of the most awful child neglect, rural poverty and family breakdown, often caused by premature death due to easily preventable diseases. The most tragic of Dickens and Hardy's characters have modern counterparts here in Kosele. Women get bought and are abandoned, children are forced to work from an early age and young girls are extremely vulnerable. Apart from the intrusion of the mobile phone a five minute walk away from our main road would bring you face to face with living conditions that are straight out of pre-industrial Europe.

Of all the details that I read and typed up today the one that gave me most pause for thought was the case of the two children whose parents had been 'lost' in the post election violence of 2008. The phrase he or she 'got lost' describes one of the real tragedies of modern Kenya. It has a variety of meanings but they all amount to the same thing. Somebody, somewhere is unaccounted for – probably dead. Men leave their wives and families to seek work in urban centres and don't come back. Young, single men and women leave home to make their way in life and aren't heard from again, or come back in a coffin.

When you take a look at life in rural Africa you can't help being shocked. Firstly by the sheer grind of it all but then by the resilience that so many of our neighbours show in the face of the most appalling adversity. I honestly don't know how some of them stay alive, or maintain the will to live – but they do. Thomas Hardy was often criticised for spinning many of his stories around implausible coincidences. If he'd lived around Kosele and written about the characters here the criticism wouldn't stand up. You couldn't make any of this stuff up!