Nice Moves

It has, as usual, been a fairly hectic day today. This week we have some good events coming up for the school. Very early tomorrow morning our choir will head off to Kisumu, (the nearest city to us, about an hour and a half’s drive away). Singing, drama and dance competitions are very popular over here and our choir has got through to the second round of the current competition. The girls are very good singers and have been working hard on the moves that accompany their songs. We are hoping that they have a good day tomorrow and get through to the next round.

Madam Nyangwe, our head teacher, brought me some exciting news this evening. She has received an invitation to the Primary Head teachers’ Conference in Mombasa on Saturday.  She will be one of a select few representing our zone in recognition of the work we are doing for the orphans in our area. She will be asked to open in prayer at the meeting. This is a great encouragement to us and a good testimony to the hard work that our team of teachers and support staff put in every day. I am very pleased for Madam Nyangwe as she has really gone the extra mile since she took on the role of head teacher in January.

We also have the prospect of more football matches in the coming week-ends. Word must have got out about our fantastic results at the end of last month when we beat two of our local rivals. Our sports teacher Mr. Richard will, I hope, be making arrangements with two other local schools to give them a shot at beating us. We are fortunate to have the services of a couple of good coaches, Alex and Pete, who are visiting at the moment. Our visitors have also started tag rugby coaching with the children. This promises to be an interesting development. The girls seem to be as interested as the boys. It would be quite something to be able to field a good girls tag rugby team. Maybe they could perform a haka at the next singing competition.

Day of rest

And so to the seventh day. In the interests of longevity and personal effectiveness I have been trying to observe the Sabbath in the way that it was intended – as a day of rest. It is very difficult, partly because of years of a nose to the grindstone must be busy approach to life and partly because it’s difficult to switch off the ‘immortality mentality’. This basically means that I agree with all the good things that one can do to preserve health and sanity but they apply to other people not me. It is often called burning the candle at both ends. Young people are notorious for it. I have this sneaking feeling that I am running out of middle in my own candle. I must confess to feeling more rested than I usually do and if I can manage to build some exercise into my normal daily routine I might even convince myself that I could develop a healthy lifestyle.

It is slightly odd trying to take a more biblical approach to Sunday in our particular bit of Kenya. The dominant church in our area is the Seventh Day Adventist Church. They start counting on a different day to most of the churches I’ve come across as their Sabbath day is Saturday. Consequently Oyugis, (our nearest town), is pretty close to shut down on Saturday. It’s difficult to get public transport along our road, as the taxi drivers and piki piki riders, (motorbike taxis), attend church. Life revs up again for Sunday, (very literally in our case this weekend).

The roads in much of Africa are notoriously poor. Dusty, full of potholes and bumpy in the dry season. Treacherously slippery and flooded in the rainy season. In Kenya one of the solutions to this problem is to effectively plane the surface of the road with a large vehicle carrying what looks like a huge snow plough. It’s a very effective way of getting the road surface smoother but doesn’t really provide a long term solution to the basic problem that the road is just a dirt track. Because of the Saturday Sabbath it wasn’t working yesterday but was very busy along the stretch of the road outside our place this afternoon. It sounded like a tank revving up and down outside and had the loudest reversing warning alarm I have ever heard. From our point of view it should mean that traveling time to Oyugis will be halved for about the next month or so as the road surface will actually be navigable. It will also make walking along the side of the road a less hazardous occupation. As the quality of the road gets worse all of the drivers using it tend to hurtle along the footpaths at the side of the road rather than driving on the main carriage way. Now that the road had been ‘fixed’ the Oyugis to Kendu Bay rally will at least be contested where it should be – along the road.

The whole of the moon

For the music fans amongst you follow the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsNTmjlf1vI&feature=related

Waxing philosophical tonight I had a ‘whole of the moon’ moment this evening. For those of you who don’t know the song the hook line is “I saw the crescent, You saw the whole of the moon”. It’s a poignant song and like most clever ones the chorus kind of stays with you.

I’ve had another good day today. It really has been a revelation being able to focus on a small number of tasks during this visit rather than rushing round like I usually do. I’ve been getting my maths together today as part of a curriculum review in our school. Not having taught maths for many years and having had no need to do much beyond the basics for quite a while my maths is a bit rusty. It’s encouraging to know that the relevant theory and concepts are still accessible in one of the dustier corners of my brain and satisfying getting the test paper answers right. (I must beware of getting too carried away here – it’s still fairly straightforward maths). I had a fun time after our praise and worship session this evening doing some maths revision with the children.

Back to the whole of the moon. As I have blogged previously I am a bit of a creature of habit and have a few rituals that I like to stick to when I’m over here. One of them is using the same shower cubicle at night. It has been a hot day today so I was really looking forward to my late evening soak. It’s usually a good idea to check that there is actually water in the showers before getting undressed. Water check completed I stepped under the shower – and the water stopped almost immediately. Annoyed I considered heading back indoors. The stars persuaded me to try the cubicles on the other side of the path. Tonight there are no clouds in the sky and the stars are amazing. Its lovely looking up at the stars while you are scrubbing off the dirt and sweat of the day – quite awe inspiring. Fortunately the water level was fine and I was able to enjoy my shower. I had though that the view of the stars from my usual spot was pretty spectacular but the view from a different viewpoint was out of this world. The rows of shower cubicles are arranged at right angles to each other and looking down the sky line rather than across it, (as I usually do), made the stars stretch on for miles. In the ten years that we have been in Kosele I have never before stood still and enjoyed that particular scene.

It made me think. Standing still and adopting a different perspective opened up a completely different view to me – a much ‘bigger sky’ than I had imagined before. Our work here in Kosele is still full of challenges. “African Time” still drives me nuts. Having to slow down my thinking so I communicate better is occasionally frustrating. There is always something new to learn. It is, of course, blindingly obvious that adopting a new take on familiar problems is generally a wise thing to do. Sometimes you have to be prodded fairly vigorously to take the obvious step. I’m grateful that tonight’s reminder was such a beautiful object lesson.

Education reform

It has, as ever, been an interesting day today. I’ve spent most of the time working on our education programme and school development. In common with schools all over the world we are busy comparing test scores with other schools and focusing on ways of making sure that our Standard 8 pupils get the best shot at the public exam at the end of the year. It’s a very challenging project because there are so many things to take into consideration. It is also very rewarding. I’ve been able to work very closely with Madam Nyangwe our head teacher and Mr Isaiah from the Agriculture College and we are definitely growing together as a team.

One of the safest principles to adopt is “sticking with the knitting” – in our case making sure that the children get taught appropriately, using materials suitable for their age and ability. It’s not really rocket science by any stretch of the imagination. We are about to undertake a curriculum review so I thought I’d get a bit of head start by looking at the Standard 1 revision to get a better idea of what is expected from them. This led to an interesting diversion when I discovered that Microsoft Word is able to work out the readability of text that you type into it. (To turn it on click on the spelling and grammar tool, then options and select show readability statistics).  Tonight’s post has a Flesch reading ease rating of 53.3% and a Flesch-Kincaid level of 10.8. This makes it fairly difficult to read and, (optimistically), readable by 50% of adults. I don’t plan to dumb it down any time soon.

This discovery was prompted by the contents of the Standard 1 revision encyclopaedia, in particular the exercises in the Social Studies section. Most of our Standard 1 pupils come from very poor backgrounds. They have just finished in what would be a reception class in England. They are very young. You might like to try these activities with children that you know who are in Year 1.  Questions on the topic of Our School include:

7. Pupils at school go to assembly on _______ and ___________.

8. Name the various people found in your school.

11. What is the work of a prefect in a class? ______________________

13. Why do we have rules at school? _____________________

21. What is the work of a clerk? __________________________

And my favourite

24. _________ is where teacher meet to talk more about school.

It’s always good to have high expectations for pupils !

It’s also good to know that the scourge of cheating in public exams is being dealt with severely. Cheating is notoriously rampant in schools in Kenya. After the public exams in November the newspapers are full of stories about schools and pupils who have managed to find some way of gaining an edge in the exams, (usually by buying a copy of the paper and mark scheme before the pupils sit the exam). On the back page of today’s Daily Nation there was a short report on the government’s latest proposals for anybody caught cheating in public exams. These measures will be discussed and, according to the Nation, ideally come into law in time for this November’s exams. Anyone caught cheating will face a 10 year jail term or a 10 million shilling fine. Now that’s what I call direct action.

Dancing the night away

Today has been very rewarding. I have managed to make good progress on both of my ‘big projects’ for this visit and was able to spend some time on the farm with Duncan, (our farm manager), Mary, (our manager) and a guy from the Agriculture department who gave us some helpful advice about dealing with water logging on one of our  plots. He was also very encouraging about the progress we have made on the farm. We are ‘learning by doing’ on the farm so we really appreciated a good report from the man from the ministry. As ministry advisors go our visitor was extremely knowledgeable and very professional. I did feel a bit sorry for him. Mary went to a farming workshop this morning and, I think, almost coerced him into visiting us. Mary is currently a woman on a mission with farming and is determined to make the most of every opportunity for improving our farm and advancing her own knowledge, (I am glad to say).

Our visitors have been a great help to us this week and have been hard at work with maths tuition, school field improvements and arts and crafts. It’s always a slightly anxious time as a new team of visitors settles in. I always worry that they won’t like the accommodation, the food, the climate, the activities or any combination of the above. Jessica, Daniel, Peter and Alex have been a delight to have round the place and I know that they have made a good impression on the children and staff. It is always good to spend time with young people who buck every negative stereotype of “the youths” and take what they are doing very seriously.

I also managed to spend some time this evening with our Standard 8 pupils, (the ‘candidates’ for the Kenyan Certificate of Primary Education exam). We have yet to decide how far we are prepared to go in relation to customary practices regarding the length of the school day for this class as they prepare for this important exam. (See yesterday’s blog). I’m sure that we will keep up their evening ’preps’ programme. During a relatively short trip to Kosele it is often difficult to keep on top of my to do list but I want to spend as much time as I can helping out during the evening study time. Our Standard 8 class are a really excellent group of young people and the teacher in me still enjoys the ‘penny drops’ moments you often experience when students are revising.

On a completely different but tangentially related note I also found an absolute gem of a news story in the newspaper that somebody had brought into the classroom this evening. You couldn’t make it up and it really couldn’t happen anywhere else. It would appear that all night dancing parties after male circumcision ceremonies have become an issue in one district in Kenya so the authorities have banned them. The mind boggles. From my understanding of circumcision the last thing I would want to do after experiencing it would be to celebrate, let alone dance all night.

Getting back to normal

We had a fun time first thing this morning harvesting our green grams, (mung beans). All the lower school pupils trooped down to the bottom of our farm to gather up the crop. Green grams look like miniature pea pods. Each pod contains small green seeds which are cooked and served with rice. We have to harvest en masse occasionally so that a crop doesn’t spoil and go over. The green gram harvest takes a few sessions. We are really at the tail end of the harvest now and trying to avoid the remainder of the crop ‘bursting’ and going to waste. Being out on the farm first thing is a nice way to start the day and I think our young harvesters had a good time.

The borehole guy arrived this afternoon and the borehole is now fixed. As suspected there wasn’t much wrong with it. In fairly typical fashion he seemed to pretty much look at it and it worked. There is a possible fault with the electricity supply from the generator and a chance that the sensors at the business end of the pump indicated a shortage of water in the borehole. Either way we now have full tanks everywhere and the equipment has been serviced so overall a good result.

The district mocks finished today. All went smoothly and we should get an initial idea of how well our pupils performed tomorrow. The official results will take some time to process. First indications are that there has been an improvement in overall performance with one or two individual surprises. I wait with bated breath – it would be nice to see some of the pupils who are usually in the middle ranks have the encouragement of doing better than they expected. As a bit of a reward for studying hard we let the children who live here watch a film tonight. We have a very eclectic collection of videos and DVDs. The children haven’t watched The Sound of Music for a while and clearly relished the idea of the hills being alive with it today.

The whole KCPE process is a very long, drawn out affair lasting the whole of the year. The pupils will be put out of their misery in November when they finally sit the exam. Madam Nyangwe, (the head teacher), Mr Isaiah, (Agriculture College lecturer) and I had our first meeting today to discuss ways of making sure our Standard 8 pupils are well prepared for the KCPE exams at the end of the year. One of the questions we considered was “what are all the other schools in our zone doing?” The answer would probably send pupils in Europe into shock. In a typical primary school in Kenya the Standard 8 pupils will start their studies at 6.00 a.m. and finish at about 8 in the evening. They would be expected to attend school on Saturday and Sunday afternoon and to attend ‘tuition’ for two weeks, (daytime), in the school holidays. They will typically follow this pattern for most of the school year, starting in January. We are considering our options!

District Mocks

Apart from a flurry of activity first thing this morning making sure that we had enough desks and chairs for the visiting pupils I was pleasantly surprised by the district mock exams today. They did not end up causing as much disruption as I had feared. The only, minor, problem occurred at lunchtime when we had to serve the visiting officials their chicken dinner and looked like running out of suitable plates to serve their meal in. A quick scrounge round the visitors’ centre saved the day and I think the whole programme went off to the satisfaction of all involved. We should have it nailed down to a really slick operation for tomorrow. I am still unable to see the point in running exams in this fashion but there is really no point losing sleep over it as there is nothing we can do about it.  Our pupils seemed confident enough after it was all over.

The water situation is still not resolved. The service engineer should be here tomorrow, according to my latest information. I hope so as we have had no rain today. The timing of the rains is always critical out here in Kenya. I think we may be at the turning point when rainfall becomes less frequent. Good for ripening crops, charging solar batteries and tourism. Bad for keeping clean and feeding the five thousand if the borehole isn’t fixed soon.

I would, again, be grateful to anybody who is up for praying for my wife Judi. Assuming no more delays because of low blood counts she is just over half way through her chemotherapy treatment now. She is trying hard to stick to her normal routine but I know it is very challenging some days. When I last heard from her she said she was feeling well. I pray that she manages to stay that way until her next chemo treatment on July 12^th.