March on

March has been a busy month for the project and an exciting one for Ondati village. With the completion of the ‘zero grazing dairy unit’, otherwise known as a cow shed, the time had come to locate and purchase 3 beautiful animals to call it home. However, this was not as easy as first thought. Information flows in mysterious ways in these parts and the farm that was identified by our crack team of project staff and government livestock officers as a sure bet turned out not to want to sell. To their credit though, they persevered through the night and turned up at 1am with the goods, or at least something resembling them.

The cows are now settled into their new surroundings and enjoying the type of care that they would never have dreamed of before. As appreciation for their luxurious diet of napier grass, calliandra and dairy meal, the only one that is currently lactating has decided to increase her production by 40%! Let’s hope the others follow suit when they calve down in 2 and 5 months respectively.

Learning by doing
The ethos behind the income generating activities of the TAMTF model is not only to cover school running costs. It is also to enhance the students’ education by involving them in the activities such that they learn technical and business skills that will empower them to make a decent living when they leave school. For Ondati girls, the first of this involvement will be in the establishment of agricultural demonstration plots. They will put into practice the theory that they have learnt in class and form groups that will take responsibility for planting, maintaining and harvesting their designated area with maize, beans and vegetables.

Water is life
Water has played a big part in the activities of March. The first week witnessed the completion of the borehole and installation of the hand pump that will supply all of the project’s aquatic needs. As a result, the committee saw fit to use the occasion as a celebration of the project so far and an opportunity for members of the community to add their views. Before I knew it a ram was being killed and skinned in front of my eyes and I was being asked to cook ugali for 40.



If water was coming only from the ground I would have been happy. But alas, most of it was coming from the sky as rainy season imposed itself aggressively upon us. Luckily, the pattern is relatively predictable – clear in the morning, gradually clouding over from 3pm and letting rip at around 5, just when I’m walking home.

April should see the arrival of several African bee colonies, hopefully not the killer variety.

February

Starting to feel like home in Ondati

My first two weeks in Ondati have flashed past like a thirteen seater Matatu flying down a hill carrying thirty, plus luggage. But while I still have much to learn, including the art of eating ones’ weight in ugali during one sitting, I am starting to feel at home.

Getting off the plane, bleary eyed, then stumbling across Russell Brand in the airport was an interesting, if a little alternative, first experience of Kenya. However, a taxi ride through central Nairobi and a night in a safari style tent with the sounds of the night to lull me into a deep sleep was enough to make me know I had arrived.

The Adongo family (by family I mean an extended family of roughly 30) have welcomed me into their home(s) and done their upmost to make me feel comfortable. And while the absence of power and running water felt like a loss at first, it is now nothing but a distant memory.

Taking over the project

As for the project, it looks like Mary and the committee have worked hard over the last six months and I was impressed by the progress that has been made. The school is established and the foundations have been laid for what looks to be an exciting year ahead.

We will soon be underway with our Dairy and Bee-keeping enterprises. A recent visit to nearby Nyambeche School with a very successful Bee-keeping project provided some useful advice for the latter. For the former, government livestock officers have been roped in to assist in the procurement of three very expensive pregnant dairy cows.

Throughout the last month girls have been arriving thick and fast to join the new Form 1 class. While the Forms 2s remain modest in number, they have assumed responsibility for ensuring the new arrivals settle in well. However, care is taken to make sure the Form 1s know who is in charge.

Umbrella and wellies in Africa (?!)
To get anywhere outside walking distance involves seeking assistance from one of the infamous motorbike drivers in the area. And although I doubt that formal training is available for learning to carry three passengers down muddy, bumpy footpaths I further doubt that these guys have so much as a license. Practice makes perfect, so the saying goes, but you may as well forget about smooth journeys once the rains come and the roads run as rivers. That reminds me – I need to buy an umbrella and wellington boots which are apparently indispensible attire during the ‘Big Rains’.

New plans, new students and much more

It seems like a long time since my last blog post, and in fact I’m now in my last month in Kenya and lots has happened since I last wrote.

Making professional plans
During December we made use of the quiet during school holidays to do lots of planning. Many of the previous business budgets had been done without consultation from experts. This meant that they were inaccurate and couldn’t be a good basis for us to decide which businesses would be most profitable and which should be started first. So during December we met with: a livestock officer from the ministry of agriculture to rework the dairy budget, a horticultural expert to discuss mango seedlings, tree seedlings and pineapple and an apiculturist to work on plans and budgeting for a bee keeping project. These meetings gave us a good basis to sit as the committee and make plans for the coming year.

Dairy business
As the dairy business now looks very profitable work on it has restarted. Our napier grass is now ready to harvest, we are currently having the cow shed constructed and have just started the task of researching suitable cows to purchase. This last task is very important to get right as buying good quality cows is crucial to the success of the project, therefore careful research is needed.

Grain storage business
We have also just started purchasing our second batch of grain for the grain storage business. We are hoping that a good profit will be made this time round as we implement the lessons learned from the first batch. This time we made sure money was ready early so that we didn’t miss the lowest market price. We are also advertising for local farmers to bring their maize to us rather than traveling to markets to purchase it. This increases profitability as we minimize transport costs and losses due to spillages. It also means we are benefiting Ondati’s farmers by providing a market for them to sell their maize.

Recruiting new students
The other main task of the last month has been recruiting students to join Form 1. After the KCPE (Kenyan Certificate of Primary Education) results came out at the end of the December the recruitment drive really began! Myself and Margaret Kisambi first traveled to all the local primary schools to collect names of girls who may be interested in joining Ondati. We then spent the following few days traveling around on a motorbike visiting each girl in their home to talk to them about the school and give them a calling letter to join. Telling girls who thought they were not going to have a chance to go to secondary school (because they can’t afford the fees at other schools) that they are now going to have a chance was incredibly rewarding.
Altogether 30 calling letters were given out and enrollment started on the 1st of Feb and is expected to continue until the 5th. As of the 2nd Feb 20 girls had already enrolled!

I’m in Kisumu right now, but eagerly awaiting get back to Ondati to meet the new students!

BULL ENCOUNTERS!!

November 2009

The highlight of the month has been the school Harambee. Harambee is KiSwahili for ‘lets pull together’ and a Harambee is a type of community fundraising event. The school committee, in conjunction with the chief and clan elders, decided to organize one to raise funds for the second classroom. The committee predicted that we would raise around ksh 70,000 (GBP 600). As they have a tendency to overestimate and exaggerate I was privately expecting something closer to Ksh 40,000. But the reality exceeded all our expectations when the actual total was over Ksh 200,000 (when the value of materials donated are included)! This is brilliant not only in terms of the actual money, but also in terms of what it shows about the desire of those who come from Ondati and the surrounding villages to see a girls’ secondary school established. The main event on the 15th Nov also provided a good opportunity to promote the self-sufficiency vision of the school. Many excellent speeches were also made highlighting the broader importance of girls’ education.

The school term finished last week (Friday 20th), which signifies the end of the schools first year and the completion of Form 1 for our first seven students. End of year exams have been completed and marked, showing that all of the pupils have made progress during the year.

We have been busy promoting the school for the next year when we hope to get a large turn-out for Form 1. I have given promotional talks with the standard eights (the last year in primary school) from all six of the surrounding primary schools. The girls were all very enthusiastic and many of them have expressed interest in coming to the school next year. However, at the moment girls face many barriers to making it to the end of primary school, dropping out because of pregnancy, early marriage, or poverty. For example, in Ondati primary school, the cohort currently in standard eight started as 46 in standard one but is now only 12. The broader task of improving the educational status of girls in the area is therefore a big one.

On the business front, most of the grain from the grain storage has now been sold. Unfortunately it has not made the expected profit, partly due to the market price never reaching the expected peak and partly due to damage from rats. However, hopefully we can learn from the problems encountered and make a better profit next time. For the dairy business, the caliandra for the cows has been planted and we are working hard on redoing the budget to work out the best way forward. We are also planning to start a bee-keeping business as the schools third venture. Plans are well under way and we have located an excellent local ‘bee expert’ who is helping us complete the budget and get started!

While not working I have being having some interesting encounters with village animals. The family I stay with have become used to me going into my room to sleep at night and then running out again in surprise at the creatures found in my bed, weather it be rats, bats, chickens or whatever else! I also had a run-in with a bull on the way to school a few weeks back. I met the bull as I was crossing a path and the bull decided to break free from its owner and charge at me, sticking its horn into my thigh and lifting me off the ground. While the actual injury was quite minor, village gossip is such that by the end of the day the story going around was that I was in hospital after being almost killed by a crazed bull! My new Luo sentence that day was ‘Mary ohero pussy gi gwok gi dhiel gi rombo. Mary okdowa dhiang (Mary likes the cat and dog and goat and sheep. Mary doesn’t like the cow)!

A New Arrival!
Mary’s first month at Ondati Girl's School, September 2009

A game of cat and mouse......

I have now completed my first month as Project Officer in Ondati taking over from James. On arrival I was warmly welcomed by the Odongo family with who I will be living for the next six months. A feast was prepared and Joshua and Karen informed me of their plans to make sure I leave Ondati as a ‘big, huge, fat and strong girl’. I am enjoying getting to know the family and several of the younger girls have become my Luo language teachers, enthusiastically repeating the name of every object we can find until I have learnt them all. I now know the Luo word for every household object from sieve (rachongi) to metal roof (mabat): unfortunately this vocabulary doesn’t really enable me to have very extensive conversations!

The first couple of days work involved completing the process to register the project as a CBO in Homa Bay, tracking down tractors in Awendo and meeting the staff. Registering as a CBO is important for the legal status it provides, as well as for enabling the project to receive funds directly. We feared that there would be more bureaucratic hoops to jump through before receiving the registration, so it was with some elation that we left the office with the CBO registration certificate in hand! The tractor was required to plough the field we will be using to grow napier seeds for the cows we hope to buy in January in order to start the Ondati Girls School Dairy Business. Finding a tractor that was not either broken or unwilling to travel along the bad roads to Ondati proved a difficult task – but one which thankfully has now been achieved! Completing these jobs, I experienced several different methods of traveling in Kenya: these ranged from being squished into a taxi with 16 people, a 200kg pig and a child hanging over my shoulder, to clinging on, white-knuckled to the back of a motorbike!

Our students started back at school during my second week in Ondati. It has been a pleasure to meet them and see their ambition and dedication to their studies. I was also pleased to find that Ondati girls have performed favorably in their recent exams when compared to students from nearby Ottoto school. It is of course very important that the school succeeds according to traditional academic standards as well as well as developing successful businesses.

On the business front, as well as preparing the field and planting the napier seeds, we have also been maintaining our grain stock and watching as the price of grain slowly starts to tick upwards. The challenge is to ensure that we don’t loose grain to rats or insects while we are waiting for the market price to reach its peak. Rats were initially kept at bay with rat poison until a first cat and kitten was bought (the normal way of protecting grain in Kenya). Unfortunately, the cat ran away and the kitten ate the left over rat poison and died…. we then had to return to using rat poison for some time until a new cat was bought. This time we are ensuring that it is well fed to stop it running away and that the rat poison is out of harms way! Hopefully, this will keep our grain safe until the selling begins!

July – August Blog.

Good things come to those who wait......

This entry really is the proverbial game of two halves. First I endured a frustrating two weeks waiting for money to arrive in order to begin the first two agro-businesses. It seems that the Kenyan bank account we are using to send the money from the UK went into meltdown, and decided to keep the cash in limbo for a fortnight. It is hugely frustrating when you have everything in position to push on, but are held back by problems out of your control. This meant I spent two weeks racking up hotel bills in Kisumu, just waiting for the money to turn up and each day being told “it will definitely be here tomorrow”. Still for every cloud, I believe is how the saying goes. Whilst waiting in Kisumu I met a very nice Australian woman who gave me a book to read, three cups of tea, saying she thought it was a bit like what I was doing in Ondati. I thanked her and began reading.

The following day the money turned up so Justus and I flew off to the village to begin work on the two businesses we had intended to start the previous week. We met the committee who had been working hard during my prolonged stay away to adapt a disused chicken hutch within the school compound into a temporary grain store. They had done an excellent job; plastering the walls, inserting a heavy duty steel door [left over from the primary school construction], and building a raised platform to keep the grain free of damp and rain water.

Oria market, the biggest in the area, is held each Friday, about an hour away, and it was arranged for us to buy the grain there. On Friday, I woke up a little excited at what lay ahead, and ate my breakfast reading my new book [a rarity since I have been in Kenya]. The story is a good one concerning Greg Mortenson’s failed attempt to scale K2 [the 2nd largest mountain in the world], and his stumbling, lost, into a small village in Pakistan. Inspired by the hospitality of the people and the hardship faced by the local students, he promised to return and build a school. This he duly did, and has since dedicated twenty years of his life to building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The book is good, and I can sympathise with many of the problems he has faced. On this particular morning, I was reading a chapter about luck, and no matter how much you plan and prepare for things, at times, you will just catch a lucky break which, in retrospect, you can’t see the project working without.

At about ten o’clock Washington arrived and we walked together to the school which was on the way to Oria. It was then that he told me about our problem for the day. “I don’t know how we will get the grain back tonight”, I was surprised and said that I thought we had organised a cattle cart, “It can’t come today. The driver is elsewhere” he told me. We discussed various options; motorbikes, donkeys, taxis, but all were deemed unsuitable. We sat down underneath a tree and remained motionless for a few minutes, until I broke the silence asking “what’s that?” We both looked up to the track at the end of school compound, and saw a seven tonne truck roaring into view. Now, you must understand my surprise; in the six months I have been here, the only six tonne truck I have seen was the one I arrived in to deliver timber and iron sheets for the school roof. Washington jumped up and waved frantically at them. The conversation went a bit like this. “Hi, what are you dong here”, “we are going to Homa Bay, and we got a bit lost”, “oh, its that way, but before you go could you help us bring some grain back from Oria”, “ok”, “great”. I think the spirit of Greg Mortenson may have been lending us a hand that morning.

We arrived about an hour later and I was told to hide; “if the people selling the maize see you, the price will be very high”, the Director told me. Thus I spent a day skirting the edge of the cattle markets, watching a Christian redemption service [lots of singing] and trying not to look too shady when I passed out money to the members of the committee who were doing the purchasing. The idea was to fill up 100kg bags, but the exercise was made difficult as all purchases were to be made in weights of 2kg, as is the norm. With lots of bargaining and me safely hidden out of view we managed to buy just over a tonne of grain in seven hours. The only problem was the slightly higher cost than expected, we bought the grain at about 55ksh per 2kg measure, when last Friday’s market had seen the price as low as 45ksh. If we hadn’t had the problem with the bank the previous week then we could have perhaps done even better. We didn’t get it unloaded back at the school until well after dark, but, all-in-all a very successful day this Friday turned out to be.

Our good fortune and increased productivity was evident again the following week. We finally managed to get the school registered as a Community Based Group with the council in Homa Bay. This is one of the key stipulations for being able to send the money directly to the school bank account, thus negating the problems of the previous fortnight. Registering as a CBO has been incredibly arduous, but now, hopefully, the matter has been put to bed after five and a half months. As well as that we have booked a tractor to come to the school for the 31 August, in order to prepare the fields for the Napier Grass. The tractor will arrive from Awendo and plough the four acres in just one day [it’s cheaper than a cattle plough too, which is an unexpected bonus on a tight budget]. The Director has located the Napier Grass seeds as well, so I am hopeful that we will get the grass planted before the rains come- expected anytime soon. Then, at the end of the week, Friday, we visited Oria market again, and made another purchase of close to a tonne of grain. Which, this time, we successfully transported back to the grain store on Wilson’s cattle cart.

Finally, the school closed, bringing an end to a successful first term of Ondati Girls Secondary School. I was extremely pleased, and proud of how far the project had come in such a short time. But, it seems I wasn’t the only one feeling that way. The local chief, at the end of the twice annual, week-long prayer meeting announced his happiness at the progress of the secondary school. On the back of this he called a general meeting in the village the following week and declared that the community should donate bricks, timber labour and any other resources they could to the building of the second school building. At the end of the meeting he declared that he hoped all the local girl’s would be sent to the new school when the new intake begins in January. His enthusiasm was mirrored by the community themselves, who promised to help in any way they could. It is incredibly rewarding to see initial ambivalence turn to genuine excitement and community ownership. The chief had previously been unenthused by the idea of a girl’s school in Ondati, whist the fact that the local population have been promised a road, a health centre and a secondary school for over forty years, means they can be forgiven for thinking “I’ll believe it when I see it”. Now with the school tangible and classes running successfully for the first term, the population are beginning to get behind the project in a big way.

KEEPING OUT THE RATS!

July 20th.

The teachers have agreed, at the request of the students, to continue teaching throughout the August holidays in order to catch up on the lessons missed in term one. Again, this shows how the opportunity of an education is something that the students are all completely committed to.

I have collected quotes from local builders to construct the perimeter fence of the compound and to put the racks in the temporary grain store. These racks just raise the bags of the floor by about a foot to prevent damp, and also allow rat poison to be placed on the floor. Moving forward with the two primary businesses is key now and we had a committee meeting to discuss the purchase of the grain. Maize is, like in much of East Africa, the main agricultural product and almost the entire population relies on it. So, understandably, the committee suggests that our main purchase be maize grain [75%], with the rest being made up of ground nuts, millet and beans. This is all to be purchased from local markets, via an order placed with local middle-men, who will deliver the grain at an estimated cost of 5,000ksh.



On Wednesdays, at the chiefs’ request, we had a meeting to invite neighbouring communities to discuss the school. There has been apparent disquiet amongst them regarding the project, which I have been told is simply jealousy and that the same thing happened when the primary school opened. Whether this is true or not, I’m not sure, but the meeting went well. As a result of this, the Director suggested opening up the committee to include members from outside of Ondati itself [not least, because many students are sure to come from the neighbouring communities]. I’m unsure about this, as we have twelve members already [the number agreed on in the constitution], and I am worried that the committee may become overly bureaucratic. Furthermore, we would have to question the ability of someone living further away to attend regular meetings, especially if the road is flooded. I have suggested that the notion be put forward and discussed at the next committee meeting.