Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page. Please watch the video first - click on 'My video' underneath the picture to the left.

My family and I first came into contact with Sasenyi Primary School in southern Kenya when we went on a volunteering holiday in August 2009. Sasenyi is a village situated inside a wildlife conservation area, a ranch which also forms an important wildlife corridor adjacent to Tsavo National Park. The village is very poor, even though the ranch does provide some wildlife ranger / tourism jobs for the locals.  The villagers live in mud and dung-walled and grass-roofed huts, and have few if any possessions to speak of. This region is semi-arid at the best of times, and as you may have seen, East Africa has been suffering extreme drought recently, so there has been no rain for nine or ten months now. The rivers have dried up, the arable crops are all dead, and the boreholes are salted up to more than 1000 times our recommended level of magnesium in water. Nevertheless, village life continues, though the hardships are evident. Water has to be carried from 20km away and nearly all food comes from charitable donations (we saw a number of sacks from the UK!). The people are pinning their hopes on the rains which are due soon.

The village school, however, seems to be thriving. Primary education in Kenya became freely available to all earlier this decade, so there are many children of all ages (up to 20 years old, though this is an outlier) going through the education system. At Sasenyi, there are 650 children coming from a catchment area with a radius of 7km. The village has 11 classrooms, but only 8 of them are safe (others at risk of collapse due to poor construction and erosion) so the government only provides 8 teachers – this means an average class size of over 80, though some will be over 100. The school day is long – 7.30am to 5pm, and the kids walk up to 7km to get there. Since this is a wildlife sanctuary, and there are LOTS of elephants, the kids have to keep their eyes open for herds on their way to and from school! The children seem to learn pretty much the same sort of stuff that our children do, though they learn in three languages – the local tribal language, Luo (which is generally not written down), Kiswaheli and English. The academic results are better than the average for the area, even though the village is much poorer than some others. The discipline is remarkable, though concentration apparently drops in late morning because many children are only fed at school, at lunchtime – there is often nothing available at home for breakfast or dinner.

It’s difficult not to want to help these people. They lead such a hard life, but their attitude is fantastic. Everyone smiles a lot, and there seem to be few if any complaints. All the children want to learn – they know that it’s their only route out of poverty. There is a strong link with Camp Kenya, part of Camps International, a UK-based charitable trust which assists with development in various ways in this part of Kenya and several others too. We would rely on Camp Kenya to supervise construction.

We can support their education and help with basic sustenance at the same time. We would like to raise funds for the following projects:

·         Supply desks for the new classrooms which we completed (~£20 per desk) - about 70 required

·         Plumbing to harvest rainwater from the roof into the tanks and to the kitchen (£200)

·         Complete the girls’ toilets – girls tend to miss one week of school per month because of the lack of facilities

·         Replacement or reconstruction of the older classroom blocks. This will include the safe demolition of the room which is falling down. (£4,000 per classroom)

There are so many things which we take for granted which are not available to the people of Sasenyi. Even a small amount of money can make a huge difference to this community, so I urge you to donate what you can - and please don't forget Gift Aid!
Many thanks for reading all of this! Andy