Home Visits or Not

On the bus to Kiserian, then home!

Today is the day the girls who are going on home visits for the holiday take off. They packed up and left this morning. Most of the girls do have families - if not parents, then grandmothers, aunts, uncles, older brothers and sisters. Others will go stay with friends of Hekima Place. For example, two of the girls will stay with one of the members of our Board of Trustees. Others will stay with Hekima Place ‘mums’ who are taking their vacation. The girls will be away visiting for a couple of weeks while they’re out of school.
The little ones are picked up by family members and the older ones are driven into Kiserian where they connect with public transit to travel to where their families live.

Some are staying here - about 36 of them. In November at the end of this school year according the the Kenyan education system, the Form 4 girls (high school seniors) will have major comprehensive exams covering everything they’ve been taught in 4 years of secondary school. The test results will determine which, if any, college or university program they can hope to enter. The pressure is intense. So they will be staying here to be tutored in math, chemistry, physics and biology to help prepare them for their exams. Hekima Place has hired two experienced secondary teachers to coach them for the next two weeks.

The Standard 8 (8th graders) also have major exams to take at the end of the school year. The results of their exams will determine what secondary school they will be accepted into. They will be staying here for the holidays as well with Mr. Kinyua tutoring them. He is a former Standard 8 teacher and the Hekima staff person who coordinates the education of the girls.

Some of the secondary school girls will be staying here because their grades haven’t been up to par and they need to be doing some catch-up work. Rick and I will be working with them each morning during their school holiday.

There are a few of the girls who just don’t have any place to go, especially some of the newest babies who’ve come here since the first of the year. These babies and toddlers were abandoned as infants and we have no idea who their families are.

Finally, with 65 girls there’s always some problems and all is not sweetness and light. One child is staying here as punishment for bad behavior in school. This girl is very cute and very bright, but has been on an unfortunate track recently. Hopefully this will get through to her that she needs to exercise more self control. She has been fighting with her sisters and classmates and using bad language (in Kiswahili, yet!). She also managed to lose 4 of her exercise books where she has all her homework for the year thus far. Two of the other girls in her class were misbehaving at school as well, but after  they were reprimanded, their teacher reported they were doing much better.

The girls who are staying here for academic reasons did supervised independent study this morning, as they did every day this past week. They will start more organized tutorials on Monday.

But this afternoon we had some fun. Right after lunch, I took some more photographs of girls I haven’t gotten to yet. I’m slowly working my way through the list. I have generally had a very appreciative audience while I’m doing this - the crowd is good for helping to get the subjects smiling. And Rick brought ‘girlie stuff’ with him from the US for bingo prizes - very popular around here. So this afternoon we had a bingo tournament. Winners got to pick from a bag of prizes that included a wild selection of nail polish and lip gloss. Now we have girls sporting some of the most colorful finger and toenails you can imagine!



While we were playing bingo, a storm rolled in. The rainy season arrived on schedule on April 1 and since then it has rained almost every day for some part of the day. The rainy season is not just constant rain (as I feared), but storm clouds roll in, it rains for some period of time and then it stops - today it rained hard for about 2 hours. Mostly (at least so far) when it’s not raining, it’s sunny and beautiful as it was for most of the day today.

After dinner, everyone gathered in the dining hall to watch the movie Shrek.