Email from Vitalice the director of Hopewell to a reporter from the Janesville Gazette...
I am Vitalice Kahendah, director of Hopewell High School in Kenya, East Africa. I am 31 years old and co-founded Hopewell with Miss. Nelly Muthui (27 yrs old) on September 25th 2000. Initially, the school was called Tumaini House School but was later taken away from us by the government in November 2003 who made it unaffordable to many kids from extremely poor families in the slums of our city and those from other hardship areas of Kenya. We then raised a little money with the help of friends, bought a 7 acre piece of land and started a fresh with our initial dream of taking poor kids through high school. This is how Hopewell High School started in January 2004.
The situation in Kenya and in many African countries is that families pay for their kids in high schools. There are two types of schools; public ones are managed by the government and private ones. The cheapest government schools, where kids come and go back home in the evenings, with no lunch provided, charge a termly fee of approximately Kenya Shillings 6000/=(US$84). In Kenya, about 60% of the population of 30 million people live on less than a single dollar per day. For most families, especially those in the urban slums and in the poor rural backyards, educating a kid in high school is pure luxury. Therefore, many families only take their kids through primary school (elementary) and the kids stop at class eight (8th grade). The only options left for such kids is to work in the farms, to serve as house girls or houseboys for rich families, or do any other menial jobs which do not require any skills or professional training. In this way, the proverbial cycle of poverty is perpetuated and those who are poor continue becoming even poorer.
It is here that Hopewell comes in. After completing my university studies in April 1998, I linked up with Nelly and Mr. Rashid Sawe to found Hopewell as a charitable education centre where poor boys and girls would get free high school education. I personally got involved for two reasons:
I came from an extremely large and poor family where taking more than one meal in a day was a luxury. In spite of the harsh conditions during my elementary school years, I performed very well in the primary school qualifying exams, ranked 2nd in the school district which sat over 100,000 kids and got a full scholarship to the top national school in Kenya, Starehe Boys Centre in Nairobi. This was the only school in Eastern Africa that was taking in bright but poor boys and educating them for free. At Starehe, I was provided with everything from clothing, adequate food and premier education that made me qualify to study BSc. Food Science at one of the top local public universities, again on scholarship. On completing university studies, I decided that the best way to pay back to the kind people (sponsors and donors who maintain Starehe) who made my education possible, was to found a school where poor boys and girls, like me would realize their academic potential and make a contribution in national development;
Secondly, I realized that there were many kids like me who were not realizing their potential just because they couldn’t afford the high cost of education and training in Kenya. Instead, the kids of the rich are the only ones accessing higher education, while those from poor households drop out. And if the poor kids were given a chance, they would perform equally well.
Nelly came from a middle class family and her parents were already supporting the education of several poor relatives in government schools. Supporting this school program would ease financial pressure at home.
Nelly, a friend and just preparing to join university, readily got in the mix and we started right away with the little savings I got from my first job as a teaching assistant at a local school and the little that Nelly borrowed from her parents.
We approached the Nakuru Municipal Council who allowed us to use 2 rooms at the their social centre as initial classes. We reached out to former college friends whom we asked to donate an hour of their time for free daily to teach. Getting kids wasn’t a problem and we received 26 on the day one of opening our doors from local social welfare offices and churches. The school grew rapidly and we had to look for adequate room for expansion. A local community, Barut, allowed us to use their spacious social centre. This is where Darleen and Eldon Johnson found us in 2002 struggling to make ends meet. Tumaini is Kiswahili word for hope and that’s how we christened the first school. We got more volunteers to teach and by November 2003, the school already had 600 kids, 22 volunteer teachers and was already receiving assistance mainly from the Johnsons in terms of school supplies, clothing and something small for the teachers to take home...Kshs.1,000 (US$13). It is at this time that the government took over and turned it into a public school, with a requirement that all kids pay school fees. Many kids dropped out, and that’s when we started Hopewell again, to realize the same vision and mission.
At present we have 760 boys and girls distributed into forms I, II, III & IV. Each class is further divided into 4 streams with each stream having about 50 kids. They learn in makeshift classrooms made of iron sheets (both walls and windows) with no doors or windows. We have dirt floors, although some are packed with stones/gravel to lessen the effect of dust especially during the current dry spell.
Hopewell needs everything! Permanent classrooms would provide a conducive learning environment. Provision of curricular textbooks would improve the quality of teaching and learning at Hopewell and make Hopewell kids compete effectively with students in other schools during national exams. Delivery of science equipment would further improve the learning of science. Adequate and quality food to these kids would effectively produce better learners in them. A properly fed kid would not only be healthy, but would be more attentive, responsive and active both in class and co-curricular activities like sports. For most of our kids, the small lunch they get in school is virtually the only meal they get in 24 hours...especially during this period when drought is biting hard and food is very scarce. And improved remuneration for our 24 teachers would greatly boost their morale. At present, each of the teachers receives about Kshs. 2,800/=(US$40), thanks to the effort of the Johnsons through their Sponsor A Teacher Program.
Wrestling the World coming to support us is the greatest miracle that has happened to our city in ages. By helping fund our water treatment (defluoridation plant), clean potable water would reach the nearly 45,000 (half the community population) currently getting water from the school borehole. The water being used now has a high content of fluoride and may affect young kids in the long term...skeletal fluorosis and teeth scaling. Supporting cultivation of a school farm is the much-needed wherewithal to catalyze the overall process of teaching and learning. This would not only boost morale but would stem school dropout rate. Several bright kids drop out purely due to hunger and absolute poverty back home. If we get good harvest, we could be able to give small rations to excessively desperate families whose kids are learners at Hopewell.
Students are very excited about this August visit and can’t wait for August to reach. It is a key component of our daily prayers in the morning and evening school assembly. We pray for the success of the various activities being organized to raise this colossal sum of money.
The pen pal arrangement is just starting and I am expecting replies to letters Hopewell students sent out. Phill has told me the replies are on the way. Through this correspondence, our kids would definitely get a wider understanding of life in the US, family situations, culture differences. It is actually a learning experience and I personally look forward to more exposed kids at Hopewell, who can at least engage in some informed discussion about life in the US in general, and Wisconsin in particular.
In the letters, the kids mostly talk about themselves, their backgrounds (families), their school and about their dreams in life. And a few attempt to teach the pen pals our local national language...Kiswahili.
Wrestling the World’s mission will help establish Hopewell High School as a permanent centre where poor boys and girls from our city of Nakuru and other hardship areas of our country Kenya, will perpetually get academic refuge and get foster care with the love and attention that they most need. What Wrestling the World is doing is practically showing love to fellow human kind who are in need…and we are truly in need! It is loving your neighbor as thyself.
For the people reading the article in Janesville Gazette, I wish to sincerely tell them that by supporting Wrestling the World’s mission to Kenya, they will be directly helping an African child to get out of the bonds of poverty by providing a fishing rod (education) which will forever help these kids get fish (get an income to survive), for education is one of the single most effective ways of combating poverty which again is the root cause of many vices, including thuggery, prostitution and general insecurity. By supporting the education of these 760 kids, the reader will be rest assured that there are at least 760 Kenyans who will never plot to hurt/bomb a single American because they would have learnt practically that Americans care! And they really do, I know for sure.
God bless you.
VITALICE
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