Nan's donation to Senior Chief Onunga School for the Deaf

My Nan, Marjorie, entrusted me with a couple of hundred pounds to put towards a worthy cause during my 6 months in Kisumu, Kenya. I decided to donate it to the Senior Chief Onunga School for the Deaf.

The school is situated on the edge Nyalenda - the second largest slum in Kenya. They teach the state school curriculum, with 5 teachers, one unpaid volunteer to 25 deaf students.

All the students are fully deaf; half are Orphans and most live in the slum. Before the school opened in 2011 some of these kids suffered abuse as, due to their disability, they are perceived as less valuable. The school not only educates the kids but also sensitizes the community towards understanding the importance of treating them fairly and understanding their disability.

Students, Staff and me showing off much of the donation

Courtesy of the government, their current budget per student for teaching materials and other costs is 1500 Kenyan shillings, which is about 12 British pounds, per year (although students under 7 years old receive no funding at all). In addition to this meager budget the school survives on donations from the church and individuals in the community.

The school has numerous challenges such as: no water supply, no electricity, no computers, lack of teaching and learning resources, lack of dormitories, classrooms and school van. In fact with some additional investment in capacity they could easily attract 75+ more deaf children, from Nyalenda slum, who currently don’t go to any school at all.

In consultation with the Head teacher, Jane, and teacher, Barack, based upon our budget and their priorities we invested in the below items…

Students using the new laptops

• 4 mini laptops with pre installed learning aids and games designed for deaf children
• Fee’s to switch on the electricity
• 60 Exercise books
• Geometry equipment
• Coloring pens and pencils
• Atlases
• Dictionaries 
• Text books
• A Football & Colour co-ordination games
• Office supplies (staples, stapler, pens)
• A Kettle (currently they must build a fire to boil water to make a cup of tea!)

Mr Collins Otieno Okeyo (Education director for the National council for children’s services) was present to officially accept the donation, and on behalf of my Nan I was pleased to receive a letter of appreciation from the Head teacher, see it scanned at the bottom of this blog. It goes to show how a relatively small amount of money for us Westerners can make a very big difference to those working for a worthy cause, on a tight budget.

Following a meeting with the Village chief a seed was planted… Rachel (my colleague), Melanie and I were looking into a micro-financing project for people, living on less than $1 per day, in Nyanza (Kenya’s poorest and most HIV/AIDs affected region), to start their own businesses. He advised growing onions, watermelon, keeping chickens and goats, and finally dairy cows…

Kids at the Omen Feeding Centre

Dairy cows produce 10+ litres of milk a day, local Cows in Nyanza produce 1 litre. Dairy cows are not popular here due to high cost and lack of awareness that they produce so much milk. We decided to pilot a dairy cow investment for the Omen feeding centre (they provide daily meals for 75 orphaned kids - free of charge). The Milk will be drunk by the kids and also sold to pay for their food, the main risk is that the cows are not fed and watered well and don’t produce enough milk. Surely this risk was worth it as if the project works we can be sure it should be promoted across the region.

After speaking with 2 schools in the region that kept dairy cows with little effort, we became more encouraged that the project could work, although coming from Suburban London we had to learn cow lingo to understand what people were talking about : ‘serving’ a cow ‘showing heat’ means getting a bull to do the business with a horny cow!

Lending a hand to the construction efforts!

Building the Cow accommodation was next, I sketched a plan – which I thought was pretty good, but after we bought the wood, nails, roof and paid a local fundi (Kenyan odd job person) to build it, the finished version wasn’t similar to the original plan! They didn’t give a reason but probably didn’t want to hurt my feelings in that my plan was rubbish! Then we set off for the rift valley -  4 hours away, here we agreed on 2 healthy cows with good credentials (their mother produced lots of milk).

Cows arriving

The cows arrived last week, christened by their former owners as Melony and Rachel, Kenyan’s sometimes struggle with the name Melanie! Although the second cow didn’t look like the one that we agreed on we were very relieved to finally have the cows. The team at the feeding centre will be taking care of the cows and milking them as soon as their calf’s come, in May and July.

Wish them luck, there is a long way to go but if successful we will try to introduce more dairy cows in this part of Kenya!

Omen Feeding/Dairy Centre Team