You say Matatu, I say No!

A little bit of information on the children’s centre: Francis founded the centre in 2004. Francis’ father was himself an orphan and had often told Francis how being taken in by a children’s home saved his life. It became Francis’ vision to provide the same future to orphan and destitute children in Kenya. The centre is now home to twelve children and also pays the school fees for two other children. The centre receives some donor funding however the general running costs and upkeep of the centre are often met by Francis himself using the profits from the Herbal Medical clinic which he runs.

The centre is doing fantastic work but wants to do more! To that end they are in the process of building a primary school in an adjacent field, which Francis was able to buy last year by selling his car. The nursery, which is currently run in the hallway of the centre, will be moved here once building is complete. The aim is to provide as many free or subsidised places as possible to local families facing financial difficulty. Francis’ wife Lydia is currently undertaking teacher training so that she can work at the school and manage it as it expands. I am sure she will make an excellent teacher; I don’t think I’ve ever met someone with such unfailing patience and an ever-present smile!

Saturday marked my first weekend at the centre and was spent shopping! For once however the shopping was not for me and was instead to buy new school uniforms, shoes and stationery for the children. Each child has one pair of school shoes to last them for the year, which has really put my, ahem, small (!) shoe collection into perspective.
Each Sunday Francis holds a service at the Centre, which involves a lot of singing (to which I happily clapped along). In the afternoon after visiting two of Francis’ children in boarding school Francis got me to take some photos of the children wearing their new uniforms and shoes to send to the people who had donated the money to buy them. This resulted in more than an hour of the kids photographing themselves striking various poses (‘gangster’ seems to be quite popular!), until it was too dark to continue.
The progress of the accountancy work had become frustratingly slow by Friday as Francis was too busy sorting out school fees etc. for the beginning of term to complete much of his training. I felt pretty bad on Monday when I insisted that we work until the cashbook entries for December were finished. Luckily by Wednesday the pace had picked up, and Francis is now happy to leave me in the back office getting on with things as he runs his multiple errands.

On a less positive note I have discovered that my personal hell is a matatu. More specifically, eight hours of matatus in one day including driving past a fatal crash between another matatu and a car. On Tuesday I experienced my personal hell on a journey to and from Nairobi. This included a good half hour stretch each way on a road that has more potholes than tarmac!  Francis and I had travelled to Nairobi to meet a radio presenter who will hopefully soon be promoting the Children’s Centre on air (with Francis as a guest). Nairobi is a very busy and very dusty city with areas of poverty and affluence right next to each other… so it’s very similar to London, though with a few extra open-air rubbish tips.

The Baraka Children’s Centre

The Children’s Centre is home to 12 children who have either been orphaned or cannot be looked after by their parent(s) due to family difficulties.  The centre is built in a compound which also contains Francis’ house, a small maize field, a chicken house, a cow and a partly-constructed school.  On arrival at Francis’ house I was greeted by his wife Lydia and their two youngest children, Abigael (4) and Elivin (3).  Francis and Lydia have two other boys who are both at boarding school.  Attending boarding school is apparently fairly normal for children in Kenya once they reach the age of 11, though I think the schools are quite different from the boarding schools that I have audited in England!

I am sharing my bedroom with Abigael, who sleeps in a cot covered with a blanket at the end of my bed.  Francis, Lydia and Eilvin sleep in the only other bedroom in the house.  The house also has a living room, a kitchen, a loo (hole in the ground, but a flushable one!) and a shower (hot!).

After being shown my room Francis took me to meet the children at the Centre, which is effectively at the bottom of his garden.  There are six girls and six boys at the moment, ranging in age from three to nineteen They each told me their name, what year they are in at school and their ‘vision’ (what they want to do when they grow up).  Their ‘visions’ were impressive and included two neurosurgeons and three engineers.  My favourite was the five year old girl who wants to be a pilot – much more impressive than my vision at that age which was to be a hairdresser and housewife with a white volvo and a golden retriever (where did I go wrong?!).

After a tasty dinner of chapattis, potatoes and something green I got an early night in preparation for starting work the next day…

After waking up and eating breakfast (a margarine sandwich) Francis, Jennifer (one of the children at the centre) and I walked the 15 minutes, through a field of cows, to the main road to catch a matatu to Nyeri.  Matatus are Nissan minibuses in various states of disrepair that are driven with sometimes questionable levels of proficiency between the main towns in Kenya, picking people up and dropping them off on their way.  I have not yet perfected the art of getting in and out gracefully.  The view on the walk to the main road is stunning despite the cows and their byproducts as you can see the Aberdare mountains in front of you and Mount Kenya, the highest mountain in Kenya, behind.