Home Sweet Home!

I can hardly believe that I am finally in Kenya! A year and a half later and I am finally here. In December 2010 I completed my degree in Elementary Education at the University of Maine Farmington. In January, I said goodbye to the most amazing seventh graders at Skowhegan Area Middle School, packed my bags, and set out for Mangu, Kenya where I will be spending the next three months volunteer teaching at Mema Secondary School. While volunteering at the high school located a mile and a half away, I will be staying in the JWHS children's home. This is a home for street children. There are currently eight children in the home and three children at boarding school. The children's home is run by the NGO Expanding Opportunites, which I came over with.

Welcome to the JWHS children's home!

Lauren, Emom, Amos, and me!

Lauren we miss you!

Mema Secondary School is a government day school for nearly four hundred students in the small, rurual village of Mangu. The classes are divided into girls classes and boys classes for each grade. I will be teaching Form 1 West (Freshman boys), Form 2 East and West (Sophomore girls and boys), Form 3 East and West (Junior girls and boys), and Form 4 West (Senior boys). I teach English even though my qualification is in social studies. Mema will not allow me to teach social studies since we do not teach CRE or bible study in the United States.

Mema Secondary School

 Here is the staff room. Instead of teachers having their own classroom

they all have a desk in the staff room. There are 13 teachers desks.

Correcting papers! There are always stacks and stacks of papers to correct, 

especially with class sizes around 40!

Given only four different forms of the English student textbook, Head Start Secondary English, and nothing else I was considered ready to teach. Shocked to find that the school library contains only student copies of the subject textbooks and back newspapers but nothing else. There are no other teaching supplies like crayons, colored pencils, or construction paper. There are no manipulatives, no pictures, and no posters. Classrooms are empty except for forty-forty five used desks, a few windows with bars on them, and a chalkboard. There are no book shelves, no globes, no computers, no charts, no projectors, or anything else except dust. 

Here are my Form 3 girls!

Everything about Mema is different. Students do chores before and after class. Chores include sweeping and moping the outside corridors, milk the school cows, pump water, etc. Students are required to wear school uniforms when they go to class. They remain in the same classroom all day and the subject teachers are the ones who switch classes! 

The gates of Mema! The motto is "Shine All Round"

I'm so excited to be volunteer teaching here!