Supporting UNITED KENYA RISING IN KAKAMEGA, KENYA

JULY 2021 NEWSLETTER

Covid-19 update, Care Centre's final graduating class, high school students impress, Rotary Global Grant, demo farms, Family Care success story, and April's photos of the month.

The coronavirus has caused suffering across the whole world, and Kenya is no different. 

A third wave of the virus in Kenya peaked in April and has since only slightly tailed off, with new case numbers still much higher than the previous two post-peak lulls. And there is also now a hotspot in western Kenya where we work.  

New foreign Covid-19 variants are spreading in Kenya, which is quite worrisome. The biggest impact on most people, however, is still economic.

At the end of May, Kakamega and twelve other hotspot counties in the western and Lake Victoria region were placed under an emergency 7pm curfew to contain the spread of Covid-19. The spread seems partially contained but numbers are still higher than before in our region. 

Mass vaccination is on hold as Kenya stares at a shortage of vaccines. Many of the roughly 1.5 million Kenyans who got their first dose are not yet able to get a second shot due to the shortage, and there are little to no vaccines available for anyone else. It may be a very long time before vaccination in Kenya is widespread, but there is hope of several million doses arriving in August to help more of the most at-risk people.

In April, we celebrated the excellent results from our last class of 12 eighth-grade students living at the Care Centre. We look forward to supporting these primary school graduates as they join various high schools across western Kenya at the end of July.

For those who may wonder what we mean by “last class,” we can clarify that indeed the Care Centre residential program has now been fully phased out. In line with our shift to Family Care and a global movement to reintegrate orphans with their families, we will no longer run a residential program. This has been in the works for a number of years now, with a gradual phase-out beginning in 2018, and it is a proud moment for all of us. By assisting entire families we can use resources more efficiently, help more children, and keep families together.

Twenty years ago families in Kenya were stressed by the HIV epidemic. As many of you know we formed an organization with Kenyan partners at that time to address children’s needs for food, housing and education. Since that time, the powerful resilience of Kenyan families has become apparent to us. In addition, schools and medical resources have improved in Kenya, as has our capacity to effectively serve children out in villages, through their families. We feel fortunate to have the wisdom of our Kenyan partners who have guided our organization’s  pivot to supporting families as they rise out of poverty and provide the best care possible for all children in their homes.

You can learn more about the reasons for this shift from Changing the Way We Care​. It is not a sad moment at all, but instead a time to celebrate. Our partner in Kenya has become a leader in providing Family Care, and in fact it’s been highlighted as such by the membership network of children’s homes known as Association of Charitable Children’s Institutions in Kenya (ACCIK). In fact, this shift and the consequent ability to support more children and keep families together makes our program a role model. Our staff in Kenya have already hosted a number of learning visits from children’s homes and orphanages in western Kenya who wish to learn from our Family Care model and copy it. 

Meanwhile, our main Care Centre building and nearby dormitory are now available for us to host workshops, retreats, and mini-camps.  We won’t be holding group events until it is safe to do so vis-a-vis Covid-19, but we eagerly await that time. Our buildings also host offices for a growing field staff who work in areas like social work, agriculture, and education.

We are proud of our past and even more excited about our future as a model organization that supports children and youth in great need by working to assist their families as they rise above poverty. 

In May we received the results of 38 sponsored students who sat their senior-year high school exams. The exercise, called Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE), is an exhausting three-weeks of tests that cover everything students learned in their four years of high school.  

The results were extraordinary! Out of 38 students, a full 15 qualified for partial government scholarships to join university. This is more than a third of all our new graduates, nearly double the national average, receiving “direct entry” to university despite facing hardships and challenges in life that are hard for us to put into words.  

Our top scorer Anne, who aspires to become a doctor, was in the top 1% of national results and will likely be admitted to medical school just as she dreamed.  Meanwhile, Caleb and Samuel scored in the top 3% nationwide and are expected to be admitted to their dream courses as well. 

Through the generosity of a bequest that we received late last year, we will be offering scholarship support to all of the 15 students admitted to university, and we will be able to offer all the other high school grads scholarships to one-year vocational training programs.

We want to offer heartfelt congratulations to all of our recent high school grads for a job well done, and kudos as well to our staff members Lydia, Grace, and Ben who work tirelessly in our Education Department to see that the students we support had the encouragement and resources they needed for such an incredible result in their exams. 

After two years of hard work, we recently received approval for a Rotary Global Grant that will help 120 families undergo an extensive agriculture business training program and then start new farm businesses. Those who will benefit are families that we’ve been supporting for some time, and we look forward to them  earning enough so that they begin to phase out of our programs, making space for new families. 

Click to READ MORE on our website.​ 

We are excited to announce the launch of a central demonstration farm in Kakamega Town and more than ten smaller-scale, regional demonstration farms hosted by families in our programs. These demonstration plots will enable our agriculture staff to teach about new techniques, crops, and methods to families we support, helping them grow more food for nutrition and profit. 

Special thanks to the Diakonient Foundation for providing seed funding to launch our demo farms, and to local Kakamega businessman Ramesh Kotecha for letting us use a prime plot of land that’s central and accessible. 

We will share more about our demo farms in future newsletters.

We hope to share a Family Care success story in every newsletter. This time, we’re sharing the story of a widow named Naomi and her family of four children. 

Originally we only sponsored the youngest girl from this family, a sixth grader named Sareen. But after shifting to Family Care we are now assisting the whole family as they rise out of poverty. 

It’s a success story because the family now have several income-generating ventures to support themselves. These include a small shop in the village market, and also a growing farm business. They have  dug a water well and they’re part-way through building a new latrine. Perhaps most importantly, they now have a strong and realistic belief that all the children will get the education they deserve, and that they’ll all be able to create the kinds of adult lives that they wish to lead.  

Click here to read a longer version of this family’s success story.

Every month we make one album of the best photos that our staff take during their work.  We then vote on these to come up with the Top Ten photos for each month. 

Click here​ to view April’s photos of the month. 

Support more family success stories:

www.friendsofkenyarising.org