The Bethany School

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to visit The Bethany School which is located in a slum right outside Nairobi. The children all come from homes of very little means. To give one prospective we visited a home of one of the kids who attends The Bethany School, the house was one room and smaller than most of our bedrooms. They do not have a toilet in the house and have to use a public toilet. The Bethany School was started by a teacher when 5 of his students were unable to pay anymore for their education. The Bethany School is completely free for the students. In addition, to the schools fees getting paid for the children get 3 meals a day, which other wise they might not get. There are about 400 kids and 20 teachers. The school is definitely not big enough for all the kids but the problem is to buy land is to expensive. The school gets support from The Watumull Family Children Fund. The founder Chitra Watumull Wright is actually a family friend of one of the girls on my semester. The Watumull Family Children Fund also provide sanitary napkins for girls so that they do not have to drop out of school when they get their period, which is very common for girls in Kenya do to embarrassment. The unitary kits last the girls 4 years and they also get a sex education talk which otherwise they would not relieve. Finally they give the boys a talk about the right way to treat women. We got to meet Chitra the founder when we went to the school and she helped to show us around.

Schools in Kenya are closed for summer break which just started this week. This didn’t stop the kids from showing up to school yesterday to meet us. About 130 kids came to school on their day off to play with us. They greeted us with a song. After that we were paired up and split into different classrooms to read to the kids. After my friend read one book to them I decided to teach them songs that I learned in preschool and from my mom. The kids loved them and I had so much fun signing and dancing with them. Signing and dancing is such a huge part of Kenyan culture I was glad I could some songs from my own education. I also got to play with bubbles and jump rope with the kids.

Something that was really cool for me was seeing the core values of the school painted on the wall as you walked in. They had Responsibility and Honesty on the wall, which are also two of the core values of Flint Hill School where I went to school from K-12. For me this showed that even a world a way schools are teaching the kids the same principles. Once again proving we aren’t as different as we think we tend to think.

A video of the school

This is a video of the song I taught them