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Interview with Meshack Oduke, acting director of the primary school of the Riruta Free Methodist Church (about 6 kms from downtown Nairobi) Meshack attended the conference last year and is the secretary of the follow-up committee.
Background:
Meshack is chairman of the youth group of the church and chair of the social service ministry within the church. Before last year's conference, the church elders and youth got together to discuss the problems in their village, Kagishu.
Kagishu is a slum and means knife in Swahili. "You don't pass there from six in the evening without "getting a knife," Meshack said. The church leadership thought of changing the name of the community to help get rid of the bad connotation in the village name. So they began calling the immediate community around the church, "Riruta." This is from a Kikuyu word, which means, "remove."
The church has been in the community for five years. The church began a nursery before last year's conference. The nursery had 13 children and parents paid 50 shillings (less than one dollar) a month to have their children there. The church had tried for two years to use the nursery as an outreach and a means to of evangelism but the nursery wasn't growing and neither was the church which had an average attendance of nine people.
Meshack's Report:
After the conference we as a church we felt that the community needed to be changed. There was a lot of theft and thuggery there. We felt that a primary school would help make the difference. We started with the 13 children in the nursery but felt there were about 50 more children in the community we should help. After enrolling the 13 in the new school, we looked for the others.
In one year we have grown to 480 kids. We decided to have four classes according to age and previous school experience. Some kids had gone to school but had stopped because they couldn't afford school fees. At first the enrollment went to 510 but we weren't able to handle that many so we reduced it to 480 kids. We are still reducing but we have been advised to not reduce further because the community might look at this as a bad thing.
In the beginning we recruited 3 volunteer teachers - teachers who had finished Secondary School. These three included myself and two others. We needed more teachers and so we looked for funding to hire teachers. We looked for people within the church to sponsor at least one child. We also got some of our Free Methodist brothers from abroad to help us.
As some of our brothers from America visited us we told them about the program and they took the story and the names of our kids back home. We now have 278 children sponsored. 150 are sponsored by Free Methodists abroad. About 60 are sponsored by the local church members and other Kenyans. There are other Kenyan Christians who have committed but haven't started to support kids yet. We now have 10 teachers and a social worker that investigates the need of the children before they are accepted in the school.
At the time we went there the village people didn't want to associate themselves with us. When we were building the school (walls and roof from iron sheets) the people from the community would come at night and take them because they felt the school wasn't theirs. So, we employed a night guard - one we felt was among the worst people in the community and who had just released from prison. Then we started building a fence and recruiting kids from the community. No one pulled the fence down. We have even piped for water in the school and were afraid that the people of the community would take the pipes too but I was there this morning and everything is working well.
Without our going to talk to the people they have come to the church and many have been saved. Before the school started the church was about 9 people in size. Now we have 250.
We are now thinking of a school motto. I am thinking of four possibilities. Want to take these four to the people and get their input. Here are the possibilities. "Work and serve for excellence." "God is light to success." "God is our light." "For God we serve for excellence." The school is only for the little ones - 4 years to 16 years. We have five standards (classes) now and in three years we will have the full primary - 8 grades. The young people (18-23 years) of the church are helping us but there is no program for them. Now I have a vision to develop something for them. For example, I want to start a polytechnic. Many of these young people are dropouts because they couldn't pay the fees for secondary school and they are too old for our primary program.
In our youth rallies we are teaching the lessons that we learned at the conference last year.
A current concern is the educational expertise of the teachers. Only one of us is trained as a teacher. Even though I have been serving as acting director I need to get training myself and I have stepped down so the one of us who has teacher training can be the director and I plan to go to get training. I am going to Kampala (Kenya has closed teacher training because there is no money to pay more teachers) for an in-service training from a private Christian university (Church of Uganda). I go next month for three weeks. One quarter of my fees are paid and I need 88,000 Shillings (less the 22,000 I already have) to be able to go. This is for six terms of three weeks each.
September 2000 Update
A year ago I told you about a young man, Meshack, who had come to my room in Nairobi to tell me what had happened in his community. You may remember he was a member of a very small fellowship (13 members and +/- 20 attendees) in a very poor slum called "The Knife" in Swahili. After the Vision Conference in 1998, he encouraged his church to start a school in this community where many kids can't afford school fees.
This tiny group of believers responded. Three of them volunteered to teach even though none had formal teacher training. They opened school with thirty-some kids in the 10 X 10-foot room where the church met for worship. Within one year the school grew to several hundred students with a staff of ten. The church had grown to more than 200. The growth was not from traditional evangelistic efforts but from the church's concern for community children.
Now the update:
(Meshack came to the Uganda conference because he passed through Jinja on his way to one of six month-long teacher-training courses in Uganda.) Since last year the school has grown to more than 600 children. It has twenty paid staff. Half of the financial support for the school comes from local Kenyan Christians who "sponsor" kids that could not otherwise afford school fees. Further, the church has planted two other congregations.
And, the community has a new name. What a story! All of us were humbled by what we heard. Pray for this church and for Meshack as he studies for his teachers certification. |
