Diary - The Latest Entry
On this page, we would like to bring all news about the school and its surroundings. The page is up dated from time to time. Old news will not be erased, so that we have something like a project diary.
You will find the preceding entries of the Diary here. If you want to be updated about our project regularly please subscribe to our Watoto Newsletter.
| Nov 2009 |
It's been almost a year since an entry has been
added to this diary. This is of course far too long and therefore regular
up-dates will be added in the future, but in shorter form. On the first page of
the homepage under the title "Top Issues" all the interesting headlines will be
published. The headline themes will be forwarded in length to our newsletter
subscribers. Never before within our 16-year history have we experienced a year with so many events - both positive and negative. We have learnt that a crisis can also provide a good basis for positive developments. When looking back at the events during the unrest at the end of 2007, many things have turned out to be quite encouraging and less disastrous than we had initially feared. And so it came to be that due to the difficulty of food supplies that we will be able to supply our children with produce for the most part from our own farm on from 2010. The farm should be able to guarantee its produce at low cost even if the market prices start to explode. During the crisis teachers and pupils have come to understand that academic performance is the key to the future. They put all their effort into performance and were able to achieve very good results once again. For the second time running the Mekaela Academies did very well in the KCSE exams of the year 2008, so well that the best boy and best girl were able to earn a scholarship from the Equity Bank. The bank's scholarship programme guarantees support for their studies as well as a job within the bank. That's almost like winning the lottery for these two lucky pupils. Thanks to the kind support of HelpAlliance from Lufthansa the MAS/HPS dining hall and kitchen were able to be completed. Approximately 600 pupils are able to enjoy a hot meal every day without it having to be carted all the way from the LPS. Now we are able to start planning to turn the HPS into a boarding school, however we are in need of dorms (and a few more classrooms). With a bit of luck this might be achieved by the end of 2010, which would be of great relief for the parents of MAS and HPS pupils. Once the HPS is fully constructed we will have approx. 2000 children attending our schools – presently there are approx. 1500. In October Watoto was granted the DZI donation seal. Now we have it officially and in writing: Watoto's administrative costs are clearly lower than 1% per year and these costs are carried and refunded by the members of Watoto. For those of you able to understand German and are interested, you are able to read this on the DZI homepage. One small disadvantage of the donation seal is however, that the DZI statutes require us not to show all children in need of a sponsorship, but permits us to show only one child as an example. Only under this condition were we able to be granted with the donation seal. If we are lucky we might be able to have solarpower at three of our schools next year. The company Phoenix Solar AG in Bavaria has taken heart and is determined to help us with energy supply. As well as the equipment hardware, Phoenix Solar has promised to send us a technician to Kenya to assist the installation and to give our technicians a helping hand. We can also envision the possibility of offering other people our expertise and know-how much later who are interested in solar technology in Kenya. There is also something not so nice to mention (and this is more than an under-statement): Frank will not be available for our project for a very long time. Having suffered a stroke a couple of months ago he is now fighting hard to recuperate and is in a rehabilitation centre. How well he will recover is still very much in the dark. This is very hard for us to comprehend and is an inconceivable fate. After all Frank has been together with us since day one and is one of the biggest pillars and soul of our project. It makes the mentioning of this next subject seem quite profound. The school fees were increased by 10% (in Kenya Shilling) this year. As the Euro has increased in value compared to the Kenya Shilling, we were able to sustain the fees in Euro without an increase. Due to the better exchange rate we have therefore changed our conversion from 85/= Kenya Shilling to 95/= in value. |
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© Watoto e.V. 2009 |