Visiting Another School

I had the opportunity to join a few year 7's on a school trip to a school in the Kibera neighbourhood. The students had made educational posters they wanted to bring and there were some desks in the back of the truck. It was a very good place to experience. In some ways, it couldn't have been more different than Canada, but in other ways it was really the same.

We drove as far in as the truck and van could go, and then we walked the rest of the way to the school. Through out the walk, we were greeted with a chorus of "How are you? How are you?" from many cute kids. Most people were very friendly and welcoming towards us, and I got to practice a little bit of my kiswahili.

The house contruction is very innovative - some buildings were made of branches as reinforcing rod and mud as concrete, while others were made of every different kind of scrap metal you could imagine with plastic bags to fill in cracks. The colours we passed as we walked would be beautiful in an oil painting: the yellow bananas, green hills in the distance, rust on the grey metal, the array of colours painted on the houses, and the red red dirt tying everything together. I couldn't bring myself to photograph any reference pictures for a painting, however, because something about photographs felt disrespectful - it would have been as if I was reducing a person to some advertising image for an ngo. So I just walked and greeted the people I met with my shaky kiswahili.

The damage we do as humans to our world was not covered up here. At home, I make all sorts of garbage, but I put it in a neat black bag and it all disappears magically on wednesday mornings. In Kibera, the option of making our waste invisible isn't there. The smell of burning garbage sending dangerous fumes up to the ozone and the piles of plastics that will take hundreds of thousands of years to decompose in nature reminded me to pay more attention to how I treat the world that God has given us to be stewards of.

On our way to the school, we stopped at a place where people were making beautiful bone carvings. They buy the bone that would have gone to waste at a restaurant, cut it, grind it down into the desired shape, dye it and polish it. They are very skilled artisans who are not paid nearly enough for the quality of their work. I have a lovely little giraffe to show you from them when I get home.

After a bit, we arrived at the school. Three local teachers were in the middle of lessons with a group of very sweet children. A bit of a funny story - they were showing us around and telling us about the improvements that had been made - the roof had been added, the dirt floor had been replaced with a nice concrete one, etc. But the funniest improvement they pointed out was the corner of the main classroom - apparently an old woman had used to live there, and they'd finally convinced her to move out, lol. I can just picture it - this little old lady living in the corner of the school.

The school was very simple with the same architecture of the houses, so it didn't look like a Canadian school of course. But the neat thing for me was that the smiles on the kids faces and the looks in their eyes were full of the same hope and care for eachother that kids can have anywhere in the world. And maybe that's all we really need in education and in life - hopeful eyes and care for eachother.