Summary for the period of February 2021 to February 2022

During the year since February 2021 the activities of our Watu Kwa Watu Charitable Trust were more then in a similarly long period of earlier years, but have had a slightly different focus as a result of the Covid-19 pandemics.

First of all, the number of children and young adults, whom we were supporting in their studies and the start of their professional careers, has further increased.  It has in fact doubled, reaching in February 2022 close to 50 children and young adults. Pandemics-related deaths has increased the number of orphans, and has also greatly reduced the assistance by more distant relatives, who have bee

n of help earlier. Also, a number of our beneficiaries have moved to secondary and other professional education, what has considerably increased their schooling costs. Luckily, we have found generous sponsors for several of them, mainly in Germany, mainly Hansen Foundation, but also in Kenya, Poland , USA, Germany and Switzerland.   Unfortunately, however, the needs are much greater and any new sponsors would be very, very welcome and appreciated.

We have had several “success stories”, like the one of Sofia, described in the earlier post, but also a couple of disappointing developments. We will present some of them in the following posts.

The second important development was the discontinuation of almost all activities, hopefully temporary, of the Draw your Dreams program, of supporting visual art education in the poor rural school and the slum schools. The rules of social distancing, and especially time pressures resulting from the need to make up the schooling time losses in the basic school subjects, have forced the schools to reduce the priority given to visual arts education.

The third change, was the further expansion of the feeding programs in the 3 Nairobi slum schools, made necessary by the greatly reduced incomes of the families of the school children. Many of these families belong to the informal sector, earning opportunities for which have very much deteriorated. Also, some of the sponsors of the feeding programs, were forced to discontinue their assistance, hopefully temporarily.

The main sponsor of the feeding programs continues to be the African Children Haven (ACH) of Galveston, in Texas, USA, and our main partner in delivery of this program is Karuna Charitable Trust. The 3 Nairobi schools, which presently continue to be beneficiaries, are Starkid School and Rescue Center in the Githogoro slum, Overseers Education Center in Kangemi slum, and St Judah Education Center in Mathare slum. During the last 9 months the program has included feeding children in the schools, and in the case of Starkid also in the orphanage (Rescue Center). In addition, the families of the poorest students, and the families of the school teachers and staff  were receiving the food assistance to improve the overall family nutrition at home, or better to say to prevent the malnutrition and hunger. This additional program, funded by the  ACH with the Moody Foundation gr

ant  has been recently extended and expanded for another year.  Some photographs documenting this assistance, are presented in the next posts.

In addition Watu kwa Watu provides other forms of assistance to schools, including the firewood for preparation of the school meals.

Another development in the Watu kwa Watu, was our first since early 2020 visit to beneficiaries and their schools in the interior of the country (outside Nairobi) in a longer round trip in October 2021. The main stops were Njoro near Nakuru,  and Kisumu, Bondo, Mbita, Homa Bay and Migori in the Lake Victoria region. Some photographs from this trip follow below.

Some of the students met in Kisumu and in Lake Victoria region. All names have been, as usually, changed to protect privacy of  beneficiaries.

Students met ad Egerton University in Njoro near Nakuru.