Educating street children in the Mathare slums

Am Latiffer, a 15 year old girl under the sponsorship of MCFpanairobi for the last 8 years and I have to say, this holiday has been one of the best ever.

We closed school for April holidays on the 3^rd of April and the next day I reported to the project. Like it is tradition, the first week is meant for settling down. It is also the week we meet as a parliament to deliberate on issues affecting us as children through the children’s parliament. A few times we have requested as leaders of our children’s parliament that we have some engagement outside the project office. As usual we submitted our ideas to the staff of MCFpanairobi. As usual we asked that we do a trip or an activity out of the office among other activities.

When we met with the staff to discuss their plans and those that we had submitted, behold; there had been a guest to the office who had kindly donated Ksh 20,000 ($200) during his walking tours in Mathare and has asked the project to spend the monies on what they deemed fit. They had finally planned to engage us in an activity outside the project environment. We only had to choose what kind of activity we wanted to be engaged in.

After long deliberations between us (children) we agreed that we needed some team building (we had quarreled a lot about what activities to engage in). The stuff had to look for somebody to take us through. Please note that this was not the only activity we engaged in, but it was my highlight. I had not attended the last trip out of the office.

The team teambuilding was to identify areas of synergy within the beneficiaries that would help us to identify the importance of working as a team and more importantly find out for ourselves the worth in life and aspire to be the best that we can be.

They broke us into groups for more competitive, fast paced games, which sought to identify various strengths within the groups and areas of improvement. These included communication games, team soccer, group races among other games. It was fun!!!

All these games we played apparently had life skills learning. For me, what I took home was on: Communication, Identification of teams and leadership and Personal Goal setting.

Thanks to our guest for making my holiday and awesome holiday. Thanks to all those who make our life better through education. May your God bless you abundantly.

Your’s Latiffer

30^th April, 2017

Links:

• Project's website