Educating orphans & the disadvantaged in Kenya

Hello

We hope you are all keeping well.  

I'm pleased to provide you with an update of news and a sneak preview of our next project. 

Thanks to you and your generous support we continue to ensure that all our pupils' educational needs are met as they receive a free full time education, food, books and stationery and uniforms.  There are no other schools in our community providing this and we simply could not do this without you.

Nairobi's National Theatre

We were over the moon when we received an invitation to perform at the Kenya National Theatre during the Little Mr & Miss Kenya grand finale. What an honour!  Our budding stars really enjoyed the trip to Nairobi and performing in front of hundreds of people.  This did so much to boost their confidence as they gave an outstanding performance.  We are very proud of their achievement.   

Sports

In August ball games were reintroduced to schools. Roko 20 Academy entered a Regional Schools competition with 11 pupils.  Three of these pupils reached County level in handball, football and netball.  Well done everyone, a tremendous effort.

Agriculture

Kale and passion fruits.  Yummmm.  We are growing lots of these thanks to the help received from the parents of our sponsored pupils.   Kale is included in our lunch programme and mixed with cabbage to accompany Ugali.  The fruits are a treat to be enjoyed with lunch. 

Volunteers

Roko 20 is slowly seeing volunteers return after a long absence due to the restrictions of Covid. 

In September we hosted Carmen from Spain, who did great work helping us arrange and promote the library. As a treat for our Grade 6 pupils she funded a trip to Nairobi Animal Orphanage and Giraffe Centre.  What a great day they had! 

Gillian arrived from South Africa and contributed to helping pupils get back on track with our Learning Support Programme.  

Dan is currently with us and concentrating on improving our pupils' understanding of maths. 

Thanks to all our amazing volunteers!     

Fundraising

Menai to Menai Challenge around Angelsey in 4 days

Jonny, Volunteer and a Roko 20 Board Member, completed his challenge to trek 200 kms around Angelsey to raise money for Roko 20 Academy.  Despite challenging weather and with apprehension about finishing he raised over £2,200.  What an achievement.  Thank you! 

Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge

In 2019, Rebecca volunteered at Roko 20 and it was quite clear to her during her time with us that there was a need for a safe space for the children to stay due to the neglect suffered at home. (Read more about our new project below)

Rebecca had the idea of raising funds for us to build a boarding facility for the children to stay during the school week providing the food they need and a safe place to sleep and study.

The team at Home Instead Harrogate Ripon and Thirsk decided to take on the challenge of walking the Yorkshire Three Peaks to raise funds for this project.   They completed this on 1st October.  Having set a target of £2,500 they managed to raise a grand total of £3,027.  Thank you so much everyone for your tremendous effort.    

Our next project 

More often now we are hearing reports of the neglect and abuse of some of our pupils.  Children as young as 6 years old are locked out of their homes for long periods of time and left to fend for themselves.  Older children have been facing dangers sleeping on the streets.

High food and fuel prices typically hit the most vulnerable households hardest. Currently most of these families can't afford even one meal per day regularly. 

All of this has had a detrimental effect on our pupils' education.  We want to ensure that they healthy, free from abuse and have a safe environment to concentrate on their academic studies.  So we are going to tackle this in two ways:

1.  Provide a small boarding facility at the school

Thanks to the funds raised by Rebecca and her team we will:

• Build a girls and boys boarding facility at the school
• Accommodate pupils from Monday through to Thursday evening 
• Appoint a mature female teacher to take residence at the School to take care of pupils and provide support with homework

The cost of boarding for a child from Monday to Thursday evening is just £7 a month.

Huge thanks are to go to Rebecca and her work colleagues who raised the funds for us to build this facility. 

2.  Introduce an After School Food Programme

We will provide a meal for all our sponsored children to ensure they have an evening meal.

We would like to thank Benoit and Florence who came up with the idea for the After School Food Programme.  With their generous donation we will be able to cover the costs of this for the next year.

We continue to be so very humbled by the generosity and concern of our friends, volunteers and donors who we can rely on for support.

Thanks to each and everyone of you.

Hello from Kenya

We recently celebrated Madaraka Day here in Kenya. This is a national holiday that is celebrated on 1st of June and commemorates the day in 1963 when Kenya attained internal self rule after being a British colony since 1920.  We invited some of our pupils to school to join in the celebrations with a meal and games. A good time was had by all.

We hope that the following update on progess will be of interest to you :

This term we’ve initiated extra curriculum clubs such as scouts, agriculture and dancing.

Gardening Club

Pupils in our agriculture club have started planting passion fruit in our greenhouse. They started by planting 30 passion fruits and we expect our first harvest in October.

The Club is also busy rearing rabbits and chickens which they feed with kitchen leftovers. The manure from the poultry and rabbits are placed on the passion fruit for added soil nutrient. At the end of Term 1 in March, pupils enjoyed a lunch of rabbit and chicken meat.

Community Support

Community support is very important to us. Parents and guardians of our pupils regularly volunteer at the school helping on the land with weeding, planting and harvesting, or perhaps assisting our cooks in the kitchen with cleaning.   Recently we were gifted with 54 school sweaters from someone who had heard about the work we do and simply wanted to support us.  Our pupils were so grateful to receive them.      

Folk dancing

We were delighted that some of our pupils were chosen and trained by traditional dancers to perform and entertain guests during the Annual Little Miss Muranga county competition.  Our pupils dressed in a colourful display of traditional costume and did brilliantly.  We are very proud of their achievement.   

Scouts

Our scouts were able to attend the Founder's Day in February where they met with thousands of scouts from other primary and secondary schools. We saw their confidence and skills improve during the day.

Fundraising

We recently managed to raise a little over £400 at a recent Bingo event in Pembrokeshire.  We have another two events coming up shortly and one of our Board Members is undertaking a 200km Endurance challenge in June, running around the Isle of Anglesey to raise much needed funds.  If you'd like to sponsor him then please do get in touch.

Child Sponsorship

Sadly we have lost a few sponsors along the way this year, mostly due to the pandemic.  We are aware that people do not have the spare cash that they used to have.  Providing a free education to children whose families are living in abject poverty really does make an impact so please do ask your family, friends and colleagues if they would like to sponsor a child.  

Finally thanks everyone for your continued support from all of us at Roko 20 Academy. 

The school is doing really well under the capable hands of our Manager, with the support from his Head Teacher and staff.  

Its a great school and its doing great work for our community.  

This is our first update of 2022 and we are delighted to share with you our news and progress so far under the direction of our Head Teacher, Esther, who is making big strides with extra-curricular activities for the benefit of our pupils.  These clubs are a big hit.

Mathematics club

We have introduced a Mathematics Club for Classes 6 and 7.  We will introduce this to other classes from second term.

Scouting 

Pupils are being trained to enhance their scout drills. The scouts group gave a terrific performance showing off their skills at the school closing ceremony in December.  

Debate

The Debating club has made most pupils to gain confidence.  We have seen some improvements in critical thinking skills and in their English and Kiswahili.  Teachers are joining pupils together to work in collaboration with each other building on the teamworking skills.  All in all we are pleased with these extra curricular activities which has fully supported all aspects of their overall development.

Farming club

Headed by Teacher Christine this club has recently started with the work of clearing the greenhouse in order to plant vegetables. Over the upcoming school holidays there will be a duty rota for pupils to come to school for weeding and watering plants.

Music and Drama

This club is led by Teacher Mercy and its aim is to nurture pupils with artistic skills such as dancing and song composing.

Home Science

Teacher Jennifer will be leading pupils in design and cooking. Last week the group cooked chips! 

In addition to the clubs we are continuing with our Computer classes.  Our computers are now connected with unlimited WIFI and every one of our pupils is now able to have digital learning.

Teachers and pupils are also able to download learning materials online. The computer lessons are offered from PP1 right through to class 7.

Pupils in the majority of schools in our area do not provide such technology and we are very lucky to be able to offer ours the opportunity to learn these skills.

We are very lucky indeed and we could not have achieved any of this without your continued support.  We are so very grateful.   

Thank you from all of us at Roko 20 Academy.

We have come to the end of our academic year and would like to thank you for your support throughout the year.  This is an update on our work.  

Examination and assessment:

There is much improvement in academics at Roko 20.  Grade 3 sat for MLP (Monitoring Learner Progress) and all successfully completed the assessment. Our class 5 continued to be among the top 4 schools in Gikindu zone while Class 6 moved from 8^th place to 6th in the Opener exam. We are using the assessment and examination to gauge the pupil’s performance and be able to help them improve in their weak areas.  

Extra tuition:

The current class 6 will be sitting for National Exams from 28 Nov. to 1 Dec 2022. We continue to carry out free extra tuition between 7.20am to 8.00 am and 3.20pm to 4.20pm in the evening.  Due to limited time for the syllabus coverage we have provided an extra support programme for class 7 and 8 pupils which takes place on Saturdays.  

Volunteer:

We received one visitor from America working with Open Door Kenya Mission. Phillip and his group have helped in guidance and counselling for our 12 years and above boys and girls.

We constructed a new classroom over April holiday for Grade 5 and computer lab. The children had a spacious room for computer lessons.  

A group from Nairobi visited our school to give our pupils a taste of Karate.  A fun day was had by all.

Community services

The school encourages community services for learning purposes. Pupils visit the sick, elderly or get involved in community programmes. Our Grade 3 helped in clearing bushes around Kambirwa’s water reserve basin and also collected scrap metals which they sold using the proceeds to purchase classroom rulers and rubbers.

Grade 2 visited an elderly grandmother and gave foodstuff for the family.

As always, we cannot thank you enough for your kind support of the work we do at Roko 20 Academy.  Without your generosity we would be unable to continue providing children with a full-time education and mentorship programme.

Thank you!

Asante sana! 

Thank you for your continued support of Roko 20 Academy. Donors like you ensure we continue to offer a full time education to the most vulnerable of our community's children.

Right now our pupils are enjoying being back to school after a four week break and have adapted to wearing masks and being social distant.   

We are truly grateful to our donors who donated enough funds to enable us to build a new classroom for our current Grade 6 who will be moving up to Grade 7 when the new school year starts in July.  In addition we have built alongside this new classroom a classroom which will be used as our computer/library. 

In order to make way for construction of the new classes it was, sadly, necessary to demolish an original mud house.  When we purchased the school land back in 2013 this was the only structure apart from a few wooden cow sheds, a tin shed we used as a kitchen and an abundance of napier grass.  Over the years the mud house served us well and changed its functionality according to our needs.  It's been used as the Manager's office, a head teacher's office, a nursery, bedrooms, a video room, a makeshift library, a volunteer's office, and up to recently, a store-room.  The house has a low roof and would overheat in the afternoons during the dry seasons making it very uncomfortable to work and learn. 

The new brick structure is a big improvement and the classrooms are now spacious, airy and cool making it a much more comfortable learning environment.       

We are improving our school and the education our pupils receive, this is thanks to you and your support.

Kind regards

Tracey 

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