For details of our 2010 East Africa trip, please click here.
To follow us to Tanzania in 2011, please click here.
In February, 2009, we visited Kenya, working as volunteers at the Heartbeat Children's Home, Bura Station - near Voi in South-East Kenya.It was an amazing experience and we made many new friends.
If you would like to see more of our pictures, please email us and we will send you the necessary links.
We discovered that the home gets some support from a realatively small church in Newfoundland, Canada. You can read more about them and about the history of their involvement with Bishop Dickson's home here.
The official, UK brochure for the home can be seen or downloaded here and some idea of the things the children really need is here.
If you would like to share some of our experiences, read the blog here.
For many years, we have sponsored Kenyan children through Plan International. After 4 weeks at Heartbeat, we left Bura Station for Kilifi to visit our current foster-child, Twalibu. Thanks mainly to Gary (Plan UK) and, especially, Harriet (Plan Kenya), we had an amazing and wonderful time! Some of our memories are here.
This seems a good point to tell you more about Kenyan food - something I am often asked about! Read all about it here.
On a more serious note, before I left for Kenya, some people expressed an interest in hearing about the education system there, and any schools I personally visited. It was suggested that international links might be formed.
This idea was enthusiastically received in the area where we were working. Knowledge of England (or the UK), its systems and policies, seemed surprisingly limited - mostly to that taught in history lessons. Recent overseas contacts have been chiefly with the USA, Canada and Scandinavia.
Education is highly valued in Kenya. Many schools are over-subscribed but erratically funded with resources and buildings so poor that they have to be seen to be believed. A recent, enormous increase in numbers attending school means that a lot of teachers are in their first post – and very overworked.
Unfortunately, the political climate in Kenya breeds such suspicion and jealousy that the suggestion of clustering, or forming teams of local schools to share experience, skills and resources is, literally, laughable. If this happens at all, it is often only achieved (informally) through teachers, or support workers, who themselves work at more than one school.
The possibility of exchanging ideas and experiences (by letters, maybe email – possible even visits) increasing interest in, and understanding of, different systems and cultures was really welcomed.
For more details, see this.
The number of personal initiatives that have been set up to try and compensate for the absence of coherent, government support is astounding. Here you can read of just a few we came across. We also met John, the manager of the KenVash Hotel in Naivasha. A displaced Kikuyu - one of the many people unwillingly caught up in the 2008 election problems, he is setting up a cooperative to establish a chicken farm. It is hoped that funds from this will enable him, and others like him, to buy their own properties and start life afresh. You can email him, if you would like to help.
Finally, a personal request!