Daraja means Bridge!
“I will continue to stress the need to educate the rural
girl. There are many dangers for
our students when they travel up to 10 kilometers to our school. For girls there is the opportunity for
an older man to see her and track her maturation. Here, even at the age of ten if a girl is “mature” a man
even in his forties can go straight to her parents and offer a goat for the
girl. Often times the girl will
come home from school and be sent to live with the man. If the girl even cries a little they
will say to her, ‘we will disown you’.”
Coming from a headmaster of a rural and forgotten school at
the base of Mt. Kenya we have only started to comprehend the harsh reality of
what it means to be a female in these areas. As we moved through the classrooms the headmaster showed us
off to the students just like the trophies in his office representing the
highest achieving students in the area.
You would never assume high scores would grow from these soil floors,
mismatched wood siding and clanking roofs that make up this rank school. There are some five hundred students
here with fourteen teachers, ten pit latrines and no food. In Kindergarten the gender ratio is
fifty fifty, by eighth grade: we counted eight girls in a class of fifty students.
“In most parts of Kenya, families don’t have money to send
their children to school, and if they do, they send their sons and marry off
their daughters or keep them in the home to take care of the chores and other siblings.” Down the road five minutes, Jason
Doherty explains to us the surface issue once again, “the girls who attend this
school are students who would otherwise have no means of continuing on to
secondary school. They must also
show strong academics and a strength for leadership”. Jason and his wife Jenni moved here from the Bay Area and
started The Daraja School four yeas ago, this year they are graduating their
first class of twenty-six young women.
These women are bubbling with palpable integrity, warmth and hope!
This is where we have been staying the last several
days. Our first hours were greeted
not by handshakes or shy eyes, but with hugs and warm greetings from many of
the girls who met us on our path.
This campus is an oasis.
Established in the 80’s as a school for inner city boys from Baltimore,
believe it or not, the school has everything it needs to sustain a peaceful and
educational community.
Our first day here we each shadowed a student, we sat in on
nine classes. Needless to say this
school is much different from the school just five minutes up the road. There is organization, structure,
light, books, love, smiles, supplies, infrastructure, laundry, beds, food and
capable teachers. The teaching
style is innately different from what we are used to in the States, it seems to
trickle down from the old British system, severely stuck in wrote learning,
memorizations and heaps of standardized tests. Jenni and Jason focus on the whole person, the project based
learning. This was obvious in
class. In English they were
learning about space, five minutes into our first class I was interviewing
another girl as if she was the astronaut, she replayed her knowledge by acting
out her role teaching me about life on mars and how it is to eat, and even
braid hair while floating!
Students here still have to take tests, in fact the Seniors will sit next week for their “SATs on steroids”. It is what they all work for their whole lives. It will determine their future. Jenni said today, “We want to help reinvent education here, to raise students who become creative thinkers, who will change this country, rather than get stuck in the system like a cog, only to be dissatisfied once they are in the workforce.” There is nothing easy about education in this country although from the moment we entered the gates to The Daraja School outside of Nanyuki Kenya, we knew we had stumbled on something unexplainably special.
The Olgirigiri Primary School
A Daraja classroom
