Murindati, Kenya
See images from this year's visit.
Read the Times Educational Supplement article (14th October 2005).
Oundle's link with Murindati School, and the Mbegi community, started in 2000, when our project in Zimbabwe became untenable. Murindati Primary School was started by local parents who were weary of seeing the children either go without education, or having to travel for 10 miles a day to get to school. They literally built it on their own, with no government funding. Although free primary education was introduced in Kenya by 2003, funding is still very limited, and for the 390 pupils in Murindati's 8 basic classrooms, education is still a struggle.
Oundle pupils have been visiting Murindati since 2001, and each year about 15 pupils camp in the community and work at the School. As well as teaching classes and raising funds to equip the School, the parties main priority is to complete some heavy physical tasks such as concreting classroom floors, building toilet blocks, and fencing the School compound, to allow a tree and crop nursery to develop. We also spend some of our days at nearby Kigio game conservancy, seeing how eco-tourism and game management (including recent giraffe and rhino relocations) can operate with the local community.
The project has broadened into two other aspects - firstly, the provision of an Oundle Scholarship each year,whereby the top scoring pupil in the Kenyan Certificate of Primary Education exam is fully funded for 4 years at a Kenyan secondary boarding school. Obviously, this involves fund raising in the UK which the whole School contributes towards, raising at least the £1600 per annum needed for all 4 scholars.
Secondly, and most recently, we have been able to raise funds to help about twenty HIV/AIDS orphans from the Mbegi area around Murindati. The money will help feed and clothe this group, and the others who will inevitably join their ranks in the next few years.
We hope our work in Kenya is useful to the local people, and we aim to give them the ability to reconstruct their own future. However, possibly just as importantly, the pupils who go to Murindati find their educational horizons affected, and their views challenged. It is never certain who benefits more - Murindati or Oundle.
Ian Clark