New classrooms, clean water, food and an education.
A seed planted in the minds of students at a Foothills school five years ago continues to bear fruit for children at a rural community in Kenya.
Building Hope Academy in Kenya provides primary school education for children in a rural area south of the country's capital of Nairobi.
The small community school has a group of Grade 9 students who attended Red Deer Lake School five years ago to thank for its existence.
The Red Deer Lake students asked themselves whether or not they could get a school built for students in Africa.
“Kind of all to our own surprise, we made it happen,” said Elizabeth Hass, one of the group of students who first lead the project.
The initiative took shape and grew over the years and today the Building Hope Society have adult supporters and Red Deer Lake alumni to continue raising funds for the academy. To date, more than $200,000 has been raised.
Society president Elizabeth Critchley said the project had two goals at first – giving Kenyan students the opportunity to get an education and providing Canadian students a chance to make a difference for others in the world.
“We were trying to think of things we could do to become good global citizens, that’s where the idea came from,” she said.
Initially, $21,000 was raised to build two classrooms at the Enkare Ngiro School for students in Grades 7 and 8 in Kenya. The school was crowded and younger students could not make the dangerous eight-kilometre trek through an elephant corridor.
Critchley said project supporters chose to forge a new direction and build a primary school closer to the rural homes of the area's young students.
Land was donated and cleared of trees and bushes to construct a primary school.
Building Hope Academy now boasts six classrooms, a teachers’ quarters, clean running water, toilet facilities, a garden and a playground. The school’s students start attending the school at age four, attending what might be called pre-kindergarten in Alberta, and classes run up to Grade 2. In January, the school will begin offering Grade 3 classes for its students.
Critchley said the simple facilities are “beyond belief” for students and their families in Kenya.
It’s not just the classrooms. The gardens provide food for students and the washrooms mean students aren’t forced to have to go out into the bush.
The society also provides financial support for the top male and top female students from the community to attend high school.
Enkare Ngiro School has even had an impact on the students’ families. Parents of children attending the school are required to take a greater role in their children’s education, including walking them to school. It’s something that has caught on as a group of parents is forming a parent teacher association.
“They’re extremely proud, they really know what a difference it’s making in their children’s lives,” said Critchley. “It started with knowing their children are getting a meal every day. Even when they didn’t understand the value of education, for their children to have a meal every day was almost beyond their wildest dreams.”
After five years, she said the current focus is not on building more classrooms, it’s on improving the quality of education for the students.
“We’re trying to not get ahead of ourselves,” said Critchley.
She said it’s relatively easy to build a school. The hard part is putting the education programming in place to ensure students are able to learn.
“What I found when I was in Kenya is when you drive around, you will see many, many schools that have been built by outsiders, and most of them, and by most I mean 90 per cent, sit empty,” said Critchley.
The current focus is to improve teaching methods at the school and work on teacher development.
“What they don’t have training in is following curriculum and having lesson plans that would form a full unit,” she said.
Critchley said they hope to bring a teacher to Canada for an “internship” to learn modern teaching techniques, which can then be shared with teachers in Kenya. She said they would also like to send teachers and university education students to Kenya to help implement changes at the school.
In the long run, the society needs to ensure the school is sustainable.
Critchley said Red Deer Lake School can’t continue on leading the initiative by itself any more and additional support is needed to continue the project. She said she hopes Foothills School Division plays a role as a collaborative partner.
“That’s one of our big goals that we have all of the Foothills School Division involved in some way,” said Critchley.
Back at red Deer Lake School, she said it has had a positive impact on students at the school over the years.
Students have embraced the project and continue to support the initiative as they move on to high school and beyond.
She said it has also shown students how valuable getting an education is.
Hass, now a university student, continues to support the Building Hope Academy.
She and her mother went to Kenya to see the school and meet some of the students at the academy. She said it brought. At one point, she was handed a science textbook, told which chapter to open and asked to help teach the Kenyan students.
“It was really interesting to meet the people we were helping,” she said. “It makes it all the more real.”
She said the Kenyan students were grateful that others were willing to help them get a better education and it’s something they took seriously.
“It’s teaching them that someone cares about them,” she said.
