NEWS FROM HOTCOURSES PRIMARY SCHOOL: HCF FOUNDER MIKE ELMS REPORTS BACK FROM KITUI

I’ve just returned from visiting the Hotcourses Primary School in Kitui about three hours east of Nairobi, Kenya. It is an amazing school making a real difference to the lives of the 220 AIDS affected orphans that now go there.

It’s in the heart of the newly built Nyumbani village on a thousand acres of farmland. Everything in the village is sustainable from the organic crops grown to feed the villagers and sell for income, to the way the houses are built with bricks that need no cement made from the deep red soil that surrounds it.

The Hotcourses Primary School, spread out in a horseshoe shape around a dusty square, has four classrooms, a library, an office and a makeshift kitchen which serves porridge at 10.00am at then lunch at 2.00pm. The classrooms are basic but spotlessly clean, as is the whole school. Some rooms have electricity generated from solar panels. On a hot day there is enough power to charge the school’s ten notebook computers and play music on its new CD player.

In the morning all the children assemble on the square in their smart green checked uniforms and respond in unison to the teacher calling out “good morning”. It was cold when I was there, so they wore sweatshirts, kindly donated by a school in the US. The tiny ones then go off to pre-school and the eldest go into higher classes up to ‘standard 8’, although the school is very strict and if you do not pass a year you remain in the standard you were in for a further year. Unlike schools in the UK this means there is quite a mix of ages within one class. The system must be working though, as in its short two year history they scored very highly in the annual assessments, with ‘standard classes 6, 7 and 8’ coming an impressive second at zonal level. Music, dance and drama is a focal part of the School and in recent music festivals they went all the way to provincial level for its music and dance.

The children are grouped into houses of 10 living with their ‘grannies’ of whom there are. In most cases the grannies won’t be their own, but a nearest relative or friend. You cannot help but be struck that even though some of the children are HIV positive, and all of them are orphans, on the surface at least, they appear happy with the most wonderful smiles.

Despite their terrible start in life, the School offers them hope. At one level it provides something to do in the day, a structure to their life and sense of purpose. At another, the education they work hard for, has the potential to lift them out of poverty and provide a future which is worth living.