Nyamwanga Primary School
Nyamwanga is an up-country school some 460 Kilometres (275 miles) from Nairobi in the Western Province of Kenya, near to the Ugandan border at a place called Bumala. This whole area is deep in poverty and has been ravaged by the AIDS virus. Most of the people live in mud huts and have no sanitation or electricity supply, but they are warm hearted and generous people. When Vision Africa first became involved in this school there were 284 children attending, 113 of which were orphans through AIDS.
There were six classrooms, two desperate mud classrooms with reed roofs and one small additional mud-built room, which was a Nursery School and doubled up as Church on Sunday. This tiny mud hut was school room for up to sixty children! Can you imagine? The six main classrooms had their roofs blown off in a gale several years previously and, apart from putting the metal sheets back on the roof (full of holes) no repairs had been possible because of the extreme poverty, meaning there was simply no money available to do it.
The school floors were made of cow dung which caused the children's feet to become infested with jiggers (like a tic). These have to be removed manually and the feet treated with disinfectant every day. However, here we are happy to report that jiggers are now a thing of the past. Vision Africa has run a program of construction at the school to provide concrete floors, new metal roofs, and to replace the mud huts with four sturdy new classrooms.
Nyamwanga has been a real success story and the number of children attending has increased dramatically (almost doubled). We have been able to treat the jiggers and concrete floors will prevent re- infection. The local economy has gained from the construction work and we have provided seed for corn to be grown locally. These things have meant that the quality of life for the children is much better than it was. However, there are still many orphaned and destitute children here that really desperately need your support.
Many of the orphaned children have no accommodation, nobody to care for them and often in the past would go days on end without food. The wonderful bunch of teachers have hearts of gold, but they also have limitations. Often the children are allowed to remain at the school overnight and one of the teachers volunteers to stay with them. Surely, we cannot stand by and let the children sleep rough and go hungry?
Since our original involvement with this school we have gone on to construct a new nursery block, a kitchen and storeroom and a small clinic. This has allowed us to start a feeding program at the school and this, together with the new facilities and government funding for teaching staff, has allowed the school to grow to more than double it's original size. Much of this is due to the generosity of our supporters and many of the orphan children are receciving the support they so desparately need thanks to our sponsorship programme.
The need at Nyamwanga is continual. While we have completed our programme of construction, there are still many children who have nobody to love and care for them. Only our feeding programme is putting a meal into their stomach and sponsorship provides the shoes on their feet. If you would like to help by sponsoring a child, please visit our sponsorship page to find out more. Thank you!
50p gives a child a main meal every day they are at school.
£1 a week pays for a child’s education
Updated: December 2008