Kitale Day Care

Background

The church needed to respond in practical ways to this situation, hence the call for sisters to work with this marginalized, poor, vulnerable and neglected people of the Kipsongo slum. The sisters conducted a needs assessment by doing home visits, interviews and organizing community meetings for the people. The needs assessment highlighted different issues but a major issue was that a vast number of children were not attending school rather the families needed them on the street of Kitale town begging, daily, for food. 

Problem

The first settlers of the Kipsongo slum were the Turkana people, a Kenyan tribe, the second largest pastoralist community in Kenya after the Maasai. In the early 70’s, some of them moved south to Kitale, looking for food due to a prolonged drought that killed their cattle followed by a severe famine. 2,000 out of the 4,000 people  living in Kipsongo are Turkana. Both these original slum-dwellers and the IDPs, who arrived after the 2008 post-elections riots, are facing a wide range of issues in Kipsongo: 

• Diseases and Death: high rate of HIV/ AIDS,  malaria, lack ofsanitation, jigger menace, lack of clean water for drinking, basic needs and severe malnutrition especially in children (August 2008: 16 people died in the slum due an illness and because they lacked the funds for a hospital visit)
• Illiteracy: 80% of the young women in this slum are illiterate and 60% of the children do not have access to education. They cannot afford school related expenses. Marginalization by other ethnic communities living around the Turkanas: they are looked on as uneducated, rooted in the traditions, dirty, lazy and they themselves feel inferior to the other tribes.
• Criminality and Abuse: Drugs, physical abuse, emotional abuse, child labour, fights, exploitation of Turkanas (sexual abuse in exchange of food) but also prostitution and begging.
• Culture and Tradition: Polygamy is encouraged in the Turkanas’ culture, women can have many husbands who, however, do not feel responsible at all for their children or wives. Therefore women often end up alone with many children from different fathers. Besides, in Turkana community, girls get married very young (12 or 13 years old). 

Objectives

The project intends to address education and food problem for the children. For this reason, the sisters have started a day care for children (boys and girls) from 5 to 15 years old from Kipsongo and neighbouring slums. All the children come from poor families, some are orphans and others come from single-parent families.

The project aims at:

• Improving the health standard and nutritional standard of the target population who are the children.

• Increasing the number of children attending school.

• Preventing children from begging in the town.

• Educating young girls thus avoiding early marriages.

• Reducing crime rate by at least 20% in the community.

• Building a well-educated and productive community. 

Activities

The children and the parents have been involved in the project implementation. From the beginning, the sisters sensitized and mobilized the community which has been very co-operative. They had several meetings and the results were very positive, 90% of the parents have been involved. The sisters have carried on home visits to help them understand better the family and the children’s situations. They had individual interviews with both parents and children.

They started by renting a place within the slum where they could meet and have the children in the morning and women in the afternoon. The rented building has three rooms: two serve as the classroom and one room as the store and office. Within the same compound another small room is used as a kitchen. 

Progress/Results

• For the feeding program, 130 children have lunch every day at the Day Care. They have beans and maize three times a week and ugali with vegetables twice a week. Two cooks take care of the meals.
• For the education program, 130 children go to school: 80 are in the Day Care that provides the basic knowledge of education to prepare them to join primary school in 2010 and 50 were admitted to primary school to different classes and in different schools at the beginning of the 2009 academic year. (Soil Conservation Primary School, Township Primary School, Chetoto Primary School, Bidii Primary School).
• Each one of the 50 children needed 3600 KES for school expenses such as admission fees, desk, school uniform, exam fees, exercise books but that was been taken care of. The children come back from school to have lunch at the Day Care Centre.  

The Good Shepherd Sisters give special thanks to the following donors for their generosity in helping to fund this project: Beese Foundation (Germany), Kindermissionswerk (Germany).