Planting at the Children's Village

Today we picked up 88 tree saplings to plant at both St Clare School for Girls and St Francis School for Boys. Kara and I had been working exclusively at the girls school the first 5 days, while our friend Harold, a clinical child psychologist, had been working at the boys school with some of the students who seem to have the most trauma issues. Since Wednesday we are spending more time with the boys and I had a great introduction to the class 7 students who have just been promoted to class 8. (grade 7 or 8). These children are tested in many subjects each month, and if they pass at 90% or more they may move up to the next level if they have completed enough of the course work. Talk about testing .....

Anyway I did the name game with the class and then we talked about planting pumpkins, remember it is spring here and the rains will be coming. They knew a lot about pumpkins and more about what plants need to thrive. I told them that Fr. Riwa wanted them to plant an acre of pumpkins ( when he says pumpkins he actually means gourds and squash of many kinds). Then we talked about how big an acre is (and I had to translate in my mind from feet to meters) and the boys figured out how many mounds they would have to make if they were the correct distance apart. They were very excited and since it was after dark they told me they would start first thing in the morning. (Since this is school, home, church and family, students have class starting at 6AM....... with a long lunch and play break of 2 hours in the afternoon... then a time of cleaning and more classes after dinner at nite)

The next day, (Thursday) I did not get to St Francis until about 1:30PM... they were still working in the 1 acre field and had many mounds already made, evenly spaced .. with all of them working at some aspect of it ... breaking up the clods, hoeing and heaping soil into mounds or bringing the fertilizer to the mounds. There was NO adult supervision... they were just working on their project themselves and doing a very good job ... very impressive.



Today when we came with the mosquito repellent trees, they had more than 1/2 of the mounds made and someone had become the engineer with a string line and stakes as others laid out the mounds so they would be straight.

The mosquito repellent trees.. (no names that anyone knows OR even if it works, but there is a man who no longer uses mosquito netting where we are staying and he swears its due to this plant... we shall see.. if so, Fr Riwa wants to start a nursery and give them to the villagers... ) These will be planted by the first grade students at both schools since Ms. Sullivan's class donated $$ for plants and Fr. Riwa wants to honor those children by having his first graders do the planting ...

We are leaving Sunday afternoon for our small safari... Fr. Riwa is taking us to Masai Mara ...

not sure if I will be able to do another post... so this may be it for now ....

Actually under another tree today at the boys school.