Mukuru P. C. Projects

First of all we employed some social workers to follow the cases of the children who were dropping out of school. Usually these children were the most needy, often of single mothers who were sick with AIDS and so the children had to work to get income. There is no social welfare in Kenya and so the unemployed have no income and have to beg, scavenge or run a small business of buying and selling so that they can survive. If unemployed and sick, they depend upon the income earning power of their children for their daily food.

The social workers try to ensure that this vulnerable group of children get a chance to stay in school by providing food for the families of dying Aids patients, and by enabling the single mothers to have a small business or receive training for employment. They also organise the community so that it can solve some of its own problems, for instance, at present, different slum communities are busy replacing bridges swept away by the floods, and constructing latrines and drains to try to prevent outbreaks of disease. We also badly needed basic health services, so we employed two nurses. These nurses look after the health of the children and of the destitute without income. They also train community health workers in preventative medicine. This year we had outbreaks of cholera and typhoid due to the heavy rain and floods, but because of the health services we now have, we did not experience the large number of deaths we used to in the early days of the project. In addition, the nurses are busy training midwives, because, due to the increase of poverty, mothers can no longer afford to go to hospital to deliver.

In terms of further education, we try to get sponsors for those children who are very bright academically but who do not have the means to go any further. We have past pupils who now have university degrees, some who are presently in university, and others who have qualified to go but who do not have the means to continue. Hundreds of slum dwellers are now able to earn their living because of our intervention.

Apart from the five schools, with about 4,300 pupils in total, we also run a children‘s home with a capacity for 128 orphans. Because some of the orphans are innocent children who have not had street experience and others are hard-core street children, we have had some bad experiences where a street child would run away taking innocent children with him or her. Some small street girls who engaged in prostitution were also pimps. Sent by their own pimps, they would pretend to want to go to school and would get admitted to the home, then after a few days they would return to the street taking a few innocent girls with them. We therefore run a shelter for hard-core street children so that we can try to rehabilitate them and find out more about them first before mixing them with the innocent and already-rehabilitated children.