A very late Happy New Year to the EAC blog readers! My New Year’s Resolution was to update this blog every month…I hope you are all doing better at your resolutions than I am! Better late than never… (and I know the picture doesn't directly relate, but I was so tickled with our students cleverness I had to find a place for this picture).
We have had a great year so far at the EAC. I complained about the heat in my December blog, but just like every year, I under-estimated coastal Kenya’s capacity to be hot. March is always one of the most sweltering months here as we wait for the rainy season. It hasn’t slowed us down though!
Our health department is busier than ever. Government nurses were on strike for two weeks, so our clinic saw a huge increase in out patient clients at the beginning of the month. Thanks to Valerian for keeping up with all the extra work!
Our health team has been meeting regularly with the new community committee in Mavueni, an area where we hope to help open a new clinic in the coming months. We look forward to giving you more concrete updates on this as things move forward.
Health education is back in action for 2012 – the six schools that participate in the Stay Alive Program have more than 300 students enrolled! Our girls health discussion groups have resumed and the participants are more active and passionate than ever – we learn so much from the young teenage girls who are participating in these discussion groups.
Our primary school is now finally a FULL primary school. Head teacher Catherine worked very hard to register our Class 8 students for the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) exam to be held in November. Our students are now registered and have submitted their choices of Secondary Schools to the government for consideration. We are very excited to see how our students perform and are working hard to offer them extra tutoring each week. Thanks to all our teachers for putting in so much extra time. It is going to be a tough year but we hope it will pay off! If you are interested in helping a student pay for Secondary School, please contact the EAC at info@eastafricancenter.org.
We are also implementing new strategies for success at school that were discussed at the EAC’s annual board meeting in December. Every Friday during the morning assembly, students are publically recognized for various hard work and good deeds throughout the week. Teachers are also now referring to students by their graduation year. Our Class 8 students are now called the “Class of 2016”! We hope these new strategies and other brainstorming by the tea
chers will help cultivate a culture of success at Vutakaka!
The year has also brought great news from our partnership with the Combined Federal Campaign and the Aid for Africa Girls Education Fund. Vutakaka Junior School was awarded money to use as scholarships for the best performing girls. We have given out scholarships to 10 very bright female students.
Congratulations Subira, Lillian Ngala, Lillian Moses, Moza, Caroline, Farhat, Nuru, Aisha, Muttaquina, and Rehema. Keep up the good work!!
School closes for 3 weeks in April for the Easter holidays, so that should technically mean I have more time to update this blog. I will renew my commitment to monthly blogs and hope that it works better this time than it did in January. As always, thank you so much for your commitment to the work of the EAC and the community of Takaungu. We couldn’t do it without ALL of you!
