By Kasia Mychajlowycz

Shy at first, the children living in the villages around the site of the Maasai Women Secondary School have become great friends of the ROTH volunteers. Nowadays, you can hear children yelling the names of many of our volunteers as they pass by the site, waving a greeting to the volunteers hard at work. 

   
Ibrahim and Irene

Without electricity, running water, sewage pipes, roads or any other kind of infrastructure, our neighbours are mostly small-scale farmers growing crops of corn, tomatoes, squash and fruits such as bananas and papayas. While some of the children are enrolled in school, all of them are expected to help out with the daily tasks of farming, and are charged with taking care of the herds of goats and cattle that graze on the wide plain stretching from our construction site straight to Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Among the many characters we’ve befriended, there’s Francis, quick to smile and always the first to learn new volunteer’s names; shy Irene, who helps her relative deliver and collect the bottles of soda sold on the site; Erica, the eldest girl, who likes reading comics and one coaxed a few of us into dancing the Macarena; and Ibrahim, one of the younger boys who always runs to greet the MWEDO van carrying volunteers each morning and evening.

   

At the end of a long working day, it’s a great break to be able to play with the kids, who will often wait for volunteers to come and join them outside the fence. We were especially delighted when we discovered that one of the kids had used scraps of roof sheeting, PVC pipes and wire mesh left over from our site to create his own toy car, complete with rolling wheels! Clever and full of life, these kids are also a great reminder of the potential in people that needs to be nurtured with a quality education; when the school is up and running, we hope to see some of these girls again, but this time as students!