Home Visits

Today we went back to Burka Primary School. Since we interviewed 10 students, the best way to assess need was to physically visit their houses and see their home environment. This was Emanueli and Irene’s idea, so I trusted that visiting homes was culturally appropriate. I could tell all of them were definitely poor, but Emanueli and Irene really knew what to look for to assess the different levels of need. They had no problem ranking them against each other.

The second girl had a particularly compelling story. She lives in a one room square mud hut with her 2 older brothers and 1 younger sister, surrounded by banana trees and a few meager crops. After both of her parents died, her oldest brother kept the family together and cared for them. He only finished primary school and never got the opportunity to go to secondary school. He now shines shoes to earn money for the family.

The second oldest brother had an international sponsor to go to secondary school but lost his sponsorship after he didn’t have shoes to go to school and his grades dropped. He wrote a letter to the local government petitioning them to ask the national government for help to go to school and got a government sponsorship to finish secondary school. Now he is in Form IV, preparing for his national exams, and taking care of his younger sisters, with ambitions to go to university.

The applicant, a current standard 7 student in primary school, hopes to go to secondary school. Right now, primary schools are on holiday, but hold remedial classes that students who can afford the 300 TSH a day (less than .30 USD) attend. Today, she stayed home to wash clothes, clean house, and make meals for her family, but first and foremost didn’t attend remedial classes because she didn’t have the 300 TSH. Maybe tomorrow, she said.

After visiting her home, we looked at her grades and saw that, with an A average, she was one of the top students in her class.

Health Assessment: We are starting to review the objectives for the health assessment of the community that we will start in two weeks. We have a data collection manual that is very useful and helpful. However, it has a lot of words that Emanueli and Irene don’t understand. We independently read chapter 1 and then reviewed it together. We spent about 1.5 hours discussing data collection, clarifying hard words and practicing with different examples. I’m glad we are doing this now!

I also showed Irene and Clemens, one of my other brothers, the typing programs on the laptops (which were donated to Sustain Foundation). Learning “home row” brought back memories of elementary school computer class.

Word of the day:
Ndiyo - yes