Today heralded the start of a new era at the Centre. After two weeks research and a week’s preparation, our Outreach Officer, Alex, left the Centre this morning all packed up on his two-wheeled school for his first day teaching in the community.
The research we have been doing has produced some very exciting results. Of the 50 homes Alex visited, virtually all of them said they couldn’t get to the Centre because they didn’t have enough time in the day to travel there after they’d fetched water and firewood, looked after their cows and goats, and tended to their farms. Every single one of them said they wanted to learn though, and although today’s market means numbers for the first outreach lesson won’t be as high as our research suggests, by the end of the week we should have class sizes approaching 30 – well beyond our expectations for this limited trial. It just goes to show that there is a huge demand for education but we need to remove the barriers of inaccessibility.
Apart from the outreach, there’s been a million and one other things going on… The Operations Manual for how to run a LivLife Centre is developing and our management processes are improving on a daily basis as they are documented. Training on the examination process begins tomorrow with the monitoring and evaluation systems following after Easter. The kindergarten expansion is almost finalised thanks to help from Roxanne, the newest member of the LivLife team in Tanzania, with a (hopefully short) wait on funding the only thing to complete before a planned start in either May or June.
All this was punctuated by the slightly worrying appearance of an Egyptian Cobra in the library roof one Wednesday lunchtime. With a neurotoxic venom, one bite will kill if it is not treated quickly and we were all a little worried when the kindergarten finished just after we’d discovered it and the kids poured out towards the library before we quickly turned them around the other way. Our Maasai guard, Nyangusi, who seems phased by nothing, dealt with it in his own inimitable way by pounding the roof in the hope of scaring it out so one of the local snake-catchers could grab it. Although this was after I’d vetoed his idea to get perilously close to it by building a makeshift tower out of two tables and a wobbly chair. Thankfully the snake was immobilised before it could do any damage, and the library is back in use…
