The rain should have made me feel good. Here, in the arid lands of northern Kenya, rain is what we pray for, and when it comes it brings relief and joy. We have had very little rain in the last few years, rainy season after rainy season has disappointed. Everybody has lost livestock because of …
Patrick, the Leopard group teacher, looks less than impressed by the boys’ emergency toilet procedure. What would you do if you really needed a pee while on a safari and surrounded by dangerous wildlife?
A little over a year ago the Lion group took over the management of the Olng’arua School kitchen supplies. Since the school opened there always seemed to be problems with the management of the kitchen supplies. Orders would be forgotten, stock too low or perishables gone to waste. You never quite knew if there would …
Penila did a particularly good job of leading the leopards in a story class, encouraging them to engage with the story and discuss what was happening in the text and pictures. Perhaps she may become Olng’arua’s first home grown teacher in years to come.
When times are hard, when drought has taken almost everything people have, lunch becomes an especially happy time in the school day. With very limited water supplies (all brought into the school each day in 20lt cans) washing hands before lunch is closely monitored by the older children and the grey water saved for other …
This afternoon a lorry full of hay for the zebras arrived at the school. This was very exciting for the kids, both because they would be able to save more zebra, but also because it was a LORRY! We don’t see many lorries round here. We are storing the grass where ever we can find …
The zebras around our school are dying of starvation, every day we find more casualties. The marsh they (and the community) have always relied upon to get them through the droughts has, for the first time in living memory, dried up. There are approximately 60 zebra that have become confined to the area that was …
The last 2 years have been very difficult for the community surrounding Olng’arua School. Violence has resulted in two thirds of the people who lived here being displaced, houses and possessions destroyed, livestock stolen and lives lost. The community was totally unprepared for the violence. Though there have been occasional periods of insecurity in the …