The Stockers' Stories

Yesterday afternoon I had to do one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, turning away an orphaned boy with legitimate needs. It was heartbreaking to see the hope fade from his face as I explained that we weren’t able to help pay his school fees because of a lack of funds.

Of course if there had been enough money to pay his fees, it would only have meant turning away the next one, or the next. Well over 100 children have come to Kindle asking for fees in the last two weeks, and we were able to send less than a third of them to secondary school. For the vast majority, they will return home to help in their parents’ fields until they marry and become subsistence farmers themselves.

But money for fees isn’t the only education problem these children are facing, and it may not even be the most serious one. There are problems at all levels of the educational system, so much so that it’s hard to know where to start trying to help. Sometimes I even wonder if it’s worth trying to help at all, but then a day like yesterday comes, when you’re sitting face to face with a reason to try and there are a hundred more reasons queued up outside the door.

So this is how we at Kindle are trying to have an impact on education at all levels:

Early Childhood

One of the great things that has happened in Mkaka village is that about fifty children who are too small to go the long distance to primary school are able to learn from volunteers at a community-based childcare centre. We hope that others will be inspired by the women of Mkaka village and will start similar childcare centres in their own villages.

Primary School

Most of the children in our area attend Namanda Primary School, which has six teachers for more than 1000 students. We help as we are able at Namanda. We’ve helped with construction projects, we help with food and school uniforms for many of the children, and we also provide teaching materials when they are donated. In fact, there are a dozen posters from Australia sitting in my kitchen right now waiting to go to the school. And there are others who contribute to the school as well, including UNESCO who helped with toilet construction and another large organization that installed a borehole, tank, and solar pump to provide water. But even with all of the extra help, the pass rates at the school are abysmal. Most of the crowd of students who have been at Kindle recently have just gotten their primary school leavers’ exam results, and out of more than 100 who took exams at the school, less than 20 passed. And of those 20, only 2 did well enough to be accepted at a secondary school, Kaphirintiwa Community Day Secondary School.

Secondary School

Kaphirintiwa is the only secondary school in our area, and we also try to support this school as we are able. We pay fees for many students there, of course. This year we’re supporting almost 70 students at Kaphirintiwa and several other schools. The students we support are a combination of children in our area who have done reasonably well and several orphaned and vulnerable children from nearby areas who have done very well and have no other means of support. In addition to paying fees, we also provide teaching materials and sometimes we’re also able to provide a volunteer teacher or two at Kaphirintiwa. But again, the pass rates at the school are abysmal. The students who are sent to other more expensive schools tend to do better, but even there the results aren’t always good.

Tertiary Education

Last year Happy Makoni, one of the children from our area, finished in the top 10% of his class at Likuni Boy’s Secondary School, an excellent school just outside of Lilongwe, the capital city. He did exceptionally well on his Malawi School Certificate of Education examinations (13 points, for anyone who understands the point system), but this week he learned that he was not selected to go to University. Now he’s living with an uncle, facing a difficult job market with little hope of making enough money to ever afford going to the “parallel program” at the University, which is the same program that the “selected” students go through, but at much higher cost. At present, we at Kindle don’t have a way to support students like Happy, but there are some people who volunteered at Kindle who are now working to raise support for a tertiary education programme.

Vocational Training

We are excited about “Tiwale Centre,” which is currently under construction at our Nanjoka site. One of the rooms is dedicated to vocational training, where we plan to have a dozen sewing machines that will be used by women and girls in the community for income generation. Our hope is to have a trainer who can teach them to use the machines, and then give graduates the opportunity to rent time on the machines so that they can start to earn money from sewing without having the capital to purchase their own machine. It is our hope that after the sewing programme is started we will also be able to start similar vocational training for boys and men, probably in carpentry. It is our hope that increased income will encourage more investment in the community, including better support of students and schools.

Basically, we’re pouring money, time, and other resources into the infrastructure and into individual students, with the goal that these children will reach their full potential as productive members of society.