Alex Haynie, nicknamed “Aliki” by some of his new Strathmore friends, is an associate at Strathmore University Foundation now in Kenya until December on a three-month exchange assignment to further the collaboration of SUF with Strathmore University.  A 2008 graduate of Princeton University from Pennsylvania, Alex is interning with three of Strathmore’s departments: athletics, community outreach, and alumni development. He is keeping a journal of his experiences and impressions.

 

I had heard that Kenya was famous for, among many other things, its vast farmlands and agriculture, and

on Friday, November 14th, I saw why. I traveled to the small village of Mairi in the Central Province of Kenya with Mrs. Bernadette Thiuri and Timothy Mburi, in order to check out one of the Rural Reading Centers that Mrs. Thiuri and her husband Phillip have started with the help of Strathmore University Foundation.

The town of Mairi sits roughly 100km northeast of Nairobi, and while driving there we saw field after field of crops, many of which were planted on steep hillsides. Though Mairi isn’t that far from Nairobi, we had to pass through the center of the city to get north (there’s no beltway around the city), and we ran into an hour of traffic before even leaving the city.

When thinking about poverty in Africa and other places, often the first thing that comes to mind is the lack of food that some people have. While food shortages are certainly of great concern, another shortage that can be overlooked is the number of books in rural villages. Pulling a book off of a shelf in a home or visiting a local library are two things that kids in rural Kenya can’t do—there just aren’t books that are accessible.

The Thiuris are doing something about it. Mrs. Thiuri and her husband, who live in New Jersey (where Philip is a professor at William Patterson University) but still spend some time in Kenya, started a project a few years ago called Rural Reading Centers, in which they put up reading centers in rural villages across Kenya so that community members (most importantly children and adolescents) can access books. There are local schools that serve Mairi, but the students must leave the text books at the schools, which are often far from children’s homes. There are no other libraries to speak of, and the reading centers allow people from all over to use the books. School holidays leave students with no materials and no place to study, and the Thiuri’s reading centers fill these gaps—the six centers now around Kenya have approximately 3,000 books each, and the centers also offer materials that help students study for the national exams (Kenya has a nationwide exam for students at the end of primary school, and another exam at the end of secondary school). Each of the six centers has recorded on average 40 young people using the library services on a daily basis.

Mairi is a very small village, from which Mrs. Thiuri hails, with a town center that has just a few buildings.

The town just got electricity in December of 2007. It is a kikuyu village, and everyone there speaks kikuyu to each other. Kenya’s nationwide exam is in English. The rural reading centers offer literature in English, and the centers are planning competitions and prizes in order to promote reading among the rural youth. The reading centers are trying to provide rural youth with educational opportunities so that the kids have more job options, besides the farming careers that many people unavoidably pursue. Without local reading centers, there are few, if any, books in town, and though the youth learn English in schools, they speak their mother tongues (tribal tongues, such as kikuyu) at home. Many residents of the small villages have never even seen a television.

Mrs. Thiuri, who is a curriculum development consultant to the Strathmore School of Tourism and Hospitality, and her husband have just launched the reading centers (within the last two years), and they intend to start more centers. The reading centers are community initiatives; the communities have provided the buildings for the books, and a village member tends to the center. The books, however, have been donated by people in America, including friends and alumni of Strathmore University.

Besides checking out the reading center and briefly walking through the tiny town center, I got to walk

through some of the fields of crops. Timothy (who works at Strathmore and helps Mrs. Thiuri with the reading centers) showed me how to pick tea leaves, and pointed out banana trees (though they were easy to spot), avocado trees, potato plants, sugar cane, corn, and plums. Tea is the main cash crop, but the villagers have enough to eat with all of the other crops they grow.

I learned of the reading centers because Strathmore University Foundation helped to ship some of the reading centers’ books to Nairobi. The centers provide rural youth with an avenue for a better education, and Mrs. Thiuri and her husband, and all those associated with this project, including those in America who have donated books and helped ship them, are certainly having a positive impact on these communities.

[Editor’s note: The Strathmore African Books Project, led by Dr. Andrew Sicree, a former Strathmore teacher now living in State College, Pennsylvania, is playing an important role in helping the Thiuris source and ship books from the United States. To see our African Books Project in action, please see our Photo Gallery.]