Fundraising for Mary Bright Learners Center
Donation protected
Hello!
I am Charles Wang, a senior at Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut, and am fundraising for the Mary Bright Learners Center in Nairobi, Kenya. I hope to get your kind support.
The Background
I first visited and volunteered at the Mary Bright Learners Center in June 2019 when I stayed with a local family in the outskirts of Nairobi. It is a small orphanage and community-based school for slum children located in a slum in the Kayole area of eastern Nairobi. Founded in 2012 by Clare Olacha and her husband, Pastor Charles Oduku, Mary Bright Learners Center seeks to transform less fortunate children into skillful and self-reliant individuals who can face the challenges around them with a view of finding hope and lasting solutions (Oduku, 2019).
The Details
During my volunteer service there, I was appalled by the Center's dreadful conditions and lack of basic learning infrastructure. There is no electricity, running water and basic sanitation. The whole place reeks of sewage. The surrounding area resembles a junkyard as shown in the following photo. These orphans and students are a real life manifestation of the distant and unfathomable statistics on poverty we see online.
The total enrollment of the school is around 80 children aged from 3 to 15, who are being handled by 3 teachers. The four classrooms are all made of iron sheets with leaking roofs and no window. The floor is not cemented and everything is dusty. Each desk is shared by 6 students and each book by 4. The books and furniture are in a very bad condition and many items have been damaged. The dirty and broken chairs and benches in the classrooms look as if they were just picked from the trash. Despite these repulsive circumstances, the students are very hardworking, as you can see in the photos of their work.
The Potential
The school strives to provide a safe and nurturing learning environment. In order to renovate their classrooms and have a healthier living space, they are in need of timber, iron sheets, wire mesh, construction materials and manpower. They also need to rebuild their decrepit toilet and chicken coop (the chicken eggs are a crucial source of nutrition for the students), which will also require some of the materials listed above. The total cost for all of these refurbishments is roughly 4,000 USD (please see the cost breakdown). It would already be greatly beneficial if we could raise half of that amount.
The Pandemic
Impoverished communities in Kenya like that of the Mary Bright Center have also been impacted disproportionately by the pandemic. According to the Johns Hopkins University latest statistics, as of September 16, 2021 only 1.6% of the 53 million people are fully vaccinated in Kenya. As such, they are at an even greater disadvantage and need as much funding as possible to improve the current situation.
The following words are from Pastor Oduku on the current situation during the pandemic:
“The centre depends on well-wishers and parent/guardians' contribution of 4$ (400 kshs) per month that caters for school premises' rent, childrens' meals and other expenses which has been of great challenge as a result of their low economic status that has been worsened by the covid 19 pandemic.
Mary Bright Learners Centre has gone through a lot of difficulties brought about by the pandemic.The onset of covid immediately led to loss of parents/guardians' jobs therefore bringing down a major source of finance of the school. Children could now not afford books, stationery and uniforms. Some even dropped out of school owing to the fact that their homes could not provide food.
Government policies of social distancing concerning covid have added salt to injury since the school lacks resources like textbooks and desks. This is because children cannot afford the money to buy the resources and have to share the few available textbooks and desks thereby making the one metre policy a dream and not a reality.
Furthermore, the increased cost of living in the country caused by the curfews and lockdown have led to increased price of foodstuffs making it a hard task to provide for the childrens' meals by the school.”
Below are photos of students during the pandemic, most students cannot afford high quality masks. Since there is no running water, the school has to set up the bucket for students to wash their hands more frequently."
More photos and videos are available through this Google Drive link:
Please consider supporting the Mary Bright Learners Center and contribute any amount to your ability. Your donation will make a huge impact on the life and education of the students at Mary Bright Learners Center.
Feel free to contact me with any questions at charles.wang2004 @ (gmail.com) or +1 2034799595. I would greatly appreciate your help!
Thank you,
Charles Wang
Organizer and beneficiary
Charles Wang
Organizer
New Haven, CT
Henan Cheng
Beneficiary