AN ADVENTURE OF A LIFETIME BY REBECCA NESBITT
M
y adventure started when I arrived at
Kelowna International Airport at 4:45 in the morning on August 22. Although most kids were still enjoying sleeping in and looking forward to an Okanagan beach day, I was going on a trip to Kenya with my school, Vernon Secondary.
Myself, four teacher chaperones and 20 other students in grades 10-12 were going to help build a school in the community of Ngosuani. Ngosuani is a village in the Massai Mara region in Kenya. It took us thirty-two hours from Kelowna and a couple of connections in Toronto and London, but we arrived ready and excited. I had been waiting for this moment for a whole year.
The first day in the African sun we got a tour of the existing school in Ngosuani. Five hundred children are enrolled in the Ngosuani Primary School, one hundred of those kids are in kindergarten alone. Just imagine one hundred kids in a small, cold room that only has one window as the source of light. The principal told us there are only two teachers for the one hundred kindergarten children aged five years old. As I hope to be a teacher, I personally can’t even comprehend this size of class. Classroom sizes start to
decline as the kids get older because they start to have more responsibilities at home.
The girls and boys who are in grade 8 (the last year of primary school) have worked so hard to get there, especially the girls. Girls in Kenya want to go to school so badly but they don’t have the opportunity to, unlike the boys. Children and teenagers in North America take education for granted - I know I did. When I was meeting these kids and talking to them they would tell me that they loved going to school and wanted to continue on to high school and university. Most of the kids wanted to become doctors or pilots. It was sad because I knew in reality that wouldn’t really happen. They would say that they
wanted to be pilots so that they could fly to Canada and come and help us like we have helped them. They were all so grateful for us to be helping them.
Not only did we help the children, we helped the community. The parents want their children to go to school so that they can have a better life than they did. Just by helping to build one classroom we changed their lives forever. Not only did we have an impact on their lives, they had a huge impact on ours. I can still see the faces of the little children running around and playing games with us. They are so poor and have nothing, yet they are so happy - happier than anybody I have ever met. Their attitudes towards life prove that money can’t buy happiness. From this experience I have become more grateful for what I have and I value living in Canada more than I ever have before.
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