Mercy Children's Centre, Kenya: 2009 Year in Review

By Lili and Lew Fulton

Dear all,

Although we Fultons haven't been to Nairobi since March we have been in good touch with Charles and Pius. I figure now is a good time to update y'all about how we are doing at the Mercy Children's Centre.

Thanks to donations from many people, with especially important contributions from Carol Bohnenkamp and Acton Presbyterian Church, we are managing to maintain our operating budget of 2000 dollars per month and have been able to feed the kids and pay the teachers for another academic year. This is no minor undertaking and we are proud of ourselves and very grateful to you! I have to remind myself that each day spent in a safe school is a major accomplishment in the lives of our kids and even our teachers. Though we also have to remember that we give each teacher only 45 dollars a month to live on. And, of course, they are allowed to eat lunch with the kids (which, given the rising price of food, these days all too often only consists of rice or corn meal).

(As a side note: you can rent a room in the slums of Nairobi for as little as $15 a month so we hope $45 is a living salary. On the other hand, just to illuminate the disparity in life in Nairobi -- our modestly appointed by very well placed house cost us $1500 a month to rent when we lived there. And Sadie couldn't find a safe place to live for less than 700 a month when she went back to visit. That is because we wouldn't let her live in the slums -- these people are living at a comfort and security level that we really couldn't accept).

Meanwhile, in Bumala some great things are happening thanks to efforts by Charles, Pius, the teachers tehre - and also to One Child's Village (especially Todd Lorentz and Cristelle Audet). They have led fundraising efforts and funded an expansion of the campus out there. They have bought another 3 acres of land adjacent to the school (so we now have 5 acres in total for growing food), built a volunteer guest house/dormitory, two additional classrooms, a computer room with 6 computers and Internet, a sewing room with 3 sewing machines.

One Child's Village has also invested in major capital improvements, including better kitchen facilities and a 12-hole latrine out in Bumala. Finally the campus is even getting electricity installed throughout the entire complex. It is an amazing advance in this region to have electricity in our school so that now we can have computer classes and maybe even a movie night. (That bit was funded by a grant from FAWCO). But since their money has been completely earmarked for capital investments, our monthly operating costs remain funded out of the $2000 per month mentioned above. For more on their projets and vouter program You Can check out www.onechildsvillage.org.

In the long run we hope to move all our students from Kawangware to Bumala because the countryside setting offers a much healthier environment to grow up in. We are hesitant to make the jump however on the grounds that in Kawangware most of the students have extended family who are helping to raise them. Almost everybody would be very happy to send their children off to a boarding school up country largely for the obvious reason that this would cut out their costs in helping with the children's daily needs. The families of the kids would be more than happy to trust the Mercy Centre to take over full financial responsibility of their nieces, baby brothers or cousins. But for us the financial commitments to making this move would be large and irreversible -- once we take full care of the more nearly 300 kids full time they will truly be our wards. So in the meantime we are continuing to operate the school and pay rent in the slum (including for 25 of our students' accommodations) because it is working and for now that is all we can afford.

So for the short run while One Child's Village is making major capital improvements in Bumala we are experiencing added costs in Kawangware. The new baby classes keep coming in as our original kids grow up. Charles and Pius have been told that they cannot bring in every underpriviledged child they meet in the slum and it is very hard for them to keep the class sizes down to a manageable size. Logically, there will always remain this tension between providing a solid education and healthy childhood to the relatively lucky few who are adopted into our school or spreading our money more thinly to a larger clientele who we ultimately can't afford to keep. Don't forget that Kenya has 1.5 million orphans and no government programs for them.

Back in the states we have established another website and a charity entity which allows tax free donations to the ‘Friends of the Mercy Children’s Centre’ out of Piedmont California. Check it out at www.friendsmcc.org

Finally, while Charles and Pius feel a strong pressure to expand to more little kids Lili can't stomach the idea of letting the big kids graduate and head out into their wide world without our help. We have an 8th grade graduating class this December of 7 students. We paid their way to another charity based private school for the last two years, and they are sitting their exams now. They are roughly 14 years old and will get the Kenya primary school certificate if they pass their exams. To send them to secondary school will be very expensive, and to not send them to secondary school will be very hard.

Then next year's class of 8th graders amounts to about 15 kids and each younger class grows proportionally. The future is frankly far from settled. We are working on several different fund raising schemes but it is quite a challenge to keep up with our rising costs. Clearly we have already bitten off a very big project here and we need all the help we can get in chewing it.

So thank you in advance for any donations, or even fundraising ideas or leads you can help us with. Remember every last cent of the money that is sent to Friends of the Mercy Children's Centre is spent directly on the children.

Donations can be made directly via paypal on www.mccentre.org or sent by completely tax deductible check to Friends of the Mercy Centre, 172 Wildwood Ave, Piedmont CA 94610.

Mercy Children's Centre, Kenya: The Year in Review

By Lew, Lili and Sadie Fulton

(Written November 24, 2008)

As 2008 comes to a close...

We thought it would be a good time to let you know how things have gone at the Mercy Children's Centre this year. Kenya's had a tough year - and what follows is not completely uplifting - but the fact that we are stable and in some ways moving ahead, is itself a great achievement. This is primarily due to the continued commitment of our supporters and the great leadership of Charles and Pius and their team of teachers at the two school campuses in Kawangware and Bumala.

The year certainly started out with great difficulty, as Kenya experienced violent upheavals after the December 2007 elections. By March things had mostly calmed down, and during Sadie and Lili's March trip to Nairobi and Bumala they saw a lot of new hope in everyone's faces.

Unfortunately, for many Kenyans (including children and teachers at the Mercy Centre campuses), this hope was accompanied by a very real shock that can only be diagnosed as "post traumatic shock syndrome". The country had veered very close to a Rwanda style genocide, with plenty of small and a few sizeable atrocities, but then miraculously pulled itself out before experiencing death and destruction on a mass scale. The trauma this inflicted highlights the real need of all Kenyan children, especially orphans and "vulnerable youth" for a peaceful, safe and nurturing environment and good education - so that they can learn how to be the caring responsible adults who will be pivotal for Kenya's development.

At the two MCC campuses, we therefore made a renewed commitment to provide a safe haven, schooling, and a daily meal to each child and so far we are keeping up with that commitment - though meals became increasingly expensive during the year as we got hit with a second major challenge - rising food prices. Prices of basic stables like corn and vegetable oil doubled or tripled (or worse) as food prices rose around the world between March and July of 2008. Since August, prices have moderated somewhat but are still well above pre-2008 levels.

Another setback (we'll get to some good news soon!): we had hoped to get support from Feed the Children but they let us down despite having a verbal commitment of support if we met their hygiene and food storage requirements, which we did (at considerable expense). It turns out that successfully navigating their bureaucracy requires more time and resources than we have available. Clearly, the poorest of the poor remain neglected, even by food charity organizations.

So we continue to pay market prices for food, and in our 2008 budget we have been able to allocate around KSH 20 per child per day (about $0.30, which means $8 per month or $1600 for 200 kids). This is the absolute minimum to provide some maize and vegetables each day, and meat on rare occasions. It would be great to increase the budget (and food) per child, but we must also factor in cost increases associated with adding new students in 2009.

During the year, we also implemented a proper (if small) salary for all teachers. This amounted to KSH 3000 ($50) per month per teacher for 15 teachers in the two schools (a total budget cost of $750/month). Gaining some stability for the teachers (especially in the face of their own rising food and living costs) has been a major achievement, and gives the Mercy Centre a little more leverage in terms of choosing teachers and ensuring that they do their jobs properly.

The Budget Picture

As mentioned, the average expenses for food and teachers during 2008 were $1600/mo and $750/mo respectively. In addition, rental costs (in Kawangware, including the dormitory for 25 kids) came to about KSH 30,000 ($500) per month, and school supplies and operating budget came to another KSH 10,000-15,000 ($150-230) per month. All in all, monthly expenses have been about KSH 200,000 ($3,000) per month. Of this, we were able to cover about $2000 per month with external contributions (thanks everyone!), and the rest was raised by MCC staff (Charles and Pius) from the local community and even from their own pockets.

During 2009, these costs will rise as we add a new "baby class" to the 2 schools. Costs should also rise due to increases in spending for food and teachers, but this can only happen if we can significantly increase the level of support we receive through donations. At Bumala, a 5th class will be added (Baby through Class 3), whereas in Kawangware, as mentioned, we will need to decide whether to expand the school through class 7 or even 8.

Some Good News! Construction Continues at Bumala Campus

Funded primarily by our Canadian NGO partner One Child's Village (www.onechildsvillage.org), during late 2007 and in 2008 at the Bumala school, the following construction projects were completed:

• (Just finished in November) an assembly hall that doubles as a 3-classroom building, ensuring sufficient class rooms through 2009.
• 5-classroom school with administration and storage offices
• Kitchen building (kids are ensured lunch each day)
• water well
• 4 stall latrine

OCV also provided a host of important supplies to both Kawangware and Bumala.

Second Phase of Construction

In early September 2008 the second phase of construction began in Bumala. As of late November we are nearing the completion of a large meeting hall at the school in Bumala which will double as a 3-classroom facility for the children. Prices for construction have gone up dramatically since building the main school last fall, but Charles has worked tirelessly to negotiate fair prices on almost everything.

OCV proposed construction plans for 2009 include:

• Increased library and computer room facilities
• 2 additional acres of land for future food production and expansion
• Improved kitchen facility
• Additional and replacement desks, uniforms, textbooks, and school supplies for the school year

OCV is also putting together a plan to create several volunteer guest housing complexes on site so that volunteers and well-wishers can stay right at the school and participate in programs such as teaching, gardening, construction, or community outreach to the orphan's homes. This will hopefully be achieved during 2009. Want to come to Kenya?

In sum, we are hanging in there. We hope we can get greater levels of support, and more supporters, during 2009 so we can continue to grow and help more kids in Kenya. Lew is hoping to visit Kenya in late December or early January and will send back a fresh report on things there. Anyone interested in joining him on this trip is most welcome.

Finally, we sincerely want to thank all our supporters during 2008, as listed on our website (www.mccentre.org). A special thanks to Knox Church and Renee Fulton in Acton, Ontario for their amazing fund-raising efforts, and to Elisa Dumitrescu of Nairobi for being such a dependable supporter!

We wish everyone a happy and healthy holiday season!

Lew, Lili, and Sadie Fulton

Lili's Trip Report - Kenya March 15 to April 8 2008
(written 19 April 2008)

This is to let folks know how our trip out to Nairobi and Bumala (Western Kenya) went last month. Mostly it was simply wonderful.

Mercy Children's Centre Kawangware Update

First a quick Mercy Centre update: the Kawangware 'campus' looks the same as ever, no permanent damage from the country's troubles that ended not long before we arrived. If anything the neighborhood was a bit tidier than it had been when we last saw it back in August 2007. There are a couple of 'open spaces' where their once were buildings. We were told these were burnt down in the riots, but the government did an amazing job of cleaning up the mess. I guess people are really trying to move beyond the violence.

So things seem about the same. Well, the baby fruit trees we had planted are all gone, but the shade trees are still growing. A new latrine has been dug because the older one that we had dug was used up. The teachers have an office now as well as the five or six classrooms (taken from one long room) that are kept full of students of the different class levels.

I met with the teachers and then helped a bit with some of the classes a couple of days. The teachers said that things are really tough now (e.g. higher food prices) and so Charles, Pius and I agreed the time has come to give everyone a regular salary, though this will require a significant increase in our budget. We promised to begin providing a regular monthly pay of KSH 3000 from May. This is only $45 but it is nearing a typical base salary for teachers, and with this income the teachers will no longer be considered volunteers. We all agreed that in exchange for receiving a salary they must now make teaching their primary responsibly and that they must focus principally on the educational and development needs of the kids.

NEWS FLASH - several short videos from Bumala are now on You Tube - you can search for them under "mccentre".

This change also means we will also now be in a position to let teachers go if they don't do good work. Sadly, for Kenya, there are plenty of people who would be willing and able to work for this paltry wage. So we are now planning to hire only qualified teachers rather than just accepting volunteer help from our neighbors. Our main mission must continue to be the education of the children and this requires a focus on quality teaching. To that end I even took the teachers out to an appreciation lunch…to sort of launch their professional careers with us.

I brought nearly 50 children's videos (e.g. Disney) to provide a bit of fun for the kids; in the longer term we hope that we can even set up a movie night in the neighborhood (with a projector) as an income generating activity. I also provided some professional computer training to the teachers so that they can now begin to educate the students on computing, as we plan to get more computers into the school. They were very happy to be educated on this exciting new technology.

Feed the Children to Assist MCC Kawangware

Probably the biggest news is that we've had a great development regarding feeding the kids – The organization "Feed the Children" (FTC) has conditionally accepted the Mercy Centre's application and should begin to provide regular breakfasts and lunches in Kawangware soon. We will have to make several physical improvements to the school and ensure secure food storage in order to meet their criteria for assistance. So we are making some quick investments to meet this criteria, including renting an additional secure space which will house the food and serve as a new kitchen. This set of investments will provide a large payoff in terms of improved lunches, breakfasts (which are new) and savings to the budget from reduced food expenditures. FTC will also do things like provide de-worming medicines, so there will be many benefits.

MCC Bumala Update

My daughter, Sadie, and I also went to Bumala to see how things are going at the newly constructed school on our "Bumala Campus". They had finished building the main school building and moved in October 2007, but we hadn't been back to see it until now.

Here's the scoop:

• The campus is really quite beautiful, with lots of baby trees planted and a beginning educational vegetable garden. I bought 5 new pawpaw trees and some bags of seed to add to the mix.
• They had a new water well dug and it is quite good, because it accesses water all year around. But it needs shoring up inside and around the top as well as a water extraction system, I bought two aluminum buckets to help a bit there.
• The school building, with 4 classrooms, is great - cool and breezy and quite pleasant! The mud-wall construction seems to have worked out fine, though it does get cracks and slumps here and there that need regular attention. But Charles and Pius are making sure things are maintained well.
• The kids all look very healthy and happy though many were barefoot – they go through shoes fairly quickly! I bought 186 new pairs of shoes (for both Kawangware and Bumala) so that should help everyone's feet be clad through 2008. A number of kids have skin rashes so we are asking our colleagues Todd Lorentz and Cristelle Audet (One Child's Village) to bring a few medical supplies when they travel to Kenya in June.
• On another front, the use of firewood for cooking seems expensive, unsustainable, and a lot of work for the Matron, so I took two teachers to Nakumat (the big department store in Kisumu) and bought some Chinese made gas cookers that really fit the needs of a large school. They were quite cheap, about KSH 3000 each, so I bought two and the tanks of gas to go with them at 6000/= each (they will be much cheaper to refill than they are the first time you buy). I am frankly very pleased with this appropriate technology shift, and so is the matron who enjoys the lack of smoke.
• Sadie took some great videos of the kids singing and dancing for us – we have put a few of these up on youtube, search on "mccentre".
• Going forward, we are hoping this year to get the Bumala school an electrical hookup and begin construction of more buildings, such as an assembly hall/cafeteria and a guest house (so that all of our friends and supporters can come see MCC for themselves!)
• Finally we are trying to get Sadie's famous musician friend (Eric Wainaina) to perform his new musical on 'our campus'. He has a grant to perform all over Kenya but he hasn't been able to find venues very easily. It is an awesome musical that he may be taking to London soon, but in the meantime he may perform it for our little school and the whole town of Bumala. We are pretty excited about that.

A quick note about Kenya's recovery

I have neglected to mention the bigger political picture that I saw in Kenya. It looked at first like the country has awakened from a bad dream, everyone is trying for business as usual and the Kenyans are ambitious about their work. But when you look into the eyes of some of the more vulnerable people you see a kind of shock that I think would qualify as post traumatic shock syndrome. They've certainly experienced trauma. For example, our driver had to stay at home near his tiny shack in a slum and sleep out side of it so that they would not burn down the house with him inside. Another example is from our old cook who luckily speaks several languages fluently because she answered her door several times to gangs of hoodlums from each different tribe who were on door to door rape and murder campaigns. She was unhurt because she spoke whichever language they spoke to her and assured them that she was of their tribe. But her next door neighbor was slashed to death for being of the wrong tribe. Can you imagine?

Of course the children of Kenya saw all this. It is therefore very important to provide safe havens and teach peace and tolerance. We have talked to the teachers about completely avoiding any violence (including corporal punishment) in the classrooms.

On a happier note the rainy season has been plentiful and that means new life to the Kenyans so hopefully they are putting the trauma behind them.

Update Regarding the Post-election Situation in Kenya

While we are rather heartbroken about how this Kenyan election has gone, and the violence it has produced, everything at both the Kawangware and Bumala campuses of the Mercy Centre is (so far) okay, and these areas are relatively calm. All the kids are safe and there is enough food to go around. The Kawangware school in Nairobi will probably only have limited classes until the situation improves.

Lili and Sadie have postponed their planned trip to Kenya for the time being

We hope everyone will give an extra thought to the plight of average Kenyans, to make it through this difficult time.

Construction of New School Facilities in Bumala, Kenya

It has been many months since the last time we have written everyone about the Mercy Centre schools in Nairobi and Bumala Kenya. In the meantime we Fultons have moved - Lew and Lili back to Paris and Sadie off to University in Belfast. But the Mercy Centre has also been moving - building a new school facility in Bumala and moving the kids to it in October after a very efficient 2 month construction project. We are very excited to announce the completion of this "Phase I" construction effort and describe the new facilities and plans.

During the months of August, Sept. and Oct., Charles Oduor and Pius Likami directed the construction of a schoolhouse, office, and latrine facilities for our students in Bumala in Western Kenya. On our two acre plot of land, purchased in June 2007, and thanks primarily to funding from One Child's Village, we have been able to build a five-room school house and a sanitary latrine outhouse. The Bumala students were moved from their temporary (rental) classrooms in Bumala town into the new facility on the outskirts of town on October 8. New desks, chairs and other equipment were also provided for this "grand opening" by One Child's Village.

Construction was challenging but by keeping things fairly simple and using traditional building designs and approaches, we were able to construct the main building fairly quickly and at fairly low cost (about $12,000). We all helped develop the blueprint, with assistance from a Canadian architect, and Charles and Pius hired local builders, suppliers and laborers. In August, Lew, Terry and Terry's friend from St. Andrews, Katherine Kemp, all got the opportunity to go out to Bumala and help with the work in progress - hammer a few nails, help dig a trench, etc.

As shown in the accompanying photos, The classrooms are quite large (all about 24 x 28 feet or 7.5 x 9 metres), large enough to comfortably accommodate classes of up to 40 children (though current class sizes are smaller, around 25-30). The central room provides a school office, with an outer office and 2 smaller closed offices for the Head Master and Assistant.

The floors are sand mixed with mud and cement, with a smooth surface layer. The walls are built up with a timber frame and then mud/cement around this, providing good strength and insulation. The roof is timber frame with metal sheeting, again, a typical style of construction in western Kenya.

The students seem very pleased to be at the new facility with plenty of space to run around and a sense of pride in their new facilities. Now they have space and security to finally provide a milk cow and some chickens as well with the money we have already collected.

We will now begin to raise funding to start a second phase of construction, including a proper kitchen and dining/assembly hall, and a guest house for visitors (including, hopefully, volunteer teachers from around the world!). An electrical hookup, converter, and basic lighting system is not too expensive (around $1500) and an obvious priority. A well or bore hole has proven too expensive so for now we are planning to add a rainwater collection system as we have in Kawangware, and supplement this with purchased drinking water as needed.

We have planted several fruit trees and welcome contributions toward more self-sufficiency purchases. For example, once there is an assembly hall, we hope to provide a video projection system so that the school can have movie nights for the community at a small admission fee.

Meanwhile, at the Kawangware Mercy Centre school in Nairobi, the students continue to thrive and work hard. January will start a new school year (at both schools) and we hope to be able to expand by one class level, moving all the existing classes up one level and entering a new "baby" class. If we can keep expanding the funding base, we hope to be able to help the oldest kids eventually make it all they way through Form 4 (equivalent to grade 12 for our North American friends). We also hope to move some of the Kawangware kids out to the healthier environment of Bumala, in cases where they will be essentially going home, since many of them moved (or were moved) to Nairobi from that part of Kenya in the first place. But one step at a time.

We now hope to gain significant new contributions and funding from our friends and patrons. Priorities are described on the next page.

Best regards,

Lew and Lili Fulton

Needs for new funding for the Mercy Centre Schools

At this time we are welcoming donations either to contribute to on-going construction (though we hope to get another generous grant from One Child's Village to go pay for much of the next construction phase) and also donations to help continue to pay for school lunches, school supplies and uniforms for the next school year, and to begin to provide the teachers with better salaries. The teachers are provided a small salary when possible, though it has not been possible every month, and it is not very much. The Kawangware school has experimented with enrolling some students who are not orphans at a modest monthly fee to help pay teacher salaries, but this has had mixed results and we may not push it much further.

The best contributions now would be those that one could call "subscriptions", i.e. something like a commitment to help pay for, for example, the salary of one teacher for a year (hopefully to be renewed in future years), or to pay for daily lunches for x number of children, again for a year or more (a one-time payment could be held and allocated over the course of the year).

Subscriptions could be made as follows:

• 1 teacher for a year: $600 (KSH 3000/mo x 12 months = 36,000; this sounds low but would be a vast improvement over what they are used to)
• 1 student lunch for a year = $65 (KSH 20/day * 200 school days/year = 4000)
• 1 student outfit per year = $50 (approximately)

A one time gift is also always useful and appreciated:

• A rain water collection system for Bumala would cost about $1000
• The cost of an electricity generation hook-up with converter would be about $1500
• Any amount that can be put with other contributions toward these types of purchases

We were going to hold out for really big news but figure we owe the website an update. The Mercy Centre is now building its new facility in Bumala on our 2 acre parcel of land! Charles and Pius are leading the way, having spent the month of August there and managing construction themselves. The first "phase" of building is focused on a school house with 4 large classrooms (that can easily be subdivided to make 8) and a central school office. So its one long building with five rooms, located at the western edge of our 2 acre compound. A latrine is also being built. Look for photos on the photos page of the website, coming soon...

This goal is to complete this first phase by the end of September 07 and be "open for business" 1 October. the kids from the current Bumala school (a rented set of 4 tiny classrooms in the town) will shift over to the new campus, and the 100 kids will suddenly have a lot of running around space.

The next steps will probably focus on provision of water and electricity to the campus - we estimate that a bore hole will cost up to $5000, so we are looking around for NGO and donor help on this. A basic water tank (5000 litres) costs around $150 so that's doable, and we might put in a roof-top water catchment system. In the mean time, you can pay a water company to fill your 5000 litre tank for about $20. Its a lot per litre, compared to what people pay, e.g. in the US, but better than not having water.

Electric hookup should not be too bad - looks like about $1000 to arrange for the converter and hookup to the public electricity system.

Then we will focus on building a dormitory and a guest house - we want to get a 6 person guest house built ASAP so people can come to Bumala to volunteer at the school for a few days, weeks, or months!

More to come...

Quick update: we (Mercy Center's board) are now ready to buy a 2 acre plot of land just outside Bumala and are very excited about building our new school there! We also have received a large donation from Todd Lorentz through his fund raising efforts in Edmonton (see http://www.onechildsvillage.org/). We will soon post a set of cost estimates for "Phase I" construction of our new school facility and will seek additional donations to cover the cost of buildings, equipment etc. not covered by the funds we so far have raised. Stay tuned!