The Beautiful Tree (18 page)

Jane was keen to tell me her story, as we sat on old school chairs crowded into her office. “Free education is a big problem to me,” she said. Since the government abolished fees in the state schools, “parents have opted for free education.” She used to have about 500 children in her school; now she had only 300. She was in a real fix, she said, and couldn’t afford the rent. It was true, a substantial number of her parents had opted to stay with her, rather than move their children to the free public school. She explained: “Children have to walk two kilometers to outside the slum; there is no public school in the slum itself. But parents are worried about their children, especially girls, because there are child abductors around.” So that was one reason why 300 parents stayed, even though the public schools were now free. She was sure that if her ex-parents could see some slight improvement, they would return and make her school viable again. The wealthier of her poor parents had taken their children away, she said, the ones who paid their fees on time. “So what I can do now?” she asked.

Her school fees were about 200 Kenyan shillings per month, or about $2.60. But for the poorest children, including 50 orphans, she herself offered, and had always offered since she established the school 10 years before, free education. She chuckled at the irony of her having done all along what the government was now getting so much credit for doing—offering free education, at least to the poorest of the poor. In the last decade, she told me, she had experienced so many difficulties. But now she felt very crestfallen, that she might be unable to surmount this particular difficulty. “When free education came, I am really being hit very hard.”

Why did she establish a school? “Even my grandfather was a teacher, it is in my family’s blood,” she responded. She loved being a teacher, but also enjoyed the role of helping families, being “upfront” in her community, being noticed. She enjoyed “the best of all worlds,” she said, running a business and being respected in the community, at least, that was, until free primary education came along and shattered her dreams. She herself had not been trained as a teacher. Of her teachers, six were men, seven were women; some were trained, but she believed that they had talent even if they had failed the exams or had not even taken them. Government teachers, she said, were paid much, much more than her teachers—she didn’t want to say how much, because, she laughed, “the comparison will make me cry!” A big problem with the government teachers, she said, was that they frequently went on strike. This was one reason why parents were willing to pay for private education, even if there was a free alternative.

I visited the classrooms, creeping carefully on the rickety boards of the upstairs rooms, which were pretty dark and not full of children—but this was the first day of the term. James Shikwati told me that he wouldn’t have expected any children at all in schools on the first day of the term, as teaching didn’t normally get under way until at least the second week. But that was in the government schools. Here, teaching was going on, right on the first day. I talked to the children after they stood to greet me and said, “Welcome, you are welcome.” I asked a boy in the upper classes why his parents sent him to this school when government schools were now free. “In government schools,” he said, “there are too many children and too few teachers.”

We left Jane, promising to return later. Immediately next door was another school, Makina Self-Help School, but we didn’t call there because we didn’t want to offend Jane’s hospitality. We continued walking down the muddy street. Waterfalls tumbled from rocky heights, carrying along with the heavy overnight rainfall the detritus of the slums to the humanity below. We arrived at a narrow-gauge railway line, weaving through the slums, to a small gorge etched out of the rocks. Crowds of people were using the railroad track as a major thoroughfare, relieved from the mud as they moved along the steel line and wood sleepers. It was the old Uganda Railway, James told me, built by the British to connect the coast at Mombasa with Lake Victoria, where a steamer could take people across to Kampala, Uganda’s capital. I was about to ask if it was still in use when the deep throbbing that had been in the background for some time answered my question: a diesel locomotive appeared out of the gorge, pulling an immense train of freight cars. As it approached, people dove off the track into the mud, as the train seemed to plow its way through the crowd. The moment the train passed, they all crowded back on the track and resumed their business.

While the train passed, we asked if anyone knew of any private schools. Of course, we were told. There were private schools in every direction.
Private
schools? We ensured that people had heard us correctly. Of course, there were no government schools here in Kibera! James Shikwati took it all in his stride. OK, so I was wrong, he joked, very wrong. We crossed the railway line, turned left, and clambered up the steep bank to the top of the gorge. And five minutes later, we found three other private schools. We stopped first at Huruma Secondary School, across the tracks from Starlight Educational Centre. Huruma was the longest-established private school in Kibera, we were told. We met the principal, a jolly rotund man, who was in the office as parents were lining up to pay for their children’s education. Free education did not affect enrollment in this school, he told us, because education was not free at the secondary level. But even his sister primary school had no problem now—some students did leave in January when free primary education was introduced but were now returning, and there were more children now than at the end of last year! Why was that? we asked. “You ask my parents,” he chuckled. The sister’s primary school was farther down the railroad tracks. Painted in bold white capital letters on the blue corrugated-iron shack walls was the legend:

The Huruma Kibera School.

Free
Education for
:

Welcome.

An arrow pointed to the entrance, down an alley between the shacks.

We made our way out of the slum. Its exits seemed to be fine locations for young entrepreneurs, who would wash and shine your shoes for a “few bob” (that is, a few Kenyan shillings; Kenyans used the same slang for their money as the British used to for theirs) as you prepared to go about your business in the city proper. And James pointed to one of the grand houses bordering the slum, with beautiful and extensive gardens, flush with jacaranda trees, pale purple in season. Here lived the notorious ex-president of Kenya, Moi. And running parallel to the railway line a few hundred meters away on higher ground was a high brick wall; on one side the crowded slums, on the other the spacious and attractive municipal golf course.

Back in the office, James told me how astounded he was that something was on his doorstep that he never knew about—but, more important, that those who should have known were also in the dark! Why did no one tell him, especially those that should have known better? I, on the other hand, felt vindicated. We could do the research here and see what we could uncover about private education and the poor in urban Kenya, and how free primary education had affected it all.

We did the research proper on private schools for the poor in the slums of Nairobi; but I also wanted to see if the same phenomenon also existed in rural Kenya. When I returned to Kenya in August 2004, my opportunity came. I went with James Shikwati’s elder brother Juma to the province of Western, where James and his family came from. We flew—a new experience for Juma—from Nairobi to Kisumu. He struggled manfully with his seat belt before I intervened to show him how: “Will we really need this? Is it going to be so bumpy?” he asked, looking squeamish. He studied the safety card for sometime after the flight attendant had taken us perfunctorily through it, and asked me how exactly we should leave by the emergency exit when required. And as we flew, he delighted in looking at the clouds. They
were
extraordinarily beautiful, with deep chasms between their cauliflower heads and what looked for all the world like a lakeshore in the distance, with the dark-blue line of the water, clouds reflected below and standing in their whiteness above. But it was all cloud illusion. As we broke through to see the earth below, Juma said, “I can now tell my children I have seen how God looks down upon us.” Later he told his brother of his flying experience: “There were potholes. Potholes, in the air, which made it all very bumpy. They called them air pockets.”

I also experienced a new form of transport, with as much delight. This was the
boda-boda
bicycle, so named because it originally took people’s goods illicitly across the Uganda-Kenya border—there being no duty on goods taken by bicycle. “Border-border” became transmuted to
boda-boda
. Since then,
boda-bodas
have emerged as a major public transport system in Kenya, particularly Western province. You sit on a comfortable seat fitted with footrests and hand rests, above the back wheel of an otherwise ordinary bicycle, behind a fit young man who energetically cycles you where you want to go. Except that when you reach a hill, you get off to walk alongside him.

By
boda-boda
to the bus station, then on to the town of Kakamega in a
matatu
(minibus-taxi), and then to Juma’s village, Lubao. Juma lives in a mud-and-wood building with a half-acre plot on which he grows bananas and other staples and keeps his cow. We arrived at nightfall. As his wife prepared some food for us, Juma took me across the village to the local private school, Victory Academy. It was run by Lydia, who was breastfeeding her baby in the dark corner of a classroom that doubled as her home as we arrived. Her possessions were all around, but when school was in session she bundled them away during the day and unpacked every evening. It was nearly 7:00 p.m. and getting dark. In the gloaming, she unlocked and unbolted each classroom door and showed us rooms with wonderful displays for the young children of animal pictures and alphabet friezes.

Lydia told me a familiar story: She had started a nursery four years earlier, but then the parents came to her when their children transferred to first grade in the public primary school and said that her children were far ahead of the other children and now nowhere nearly as happy as they had been. So why couldn’t she teach first grade too? So she had started first grade, moved the children up to second grade, and had hoped to expand further as the children grew up with her. She currently had about 50 children, paying fees of about 200 Kenyan shillings (about $2.60) per month. She had no view on the effect of free primary education—her school population had stayed the same, she said, nothing much had changed.

We left her, to have
chai
—sweet, milky tea—and sandwiches that Juma’s wife had prepared for us. The sun was setting, golden on the horizon. The crickets chirped, and in the middle distance was the noise of older children playing, joyously, exuberantly outside, while babies coughed gently in the next room; there were flickering candles and the smell of paraffin lights; at the end of the drive, the old men and younger men and women stood and chatted.

In the morning, after an excellent breakfast of tiny bananas, pawpaw, juice, and
chai
, we hired a car and went looking for private schools. We found plenty; there was no shortage here in the rural areas. Typical of the schools was one just outside Mukumu, where the hospital sign by the roadside advertised: “Hospital Mortuary: Cold Rooms Available.” Here we found Wema Academy.
Wema
means “goodness” in Kiswahili, the proprietor, Stella, told me; it was taken from the hymn “Surely Goodness and Mercy Shall Follow Me.” The school occupied a very pleasant site by the main road; it had a couple of block buildings with tin roofs, but most were made of mud-rendered wood. Apparently, the school was originally a residential site—a terrace of rooms for individual families to rent—but Stella had persuaded the owners to lease it to her as a school. The owner family lived on the adjacent plot.

Stella served us
chai
from a flask in her office. Why did she found the school? I asked her. She was clear: “In order to make an income for my family,” she said, surprisingly boldly, but also added, “and to help the children in the neighborhood.” The school currently had 120 students, from “baby class,” nursery up to fourth grade. Fees were comparable with those I’d seen elsewhere. She told me that “the growth of the school has been less, as there are bureaucratic obstacles.” Government officials were harassing her, and she has only one way of dealing with these officials—she wouldn’t say how, but presumably meant through bribery. One problem the officials brought up was that a school should be on owned property, with proper deeds, but she rented the buildings. This was not good enough. Another problem was the size of the playground, which should be the size of a soccer field, but hers was only half that. It seemed a perfectly adequate size, however. (A cow was grazing there.) They also harassed her about the classroom sizes, she said. They were supposed to be at least eight feet by eight feet; hers were smaller. “But my class size is also smaller than in the public schools; I have less children so I don’t need such a large classroom.” But the inspectors wouldn’t listen: “You can’t tell them that the class is small, but the students are few,” she told me, “they don’t listen; they have their rules and keep to them.” She said that none of the public schools around had the right-sized playground, or classrooms, yet they were not even inspected, let alone harassed. “Anything private, the government officers harass it. If it is a public school, no one cares how many toilets are there. But in a private school, they harass you!”

Stella also said that her school had been approved for registration, and she had a letter from the district education officer to prove this, but for the last two years the District Education Board “has been busy and has not discussed new private schools.”