First Impressions of School

We are getting a quick introduction to Kenyan education through real life experience! The staff members in our schools have been extremely helpful as we are continuing to adjusting to new procedures and ways of doing things.

The official school day starts at 8:00 and runs until 4:00. Classes are forty minutes in duration. Due to limited space, students remain in one classroom all day and the teachers move from room to room, not the other way around as happens in America. Our students are lucky in that each student has their own desk and chair. The desks are large enough that their books fit inside and don’t have to be piled on the floor. Although our schools have excellent reputations, students must still share textbooks, only two students to a book though. The classes are much larger than what we are used to. Cindy has 47 – 52 in her classes while John has 82!

Assignments are done in exercise books rather than on loose sheets of paper. That makes collecting work to mark (grade) more difficult and much more cumbersome. The good thing is that the teacher doesn’t actually collect the work. Each class has a class prefect that is similar to a class monitor. These prefects are nominated by their classmates, but the final selection is determined by the teaching staff. Among their duties are the actual collection of work and then they and a friend carry the exercise books to the staff room for the teacher. Once the teacher has them graded they call the prefects to come and pick them up and pass them back to the students. That sure beats trying to carry a stack of notebooks over a foot high to another building.

The head of each department has their own office where they can work in quiet. However, most of us do our work in the Staff Room. It is a large room that contains at least 24 large desks. Desks are assigned on a seniority basis. Some teachers must share desks. Cindy is lucky enough to have a desk of her own. She was told it is because she teaches English and has the most marking to do. John is doing his work in the library because there isn’t a place for him to work.

Each morning at 10:00 the students and teachers are served chai. It is tea made out of milk and sweetened with sugar. We both like it very much. The British call it milk tea. Teachers are served white bread with their tea. Most make a bread and butter sandwich that has four to six slices of bread in it. As a rule Kenyans don’t eat breakfast, so it is understandable that they are hungry by 10:00. It’s during chai and lunch that the staff room is the most crowded and the noisiest as almost everyone comes for these.

Lunch is also served for the teachers. We have decided that we will eat the school lunch provided. They are already concerned because we don’t take bread with our chai. In their opinion we don’t eat nearly enough to keep from starving. Lunches are typically Kenyan food: sukumawiki with ugali, githeri, or beans and rice. Githeri is a mixture of red beans and maize (corn). Their version of corn is what we would call field corn in Kansas. It is large kernels of hard, tough corn. It’s not our favorite meal. Ugali according to the dictionary is stiff porridge. It is made out of corn flour (similar to corn meal) and boiling water. It is stiffer than mashed potatoes or even corn bread. To eat it you use your thumb and first two fingers to pinch off a piece. Then you pick up a little bit of sukumawiki to go with it. Sukuma is kale that is finely shredded and cooked with onion for seasoning.


Although Kenyan schools are very different from what we are used to, students are the same all over the world. We are glad to be back in the classroom and enjoying getting to know our newest classes.