Namnyaki School

Maasai girls traditionally marry young and receive little education.  The Image Project, started by Deb Pangerl from Minnesota, helps girls with supportive families (or sometimes just mothers are supportive) go to secondary school.  Because of class status, they found that regular secondary schools were not good environments for the girls to be successful.  The Image Project started Namnyaki school for Maasai girls to create a supportive environment for the girls to live and learn together.

The school is nestled up against the mountain near Image Secondary school in a beautiful setting.  They currently have preform, Form I, and Form II with about 30 girls in each.  Preform is a year of studying English and catching up on mathematics to prepare them for starting secondary school with Form I.  Deb came with two other repeat travelers with the Image Project and I was able to go out to the school with them for a couple days and spend time with the girls.

Girls greeting us on our arrival with traditional Maasai singing.

Girls assembled to greet us with singing.

Front of dorm, the girls sleep in bunk beds with two to a bed.  They prefer to sleep together to keep warm.

Playing with the soap bubble solution I brought.

On Monday, I went to class and was asked to talk about Chemistry with the Form I girls.  One of the girls first grilled me with questions to make sure I was qualified to talk about Chemistry.  She asked me to define Chemistry, explain the difference between Physical and Chemical change, define atom, explain the Dalton theory of the atom.  Apparently I passed and we had a nice time.  Their syllabus notes were covering mixtures and saturated solutions but after talking about that off of the notes, I told them about soap and how it works to clean our clothes and how it makes the bubbles the girls had been playing with using the bubble solution I brought.  These were Form I girls and it is remarkable that I could even talk with them in English.  A couple did some explanations in Swahili for a few others.  This is what having a year of preform to study English and having small class sizes can do.  Most students do not go to preform and struggle to understand content in a language they are still trying to learn.  I expect that these girls are going to perform remarkably well when they start taking the national exam

Watching Planet Earth video on Jungles with amazing Bird of Paradise courtship rituals.

Deb's group brought a 500 lumen projector like the one I brought to Image Secondary and we had the girls watch a segment from the BBC Planet Earth DVD on jungles.  The segment had some amazing footage of courtship rituals for different species of Birds of Paradise and a segment on forest elephants in the Congo.  The girls loved the video just like the students at Image because they are seeing things they never new new existed and they expand their awareness of the world and learn some biology and geography along the way.

Projector worked well but their solar power system had a broken connection that repeatedly shut down with the girls needing to go touch some wires together to reconnect.  An electrician was coming the day I left.

Girls singing We are Marching in the Light of God in circle.

Girls smartly dressed in their class day uniforms