School Visits Mtera and Lutangilo

One of my tasks this trip is to visit all 6 Diocese secondary schools and get a report of needs and priorities from the headmasters. This week I visited Mtera and Lutangano, two schools set in very different terain, with Frank Mkocha and Msigwa, the DIRA BKB coordinator. Mtera was opened in 1996 when the government donated buildings for workers constructing the Mtera Dam hydroelectric project in the 70's. Thus the buildings are old and in need of repair. The school has 405 students in forms i to VI. Ten of these students are vision impaired and the school main streams them with the help of other students. They have braille typewriters and after class students read their notes to them so they can type them into braille. Exams are done by reading the questions orally. I visited this school a few times in the past working with teachers on science and installing a bump in a deep well.

Lutangilo is farther up in the mountains than Kising'a with spectacular views. Much of the area is planted with pine trees for New Forests company but there are also pockets of virgin forests which look like brocali heads with their full canopies. Lutangilo has gone from the poorest performing diocese school to the best in less than 10 years thanks to the leadership of their head master Sebastian Chaula. I spent a week here in 2019 and the school has tremendous spirit. The picture shows their desks with all of their notebooks from Form I-IV stacked. They stay in the classroom so they are not lost or damaged and that creates quite a stack with 7 or more subjects over 4 years. The form IV's and Form II's have national exams in November and are studying all of these old notebooks. They have very few textbooks, mostly for the teachers to use and textbooks as the schools number one priority.

Today I am off to Kising'a for the weekend. I will visit the secondary school there this afternoon where I left a computer in June. Also, I want to inspect a water project and meet with village leaders about an expansion of the water project we did in 2014 designed by UMN students.