News from Kenya – May 2020

After a few weeks, I am sending you again greetings from Kenya. Our situation here is developing every day. There are news, regulations, and restrictions we have to follow. Government limits leaving homes and we are obliged to wear masks. There are regions that are completely closed and quarantined. We pray for this toughest regulation not to apply to the region where we live.

Last time when we went shopping, the shop assistant at the market welcomed us with the thermometer in his hand to measure our temperature. As I was at the time suffering from malaria, I had a slight fever. When I informed him what my situation was, he smiled and let me and my husband enter the shop. We are lucky that we have been living here already for several years and at the places where we need to go, people know us well.

After considering the situation with the schools lock down and looking into the future and understanding that schools will be closed for quite some time, we decided to start home schooling kids that live in our home. We started with random lessons, reading and math but this was not enough. I asked Connie, a local teacher of the primary school to teach the kids in our home. Kacenka and Ebi know her, she is their class teacher. Connie lives on the other side of the city so Ben is driving her back and forth to our place every day. For the older kids, I arranged for a high school teacher. So, from the first week of May, we have school at home. Younger kids learn their lessons in the living room and older kids at the covered porch. It looks like it was a good decision. Kids like it a lot, they love both their teachers and there is a good atmosphere in both classes. Kids are happy, which is a great asset to us. They have a certain regime and will not miss much compared to regular school. The level of the teaching is very high and it seems that they gain much more than when they are at regular school. Teachers are also happy. In the future, I would love to open our own school and both teachers tentatively agreed to teaching in it. We have a lot of learning materials available brought from Czech Republic, other materials for primary education I made myself. I am very thankful to people, who help me with additional teaching materials, sending them by internet to print, especially for math, geometry, writing, etc. I also use a smart phone for teaching older children, so that they know how to find information about their country, tribes, nature, etc. on the Internet. More information about our home schooling is available on my Facebook page where I also publish videos and live broadcast from the lessons.

It is rainy season now in Kenya. It rains for several hours every day. There was flooding a few days ago. One of the rivers is about one km far from our home. Water flooded the bridge and we couldn’t reach the other side of the river for two days. We were coming to see how high the water will reach. We were praying that it doesn’t reach all the way to our place. After three days, the level started to slowly drop so we felt relieved. The crop of oats, which we planted at farmer David’s, decayed due to flooding. Oat was already grown and ready to spike but it didn’t ripe enough. We managed to reap a part but most of the harvest decayed. As for our farming, we have some additions like the first breed of pigeons, new ducks and we bought two geese to join the gaggle.

Some of you know that I had a problem with my leg for several weeks, the wound was open and getting bigger and bigger. I thank God for answering my prayers. The leg started to heal, the wound closed and it is slowly healing.

I am thanking God every day for leading us and protecting us.

Thank you all for your support, we wouldn’t be able to manage without you.

God’s blessings,

Radka, Ben, Kacenka