Celebrate the First Graduation at a Kenyan Hope Center

“A year ago, I was so excited when we realized the Hope Center would be having its first graduation ceremony. But today, with the day here, I have mixed feelings. It’s bittersweet,” says Anne, a Child Champion at Pefa Syokimau Hope Center in Kenya.

Graduations are usually full of excitement, and a first graduation means that the excitement is through the roof.

However, just like Anne feels, they are often bittersweet. For this Hope Center, the excitement of having five graduates outweighs the twinge of sadness at seeing these five beloved youth finish their time at the center.

Birth of a Hope Center

Ten years ago, OneChild partnered with Pefa Syokimau Church in Nairobi to start a Hope Center, which registered 157 children.

Despite the church being in a well-to-do neighborhood, the staff realized while doing missions nearby that behind the beautiful houses were families living in a hard place.

This situation burdened Bishop Munyiri’s heart, and he wondered for a long time what they would do to reach out to those families.

But when he met Nicholas, OneChild Kenya’s Country Director, and got to know what OneChild does, he saw an opportunity that would give his church the boost it needed. He partnered with OneChild, and a Hope Center was set up.

The children registered in OneChild’s sponsorship program at the Hope Center came from Kicheko, Kwa Mbemba, Mlolongo and Sabaki, slum communities around the church. Over the years, the number of children registered has increased to around 200.

Life in Hard Places

Kids carry water through a community in Nairobi. (Photo by Ty VanRensberg @tyvanrensburg)

In these communities, families live in small, single-room tin houses that they rent for $20 a month. Most houses do not have an electricity connection, so they use kerosene lamps or candles to light their houses at night. For the few with electricity, it is poorly, dangerously and illegally connected because most of them cannot afford the electricity bills.

Lack of tap water in the houses, poor drainage systems and a lack of bathrooms are the norm for the families.

The communities have common water points, where people pay 20 cents to buy 20 liters of salty water used for house chores and 50 cents for the same amount of freshwater that they drink.

To bathe, most families have to wait for nightfall so they can shower outside in between their rental houses in the dark. If they must shower during the day, some use the back of the house or look for a shared bathroom in the community. They have to pay 5 cents each time they need access to the community bathrooms. Anne says at Kwa Mbemba, about 300 families share two community toilets.

With poor drainage and bad roads in the communities, rainy season means sewage flows into the roads and houses. Families end up with wet, filthy houses and must walk to work and back in muddy, sewage-filled roads.

This environment exposes kids and the community to waterborne diseases like typhoid and abundant mosquitoes due to the stagnant water pose even more health threats.

‘That Is All You Know’

But the situation is different at the Hope Center. Anne recalls when the kids were newly registered in the program.

“When they began coming to the center, the teachers struggled to get them to use the toilet, and the kids complained that the toilet was too clean to be used. They had never seen one with tiled walls and floors, running water and a basin,” she says.

The teachers slowly taught and encouraged the kids to use the toilets, and today, all kids find it normal to use them.

On top of the communities’ physical challenges, Anne says, kids lack mentors and are not exposed to the possibility of a better life.

“When you’re born and grow up in such an environment, that becomes your worldview because that is all you know,” she says.

As she was going through the files of the youths who were to graduate, she noticed all of them had changed their dream careers during their time at the center.

She says, “All they knew before registration was being a housewife, a motorcycle taxi driver, illicit brewer or a housemaid because this is what they see and grow up knowing in the communities.”

But when the children registered at the Hope Center, the Child Champions asked about their dreams. Along the way in the program, the champions kept following up to see whether the children’s dreams had changed.

The center provides a safe space for the kids to dream big, and Child Champions encourage them to pursue their dreams.

Children in OneChild’s sponsorship program do classwork at a Hope Center in Nairobi, Kenya. (Photo by Ty VanRensberg @tyvanrensburg)

Some parents in the communities are jobless, while others work menial jobs like selling groceries in small kiosks by the road, working at construction sites, being motorcycle taxi drivers, cleaning, working as farmhands and selling illicit brews.

Unfortunately, Anne says, some fail to get any jobs, and if they are single parents, they end up working as prostitutes.

“It is very tough, and the parents don’t want their kids to stay hungry, so they pick up on anything,” she says.

“There are so many times I have gone for home visits and found children standing outside the houses sometimes when it is raining because their mom is inside the house with a man because she is trying to get money for the day’s food.”

This situation became thorny to Anne and the Hope Center, and despite providing food baskets to the families, the problem never changed.

To solve the problem, they employed some of the moms at the center, equipped others with livelihood skills, and slowly taught them how to save.

From Basic Needs to Leadership Skills

While helping the parents, the Hope Center also helped the kids.

The tough financial situations in the homes make it difficult for the parents to provide basic needs. Most of the parents barely make $30 a month from their jobs. With the little they earn, they have to pay $15 to $20 in rent, buy water and food, and still have money for school supplies.

This makes them settle for a meal a day and two meals when lucky. Unfortunately, the meals are not always nutritious, but the families have to eat because their priority is not health; it is hunger.

After meals, second on their priority list is the rent, because if they fail to pay, their landlords will kick them out. If, beyond this, they can’t afford school supplies, the kids stay at home until their parents can afford them. This makes some children delay joining school.

However, the Hope Center has greatly helped the parents. A child must join school when registered into the program, and the center helps pay part of the school fees and purchase some school supplies.

The children also receive nutritious meals at the Hope Center. Once in a while, the Child Champions carry along a food basket when they visit children at home.

Having started on the physical and cognitive development of the kids, the Pefa church’s Hope Center also began conducting counseling sessions for the kids because the Child Champions realized the hard conditions in the communities had traumatized them.

They brought in different professionals to mentor the children and also introduced annual excursion trips to places around Nairobi.

But above all, Anne says, the church and Hope Center leaders agreed to have all the adults at the center mentor the children because they are all Child Champions.

A Child Champion helps a student write at a Hope Center in Nairobi, Kenya. (Photo by Ty VanRensberg @tyvanrensburg)

“We conduct ourselves in a manner that is admirable because we intentionally want the children to look up to us, and that is why children refer to all the adults here as ‘teachers’ — they have something to learn from,” she explains.

Read about the power of the “teacher”

Having helped the kids mentally deal with their living situations and exposed them to different environments, Anne and her team at the center were not yet done.

They introduced skills training, and the kids got to choose the skills they wanted to learn after they became teens.

Some skills introduced were poetry, drama and acting, soapmaking, music, computer studies, crocheting, tailoring, and manicure and pedicure skills.

Anne says they introduced them to help the children acquire hands-on skills that would be critical when they graduate from the program.

“Apart from studying to pursue different careers in life, they need skills that can help them acquire some money after high school as they await to join college and even in college. These skills can also come in as a side job they do alongside their dream careers,” she says.

The champions at the center also taught the children about Jesus. At the center, some children learned to read the Bible and lead Bible study, mastered memory verses and found ways to serve in church.

“We have a Hope Center Sunday, where the church allows the kids to lead service. That is always an opportunity for us to build their confidence, and today most of them can confidently lead and serve in church,” Anne says.

Thanks to the Hope Center Sundays, some parents have joined church after seeing their kids confidently serve there.

Today as they graduate having completed the program, Anne is confident that the five youths are well equipped to pursue their dream careers and hopefully transform the different spaces they will be in.

Child Champion Anne with the first graduates of the Hope Center she serves. (Photo by Donna Atola)

To help graduates transition out of the program, the center has a six-month program inviting them to volunteer at the center as they wait to join college.

This is after giving them leadership positions while still in the program. Anne believes that giving the children roles and responsibilities around the center boosts their sense of belonging, and leadership makes them responsible.

Meet Lauren the Graduate

One of the girls considered responsible and a great leader at the Hope Center is Lauren.

Lauren joined the center when it began. She recalls that her aunt was visiting when she heard news about registering children at the church, and she took Lauren to get registered in 2014. In 2017, Lauren’s younger brother also enrolled in the program.

Lauren gives a speech during the graduation ceremony. (Photo by Donna Atola)

At 17, as she exits the program having excelled in her final high school exam, Lauren is thankful for the strong foundation the Hope Center laid.

“It has been a wonderful experience that I now realize was a golden opportunity to change my life,” she says.

“Apart from all the material things I got from the Hope Center, the Child Champions taught me how to live with others, which is living as children of God. In everything I do, I refer back to what I have learned before taking an action.”

She is also grateful to the Child Champions for the effort they put in to ensure she made it through the program.

Lauren hopes to pursue civil engineering at the university and is happy that she earned a high score on her final exam and will soon be joining an engineering school.