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education
We are excited to announce that New Hope Initiative is expanding it's ministry into a brand new country as we partner with Dwayne and Tammy Wright to open a new school project in Ethiopia. We are so happy to be moving into this new region and we are thrilled to begin this new partnership with incredibly effective leadership in Ethiopia. Please click on the link below to learn more about this amazing opportunity.
As we begin the new year of 2014 we are excited to share with our supporters a great improvement for our ministry in Kibera. The new year brings a brand new facility to our school compound. We have just finished construction of a dining hall and commons building. This brick structure is without question the finest school building in all of Kibera and perhaps the single nicest structure in the entire slum. The building is stone inside and out and houses a new kitchen, with a large secure pantry and pass through serving facility, as well as a seating capacity of almost 200. This will allow the entire student body to be fed in 2 convenient, efficient shifts. We have been able to feed the children of our school for the part 5 years due to our faithful sponsors however the children have always had to eat standing in the compound with their bowls in their hands. The new hall will allow the students to enjoy a more civilized atmosphere that will continue to help us promote excellence in all phases of the New Hope Kibera Primary School.
As we strive to bring excellence to our school in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya, we must be reminded of our foundational goal of bringing real hope and real change to the children that we work with. We have been reminded this season that to accomplish such a lofty goal we are going to have to offer quality in education to our children. We are very excited about the foundational processes we have in place through the New Hope Primary School and the Kibera Penda Project scholarship program to accomplish these goals. For the first time in NHI history we are seeing some of the long-term fruit of our programs as we have admitted five of our students into college and university. In order to move these precious children from the Kibera slum into more adequate lives they must complete an upper level degree that will offer them the hope for a better job and a better life.
It is our five-year goal to have 125 secondary school students in our Penda program as well as 100 university students completing their upper level degrees. It will be our ongoing goal to maintain these numbers into the future so that we can develop a growing base of students who begin in our elementary school and end up as university graduates. That is the blueprint for changing a community. It is not fast, it is not cheap, is it not easy, but it is achievable and it will be effective.
By Sandy & Karen Baird
One of our precious young ladies from Penda Project is Irene Misena. She was a part of our very first class of Penda students that entered secondary school four years ago. Irene excelled both as a student and as a leader and now is the primary leader of the children's Sunday School at New Hope Church. Irene recently began a new phase of her life as she enrolled at Nairobi Aviation University in their hotel management program. We are excited that she is among our first class of university/college-level students and are expecting great things from Irene.
In July we had a very heartfelt reunion as Diane Peters from Sagemont Church in Houston was privileged to be with us in Africa and to meet Irene for the first time. Diane has been Irene's sponsor for the past three years and it was an emotional meeting as each party got to meet the other for the first time. These are moving relationships for both parties and we love the close bond that develops between our young people and their sponsors. You may never get to be like Diane and meet your student personally, but please be assured that our Penda students love and appreciate each of their sponsors and realize the vital role they play.
One of the inherent dangers of exclusively working in poverty-stricken areas with materially challenged people is we can sometimes only measure success by the standard of how far we have come, instead of overall excellence. It is easy to allow progress to be the final goal and as long as we are moving forward we can become complacent about the level of progress and the future rate of growth in a particular community. That is the place where New Hope Initiative finds itself now in one of our largest projects, the Kibera New Hope Primary School in Nairobi, Kenya. The progress in this institution has been amazing. We replaced most of the dilapidated buildings, the student population has grown dramatically, we instituted a daily feeding program, the staff has been enlarged, and we have seen a 400% increase in the number of our students who annually pass the secondary school entrance exam. The blessings in Kibera are astounding and we are continually thankful for what we have achieved together with our passionate partners.
However, the future in Kibera is not without its challenges. Will we settle merely for dramatic progress? Or are we going to continue to strive for even greater excellence? You can easily excuse complacency by saying, "it is a slum school and we can only do so much," but we are convicted and convinced that our ultimate goal must be more than progress and nothing short of excellence. We are in the process of evaluating our educational ministry in Kibera. We should have no less expectations for Kibera, because it is a slum school, than we would for any other educational institution in the world.
The past successes have been amazing, but we cannot grow complacent. There is still plenty of room for progress at Kibera New Hope Primary School. The classrooms are too crowded, staff/student ratios are too large, the new facilities deteriorate too rapidly, and 40% of our students per year do not pass the critical secondary school entrance exam.
Our goal is not progress only. We are driven for the sake of the children of Kibera to see New Hope Primary School become a model school. We ask that you would pray with us, and offer any advice or expertise that you might have in this coming challenge. Change is never easy. We desire to change the cultural mindset of an entire community and we are absolutely convinced that we can and will achieve the goals we have set. We will not settle for the subtle trap of being satisfied with progress. We are committed to strive for nothing less than absolute excellence.
