What exactly do you do Ryan?

It’s been a week now since Anni and I got back from Ethiopia and it feels great to be back in Kenya. The last couple of days in Ethiopia Anni and I were getting a bit anxious from away from our respective organizations a bit too long but she is now back on the Island working on an event for Earth day (April 22nd) and I’m back at the school working on a few different projects and coordinating our first volunteer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten emails asking me “Ryan, what the hell are you actually doing there anyways?” Well, below is my month of April.

As I mentioned earlier, KGSA has it’s first volunteer unaffiliated with the University of Minnesota’s study abroad program! Her name is Claire and she recently graduated from the University of San Francisco. She will be with us for 3 months and will be doing work on the Micro Finance program and identifying an afterschool club that she’s interested in working with and coordinating a project.

Over a year ago when we started advertising for volunteers on our website, I never really gave it too much thought. I thought that we might get one or two requests here and there, but during these last few months, we’ve had over 15 requests for volunteering at KGSA. Ask my dad if you don’t believe me, he has to email me all of these forms and keep track of them. As a small non-profit, we simply cannot manage 15 volunteers and have had to turn many people down. Claire will be here until June and we have one more lined up from June through August.

Last night as she arrived at Jomo Kenyatta airport, I sat back and just laughed. We have gotten to the point where someone found KGSA on-line and thought it looked like a great place to volunteer, contacted us, and made it happen. I honestly never thought that we would be in charge of people’s volunteer experiences, but here we are.

In addition to coordinating Claire’s stay here, I just finished organizing an 8 week writing workshop for a group of students to work with the poet Imani. She has lived here in Kenya for the last few years, but has done a lot of work in the states. I met her a few years ago at a show at the Walker and I reconnected with her here. She’ll be doing a series of writing workshops, and performance workshops with our girls, all leading up to a final performance in two month. On April 15th we are holding a fundraiser where Imani, a few Kenyan poets, two of our girls and I will perform in order to raise money for the workshops. I’m working now to advertise this event, and working with the two girls on their pieces.

I’m also working with our Journalism Club as they have started working on their 2nd issue. They are hoping to have it out in May sometime. We just had a great meeting yesterday and their first drafts of articles are due in to the editor tomorrow. I’ll work directly with Asha, our editor, on revising the pieces and offering suggestions/critiques.

Lastly, well not lastly because there are always more things to do, but lastly on my priorities, Abdul, Teka and I have been discussing a larger change at KGSA regarding the management structure. Many of you may know that none of our teachers are government qualified. They all come from Kibera and are in need of jobs. To this point, we’ve hired people based on their high school scores in the subjects being taught. Though they are doing an incredible job, we have begun discussions about what it would look like if we were to hire a government qualified teacher to be the “head teacher” and restructure the school accordingly. They would be in charge of weekly meetings, teacher trainings, observing the current teaching strategies and offering alternatives etc. They would serve in a sense as the principal. We would then promote Teka to Programs Manager, allowing him the proper time to deal with the accounting, coordinating after school programs, handling our lunch program, and responding to our financial partners. We are in the midst of figuring this all out, and hopefully we can move on this before I leave for the states.

So those are a few of the things that I’ll be focusing on this month. Hope that answers some of your questions as to what exactly I do here. It changes every week as new things come up and prospective partners contact us, etc. I basically take the pressure off of Abdul and Teka’s shoulders any way possible.

Hope everyone is doing well in the States, and has a great Easter weekend!

Love and Blessings,

-Ryan