Can't Believe Its Over!

It is now my fifth day back home in Canada, and I have been able to reflect on my Kenyan experience all week.  Honestly, I still cannot believe how fast my entire trip went; I left home on July 15^th, ready for a relaxing three weeks before the rest of the Sauder Africa team arrived in Kenya.  These twenty-one days now seem like a blur, filled with meeting relatives I had not seen years, travelling to the coast city of Mombasa, and playing lots of golf with my cousin.

Fast-forward to August 5^th, the day of reckoning: our first day of teaching.  I remember waking up that morning feeling quite nervous, and found it extremely hard to eat at breakfast.  So many different thoughts were racing through my head.  What are our students going to be like?  Will they be friendly?  Will I be an effective teacher?  Is language going to be a barrier for them?  How will they respond to the program and what we are teaching them?  On my way back up to my room after breakfast, I realized that all of these questions would be answered in due time.  All I had to do on this first day of teaching was embrace the nervousness that I felt, because this emotion showed how much I wanted our three-week program to be successful for our students.

All the nervousness that I had felt at breakfast evaporated in one moment at the start of class.  The first task that we wanted to complete was coming up with a set of rules for everyone in the classroom to abide by.  Instead of forcing these rules upon our students, we wanted to let them come up with a list.  One student in particular, Evans Odero, was a key contributor to this set of rules.  When we called upon him, he stood up and the first thing he said was, “Thank you for this opportunity to speak.”  Evans came up with rule after rule and each time he stood up to talk he uttered those same words, and each time the class burst out in laughter.  This light-hearted moment was all it took to rid me of my nervousness.

A highlight of my experience over the past three weeks was the opportunity to walk through Mathare along with some of our students not once, but twice.  I found this to be an extremely humbling experience for myself.  Seeing the conditions in which the people of Mathare live in truly made me see how lucky I am to be living in a first-world country such as Canada.  Talking to one of the students, I was surprised to learn that an average of seven people lived per household, and that an estimated 400,000 people lived in a five-kilometer radius.  I can only imagine how hard it is to live in Mathare.

Even with the hardships our students have faced in their lives, they always showed up to class with a smile on their face.  Their friendly demeanour not only made it easy to teach them, but also made it impossible not to want to be friends with them.  I hope to keep in touch with many of them through Facebook, and the next time I visit my family in Kenya, I hope to be able to visit some of them as well.  The effort and willingness to learn that they exhibited in class makes me proud to call them my students, and I wish each and every one of them success in their business ventures.  I am thankful for the opportunity that I was given this summer, to take part in this wonderful program, and will cherish the memories that have been created because of it.

Some of our students hard at work.