Students, parents, and teachers at Drive-In Primary school in Ruaraka can now rest easy after well-wishers came to their aid.
The school had been plagued by frequent flooding due to the blocking of their sewerage system that caused the school to become a health hazard.
On Friday, November 5, guests were invited to see the transformation in the school after it was finally given a facelift.
Boaz Kimemia, a grade two parent at the school, said that for months, the students experienced a hard time trying to enter the school.
“The situation was very bad. Parents used to carry their children on their backs to help them get into the school,” he recalled.
The older children, he said, helped to carry others across the sewage.
He also said that most of the time, his grade two daughter wore gumboots to school even when the weather was hot and humid because the entrance was inaccessible.
“The rental buildings built near the school are the ones to blame for the situation because most of them do not build good drainage systems and sewage from the buildings end up flowing down to our school’s drainage which fills up due to being overwhelmed,” he said.
Grace Gitau, a teacher at the school said that her students were always at risk of getting sick from being exposed to the sewage.
“The flooding started from the school’s entrance and went as far as the school taps where the students usually draw water for drinking and washing their cups and plates after having lunch,” she said.
She said that some of her students fell sick often and complained of stomach aches which she suspects could have been as a result of the sewage.
The headteacher approached Huduma Afrika Rural Empowerment Program (HAREP) to help them with the situation.
Mabelo Galo, HAREP’s Program Director, enlisted the help of the Serbian Embassy who provided funding for the project.
“When we first came to the school, we could not even get in on foot because the entire entrance was flooded. It had not even rained recently and we wondered how the situation usually was during the rainy season,” she said.
The Serbian Embassy in partnership with Mozart Bets fixed the drainage problem in addition to doing further renovations to the school.
“We renovated the students’ washrooms with tiles, fixed the school taps, covered up manholes around the school, and today, we have brought them 100 desks and sanitary pads for the young girls,” said the Serbian Ambassador Dragan Zupanjevac.
He recalled that when they had visited the school earlier in the year, it had been smelly and in bad shape but now the school was cleaner and had more desks, so the students could keep on studying with no worries as they should be.
“The school is looking better and we need to make it look even better,” he said.
Edited by D Tarus
