A Day in the Life of a Kenyan Child
- Jan 8, 2022
- 6 min read
Life throughout Kenya can vary from person to person depending on where they live within the Country. The country has both cities and slums, as well as completely rural areas.
Whilst researching I stumbled across this blog: https://blog.compassion.com/what-is-daily-life-like-for-kenyas-girls/
It has a general overview of what girls around Kenya can expect in a day, and is quoted below.
The post follows 10 girls;
Faith (age 8) from Kitui County, an urban county
Maindi (age 8) from the Rendille People, a tribe in the North Eastern Province of Kenya
Gaudensia from Mathare, one of the largest slums in Nairobi
Flora (age 13) from the Seaside Community
Praise (aged 10
Tracy
Synthia
Leach from Nairobi, the countries capital city
Salama
Abigail from Rift Valley, part of an intra-continental ridge system
Below is a photo college which includes communities these girls can be found in;
Habari za asubuhi; good morning! One by one, around the country, the girls rise to greet the day. Yawning and rubbing their eyes, they spring out of bed. (Or perhaps they need to be coaxed out from under the blankets, grumbling.) Some push aside the mosquito nets that protect them from malaria; others nudge aside younger siblings who share their mattress.
Breakfast in Kenya tends to be simple. A cup of hot, milky chai, bread, porridge or fruit. However, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, plus recent droughts and locust plagues, mean many girls will start their day hungry. Over 11 percent of Kenya’s children are underweight, and UNICEF reports that more than a quarter of children under 5 have stunted growth. Since the pandemic began, Compassion’s local church partners have organized mobile cash transfers to vulnerable families so they can feed their families.
Before heading off to school, Kenya’s girls usually help their families with the morning chores.
In Kitui County, eastern Kenya, 8-year-old Faith collects water from the riverbed. One-third of Kenyans rely on “unimproved water sources” like ponds, shallow wells and rivers. Unless they have a simple way to treat the water, it can put children at risk of dangerous waterborne diseases.
Maindi, 8, milks her family’s goat. She is part of the Rendille people of eastern Kenya, an Indigenous tribe that traditionally lives a nomadic lifestyle while caring for their animals. After Maindi finishes the milking, she walks to school. Because she is registered in Compassion’s program, she is the first child in her family to receive a formal education.
Many girls in Kenya face a long walk to school, particularly in rural areas. It’s not unusual for them to walk several miles each way. Gaudencia walks through the streets of her neighborhood in Mathare, one of Nairobi’s largest slums.
In Kenya, every child has the right to free and compulsory basic education. The country has made significant literacy gains in recent years, but crowded classrooms and poor-quality teaching can still affect the quality of children’s learning. In some areas, the pupil-to-teacher ratio is as high as 77-to-1.
As part of Compassion’s program, children receive education support. It could be additional tutoring, lessons at their child development center or covering the costs of school fees, uniforms and supplies.
Back at home, many of Kenya’s girls have a few jobs to do before they are free for the afternoon. In their seaside community, Flora, 13, helps her mother dig in their vegetable garden. The main veggies families grow are potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages, snow peas, kale, beans and carrots.
Ten-year-old Praise helps her grandmother to scrub clothes with soap before rinsing them clean and hanging them to dry on a line under the bright sun.
Tracy sits in her grandmother’s grocery kiosk after school. In between helping her serve customers, Tracy does her homework. “I love to help my grandmother at the shop, plus it also helps me to know how to talk to people and to practice mathematics because of working out the change to give,” she says.
Synthia types up her schoolwork on a laptop. In 2017, she and her friends invented a mobile app to abolish female genital mutilation. It won second prize in the Google-sponsored Technovation challenge! She learned to use a computer at her Compassion center, and this helped her develop an interest in technology.
Maindi does her homework in the afternoon so she can concentrate before her older siblings and father return home from tending their animals. Her home doesn’t have electricity, so when it gets dark, she uses a kerosene lamp.
With chores complete and homework out of the way, it’s time for fun! Mary plays “keep away” with staff outside her local Compassion child development center.
Leach shows off an adorable puppy in her community in Nairobi. The 12-year-old wants to be a teacher when she grows up. “I want to make a positive impact in the lives of little kids … and give them hope for the future,” she says.
Praise lines up a goal at the local soccer field in western Kenya. Soccer is the most popular sport in the country.
Leach twirls in her favorite dress — a Christmas gift from her sponsor.
Salama and her family eat dinner outside together while sitting on a woven mat. With lots of siblings and cousins, their typical meal of bean stew and ugali (maize or cassava-flour porridge) is chaotic and full of laughter.
Leach helps her grandmother make her favorite meal — chapati. In Kenya, the flatbread is a special treat that is eaten on special occasions. Leach’s family served it on Christmas Day.
Abigail gets ready for bed in the Rift Valley. The area has beautiful, expansive lakes plus swampy marshes, so mosquitos call the area home too. She sleeps under a mosquito net at night to protect herself from malaria and yellow fever. “I can now sleep throughout the night without waking up to fight with mosquitoes,” she says.
Usiku mwema! Goodnight from Kenya’s girls. Tomorrow is another day, and it is full of hope.
Following on from the blog above, which follows the girls, I found a second blog; https://www.thejournal.ie/day-in-the-life-africa-1515806-Jun2014/ which follows Gaudensia from the story above in more detail.
A normal day for Gaudensia begins between 4.30am and 5am, when she wakes and gets ready for school. She lives in a one-room, rented flat, with her mother, Rose (pictured here) and two older sisters. The family all wake at around the same time. As the youngest child, Gaudensia shares a bed with her mother. The building in which the family live consists of 14 one-room flats, and has around 42 other tenants. There is a pit latrine just outside the building, which serves all of the residents. Rose cleans the latrine every day, to earn some extra money.
A normal breakfast for Gaudensia and her sisters includes strong or ‘true’ tea (which is black tea brewed with water and sugar). The girls shared some ugali (boiled maize meal and water) on the morning that GOAL visited. We were treated to boiled sweet potatoes and a bean mixture, as well as ugali and strong tea.
Even though lessons do not begin until after 8am, Gaudensia and her sister Yunia leave the house at around 6.30am for the 30-minute walk to school. They both attend Kariobangi Pentecostal Assemblies of God (PAG) Primary School. Since Yunia is in the later classes, she starts at around 7am. On their 30-minute walk to school, Gaudensia and Yunia must cross a major street, traverse dirt roads, follow small pathways, and pass isolated housing estates.
Since last year, there are four latrines for the girls, two for the boys, and one for the teachers. There are tanks outside the toilets for the children to wash their hands. The water in the tanks is mostly rainwater, collected from the gutters. It is used for hand-washing, flushing the toilets, and even for drinking.
The school does not have a food programme, which are common at public schools in Kenya. Instead, a local church supplies food for the pupils three days a week. On the remaining days, food is cooked on school premises. Pupils must pay 50 shillings (€0.42) for lunch.
Some of them bring food from home, because they cannot afford the cost, while others go hungry because they have neither food nor money. On this day, the church brings lunch to the school – beef stew, cooked cabbage and ugali. Gaudensia has a large chunk of ugali, three pieces of meat with sauce, and a good-sized scoop of cabbage. Some parents give their children money to buy an avocado or a banana to supplement the meal.
Although Gaudensia is quite a studious girl, often preferring study over play, one of her favourite games is ‘katii’, which translates as ‘throw-and-catch’. There are two playgrounds at the school, one in the centre and another at the front. The playgrounds are on bare ground, which turns into mud during the rains. Gaudensia and her two friends, Marion and Michelle, finish school at 3.10pm. After the teachers assign homework, the students are free to go.
Her mother is usually out working when Gaudensia gets home. Her routine is to remove her heavy school shoes, put on flip flops, make some tea, wash the dishes and do her homework. She generally goes to bed between 8 and 9pm.
After researching it does appear that no matter what walk of life people in Kenya are from, whether they live in slum, villages or rural area, there are similarities in their ways of life.
Typically, not only children, but adults, find themselves waking up around 4am, well before the sun rises to begin their day, which begins with tea. Tea is a traditional drink in Kenya as there are a lot of tea plantations around the country.
School begins around 8am-8.30am with children walking several kilometres to get to their schools. Once school finishes, they begin the journey home where they will continue with homework and family chores before an evening meal and bed.
Below is a video showing 8 year old Naresiah's daily life as a child in the Maasai tribe;
Below is a video showing 10 year old Eunice Akoth's daily life as a child in the Kibera Slums;
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