The Focus is Here!

This year's copies of The Focus have arrived! They should be arriving in your mailbox over the next week; we hope that you enjoy reading about what we have been up to this year and what we are planning for 2016.

We hope you'll help us by making a gift during this holiday season! We need to raise enough money to build a new boys' dormitory at Soit Sambu Secondary School before the rains come in April. We need $132,000 to do this, and every gift helps! To learn more, please visit our featured project page.

Introducing Haymu Primary School

We were delighted to visit Haymu Primary School in Karatu for the first time this year. A few years ago, Ayalabe Primary School's student body topped 1,000 children, and the community started working to build new, smaller primary schools in the area to help ease the crowding at Ayalabe. Haymu was one of these new schools.

The construction at Haymu is not entirely finished; Standards Five and Six even share a classroom which has no windows, door, or finishing work. The left side of the room has students in Standard Five and one teacher, and the right side of the room has the Standard Six students and another teacher - imagine your children being able to focus and learn in that kind of environment!

Despite the fact that the school still lacks significant amounts of infrastructure, it's doing incredibly well. Haymu students currently rank 9th out of 101 local primary schools. If you take private schools out of the mix, Haymu ranks 3rd!

We are currently vetting the projects Haymu has proposed, and as soon as we have, we will let you know what the first priority will be at the school. We just wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to Haymu and its students.

The Dispensary is Popular!

We were chatting with Thomas Nchimbi, one of the staff at the dispensary recently, and he reported some astounding numbers to us. In the first four months of operation, the dispensary staff saw 2,104 patients - an average of 526 per month, and 21 babies were delivered! Most similar dispensaries struggle to get 200 patients a month to come for treatment. When facilities of this size launch in many rural communities, there has to be a concerted effort to educate the local population about why they should be treated in the new facility; we don't have that problem in Sukenya!

The patients visiting the dispensary are coming to be treated for diarrhea, pneumonia, typhoid, brucellosis, pelvic inflammatory disease, and eye complaints. Women are also coming regularly for prenatal care; many of them are anemic from malaria or worms, which they are treated for. Each patient is also receiving some health education when they visit the dispensary.

The community and government have asked us to build additional staff housing at the dispensary to enable the government to assign two or three additional staff members to this very busy facility. We are hoping that we will be able to complete this project in the next few years, but in the meantime, we will keep you posted on what we hear from the dispensary!

Soit Sambu Secondary School

We have visited Soit Sambu Secondary School a number of times over the last few years, and we have all been impressed by the students, teachers, and particularly the headmaster. The headmaster and the community deeply care about the school, and have worked very hard to build enough facilities for the school. We built a girls’ dormitory there in 2013 because 160 girls were living in the space for 48. It was really exciting to open the dormitory and allow the girls to have more space. In 2014, the headmaster of Soit Sambu Secondary had raised enough money to build a dining hall for the school, and it finally opened in early 2015. Shortly after it opened, we were terribly saddened to learn that one of the boys’ dormitories burned down in an accidental fire. Luckily, no students were injured, but the dormitory was completely destroyed. The boys have had to move into the dining hall until a new dorm can be built.

FoTZC plans to build a new boys’ dormitory at Soit Sambu in 2016. We hope you’ll help us give the boys somewhere of their own to live!

        The former boy's dormitory

        Temporary Living Space in the Dining Hall

ABOUT

FOTZC is a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) organization registered in Watertown, MA. FOTZC also accepts donation of securities. Please contact info@fotzc.org for guidance on making this type of donation.