Visiting Utange Primary School by Alta Fairbourne

Every Wednesday my mom, brothers, my cousin and I volunteer at a special needs class at a local public school called Utange Primary School.  It’s a huge school in a village and there is so many kids at least 90 kids in each class. There can be 5 people sharing a small table kids sitting on the floor and sometimes they are just outside wandering around and the teachers could care less! They wear checkered pink and grey uniforms, the girls wear dresses and the boys wear a buttoned up pink shirt with grey shorts.

The first week we went in to the special needs class and introduced ourselves to the kids; some of them were really funny. I can only remember the names Edna, Job, Wanda and Ali but I can basically remember everyone’s face.  Some of the kids can’t talk, and only like 3 kids can speak a little bit of English, so sometimes it can be hard to communicate with the kids. There is at least 14 kids in the class and the youngest is 8 and the oldest is 16, a huge age difference! We are learning Swahili so we will be able to talk to the kids better. To ask someone's name you say, "jina lako nani?" Or to say my name is you can say, "jina langu ni …"  There is this one kid named Job he is very hyper and he can't stay still, and if you try to talk to him in English he wont understand and he will just say in English, "my name is Job." There is also this older girl named Warda she is super strong! She grabbed my arm when I wasn’t looking and squeezed it as hard as she could and it hurt really bad. Some of the kids can’t read or write so we are going to bring in ABC flash cards to help them improve.

This week we went and brought big globs of multicolored homemade play dough and they loved it. We gave everyone a piece and they mashed it, rolled it,  made balls and they really enjoyed it.  Job was running around stealing some of the kids play dough and squashing it into one big ball it was a gross color of dark green. It was really easy to make them laugh and they were always happy.

I feel really good making these kids happy and I always look forward to bringing in something that will put a big wide smile on all of their faces.

Using colored rice to write their names

Their work on display

Cutting Valenttine's hearts out of paper