Megan Burrard-Lucas

Getting involved with OOA has been a rewarding experience. Our work for the charity started months before coming to Kenya. We started by raising money for the charity which involved boot fairs, a club night in London and a lot of kind people sponsoring us to climb Kilimanjaro. Between Natalie, William and I we managed to raise around £7000.

The nest step in helping OOA was a actually climbing Kilimanjaro. Climbing to the summit was such an amazing personal achievement. However, knowing that our efforts in climbing Kilimanjaro and all the sponsorship money we received climbing it went to OOA, made the climb even more rewarding.

Finally we arrived in Ruiru on 21st July to start volunteering for OOA. As we were only in Ruiru for 2 weeks, we really just wanted to gain a better understanding of the work OOA did. Most mornings I helped at Githunguri primary school. I happened to be around for their exam period so I helped the teachers by marking exam papers. Githunguri had a friendly atmosphere and all the teachers and pupils were really friendly. On a couple of afternoons I went to the day care center. I loved being with the kids. We gave them a colouring book and it was great to watch their concentration while they coloured. They were such sweet children and I wish I could have spent longer there. The rehab center was another place I spent a few afternoons at. After attempting to play football and realizing how good the boys were, I mainly spent the time with the younger children or chatting to the girls. It was great to get to know them.

It has been wonderful to come to Ruiru and volunteer for OOA. It’s a shame we only helped for a short time, but I feel now I have a good idea of the work OOA do. I hope that I can help more in the future, either by fundraising or by hopefully coming back and volunteering again.



An account of my time here in Africa

I have had an incredible time here this summer. I am so glad that I decided to get involved with Out Of Afrika (OOA). It is a wonderful charity that reaches out into the community and improves the lives of people who are in need of some help, and I feel glad to have played a small part in this organisation.

My involvement with OOA began about 6 months ago when I made the decision to climb Kilimanjaro to raise money for OOA. Raising money has been fun, but at times it has been quite frustrating and tough. Through a mixture of car-boot sales, cocktail parties and generous sponsorship from friends I raised over two thousand pounds for OOA (between the three of us we have raised over seven thousand pounds).

On July 9th 2005 I flew to Tanzania with William and Megan, and a few days later on 12th July we began our 6-day climb of Kilimanjaro. Reaching the summit was one of the most wonderful (although exhausting and painful) experiences of my life, and knowing that my efforts were helping others heightened the sense of achievement.

After the climb, we made our way to Kenya. We wanted to see where the money that we had raised would be going, and we wanted to find out more about OOA and all the work that it does.

Each morning I help out at the local hospital (Ruiru Health Centre). I am a medical student, and it has been great for me to see how medicine is practiced here in Kenya. Primarily I was working in the pharmacy, dispensing drugs to the patients. The hospital seems to constantly run out of drugs, and it is heart breaking to have to tell someone that we do not have the drug that they need in stock, to tell them that they have to got to a chemist to buy it (when we both know that they do not have the money to do that). The queue of people at the hospital never seems to shorten, and less and less drugs are available each day.

In the afternoons I have been going to the Mother Care Day Care centre for young children, it is a public kindergarten that offers a free-of-charge facility to parents who cannot afford to pay for their children to attend school otherwise. It is a fun place to be, full of smiles and laughter and song. I have also been visiting the rehabilitation centre, which is home to 52 children who have lost their parents. The centre provides them with a place to live, food to eat, and 51 brothers and sisters to fill the place that parents and family once filled.

I am enjoying life here in Ruiru, and I wish I could stay longer. The town is small and simple, and I enjoy my day-to-day routine. However, the good work of OOA will continue as long as volunteers continue to volunteer here and fundraisers continue to fundraise. I hope to return at some point in the not too distant future to offer my help again and to see how OOA has grown and helped even more people.

Well done OOA for all the great work you are doing… if there were an organisation like you for each little town in the world that needed some help, the world would be a lot better off. I think that it is great that you help people locally, and that you are realistic in your aims. It is also refreshing to see how much personal contact you have with each and every person you are helping. Best of luck with all that you do!

Natalie


William Burrard-Lucas
(July/August 2005)

In July 2005 we climbed Kilimanjaro to raise money for Out of Afrika. The climb itself was an incredible experience – extremely taxing but also very rewarding. After the climb we came to Kenya as volunteers for OOA. This was our chance to see how the money we had raised was being spent and our opportunity to give a bit more to OOA’s cause.

I primarily helped out with the computer project. This involved training students to use packages such as Word and Excel. I also spent a lot of time teaching a more advanced student how to program in C++. The whole experience was a real eye-opener; in the UK computers are taken for granted but for some of the students here it was the first time they had ever touched a keyboard. What amazed me was how eager they were to learn and how quickly they picked up the basics. In the time I was in Kenya I witnessed several student make the transition from complete novices to computer-literate. It was very rewarding since these students had gained a valuable skill that would set them apart from the majority of Kenya’s population and that would hopefully allow them to obtain jobs that would otherwise have been inaccessible to them.

When I wasn’t leaning over the shoulders of computer students, I visited some of the schools OOA supports. The children I met were delightful and I thoroughly enjoyed having them run circles around me with a football! I also found speaking to their teachers very interesting; without exception the teachers were passionate believers that education was the solution to many of Kenya’s problems. However, the hurdles they had to overcome to achieve their goals were staggering; some of the students lived off one meal a day and the schools themselves had to rely on OOA’s help to provide basic amenities such as toilets and windows in the classrooms. It seemed hard to believe that children could be educated under such conditions but the attitude of the teachers and the obvious impact that OOA was making left us feeling hopeful and optimistic.

I found my experiences in Kenya very rewarding. I leave believing that Out of Afrika is making an incredible difference to the lives of scores of children and I plan to continue to support them as much as possible in the future. If you would like to find out more about our climb up Kilimanjaro and our experiences in Kenya then please visit our website: http://www.kilizone.com.

William Burrard-Lucas
will@willbl.com