Ungatani Primary School Deployment
The year has started on quite a high note here at Brck. Our vision still driving us forward; to connect Africa to the internet. That’s exactly what we were doing on Tuesday the 10th of January. Duncan Mochama, Madhav Gajjar, Robert Karume and I were deploying a Kio Kit to one of the most rural parts of Kenya, Ungatani Primary School in the heart of Makindu in Makueni county.
The whole trip was going to be quite a journey (approximately more than 130 km from Nairobi) we therefore had to leave early to reach and arrive back on time. By nine am we’d hit the road and were on the Nairobi-Mombasa highway.
We arrived at the local market, Kathonzweni Market in Kathonzweni, at around 12:30 pm, to pick the headteacher, Mr Pascal Kieti, to lead us, as the road to the school would be quite tricky for first-time visitors to navigate through. It was also to be a 20 km journey from the said market to the school.
After a much bumpy all-weather-road drive, we finally arrived at the school. It is a beautiful school enveloped in trees and bushes in a quiet and serene environment perfect for learning. The school has children of all levels, from class one to eight. We immediately set to start the training; to the seven teachers first (four had left for a Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development training), then an introduction of the Kio Kit to the kids afterwards.
The training is usually an enjoyable and interesting session. The teachers listened intently throughout the process and were eager to learn and experiment on all the available content and tech techniques as applied on the Kit. They were especially intrigued by the broadcast feature, which basically helps the teacher broadcast whatever they are seeing on their tablet, to the children at the same time. Once they felt confident enough, we got one of them to teach a class while using the Kio Kit.
The Children were just beautiful, expectant and ready as always. We got them introduced to the Kio Kit, what it is, how it functions and what it is supposed to help them achieve.
Afterwards, the teacher gave them a class on the breathing system from eKitabu content on the Kit. The lesson flowed smoothly and was a success not only on the part of the teacher, but also for us as Brck.
It was a learning experience to know where and how to work on the Kio Kit to make it better and simpler with time. It’s always a worth while trip once you see the smiles on the children’s faces and receive endless amounts of gratitude from the teachers and kids. Once again a generation has been touched.