Thursday, February 12, 2009

Red Rose The Perennial Challenges

We shall ever remain grateful to Mr. Ken Okoth together with his fellow Board Members of the Children of Kibera Foundation for the sustained sponsorship of the 50 orphans and vulnerable children at Red Rose, as well as the provision of complete school uniforms, modern information technological as well as communication network. A lot of changes have been realized at Red Rose and we are becoming an envy of many of our neighbouring education centres.
However, one major challenge which we face is the lack of ground space to expand yet our pupils population is increasing rapidly. with 131 children, the centre is experiencing congestion. The long term response to our perennial challenge is to relocate to a large space within the locality. Spaces are available but the costs are prohibitive ranging from $55,000 dollars to $80,000 dollars. However if we join our efforts as friends of Red Rose Children Centre and support the Board members of the Children of Kibera Foundation who are spearheading this noble course wherever you are in the diaspora Kibera needs your support, Red Rose needs your contribution assist in giving hope and a bright future to our vulnerable children.
YES WE CAN!!!

Saturday, February 7, 2009

RED ROSE REOPENS FOR A NEW TERM 2009

Dear Friends of Red Rose School :
We are very sorry for taking too long to update our blog. The Red Rose teachers and all the children are fine and have been back to school since early January.

During December 2008 we had the pleasure of hosting Ken from the Children of Kibera Foundation together with his visitors who included Rachel Meyers of the US Embassy in Nairobi. They donated books to our library from Rachel's mom in California and from LitWorld in New York. We are very thankful for the books that we got. THANK YOU so much all of you who donated the books. The school has grown to a total enrollment of 131 children, including 50 children who are orphans or from very vulnerable family circumstances that the CoKF sponsors by paying their fees and providing uniforms. There is now a fifth grade class and cemented paving of all the paths at the school to keep it clean and reduce problems of dust and mud. Thanks to Ken from CoKF for making this project possible when he visited in December. We have recruited two new teachers at Red Rose to take charde of grades 1 and 2.

In January, we were lucky to host Ken's friend from the World Bank Jennifer Asego who came to visit and see how the school is doing and hopefully talk to her workmates to help us out where they can. The picture above is Jennifer with some of our children at Red Rose.

Last week we received donations of four boxes of text books to our library thanks to Jeff’s coordination with the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation and the Kenya Literature Bureau. We are very happy that his request was granted. THANK YOU KLB for the donation.

We thank God for this year we had no problems compared to last year when we had the post election violence and looting. I would like to say thank you very much for the generous donations of all our supporters that have kept Red Rose running all of last year and pray that you will keep on helping us educate the Children of Kibera.