The beginning of Sirua Aulo Academy almost six years ago has been a culmination of a long-held dream since child-hood. The environment upon which the educational process happens in Maasailand is sometimes very traumatizing to young children and only the very best were able to go through all the way to college. The Maasai people live in both southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania in the Great Rift Valley (often referred to as Maasailand). The Maasai are a semi-nomadic people who lived under a communal land management system. For hundreds of years the Maasai roamed, herded and moved freely about the East African land, preserving their traditional culture. The movement of livestock is based on seasonal rotation. Since the onset of European colonization a century ago, however, the vast majority of the Maasai’s land has been taken away and the government has marginalized the Maasai. The Maasai people are often associated with the well-known game parks and tourism in their region; however, the Maasai do not benefit from the tourist industry and have few government clinics and only a few scattered and dilapidated schools. Consequently, Maasailand has the highest primary and secondary school dropout rates in Kenya. The students in Maasailand must walk an average of six miles to school from outlying areas.

These statistics may be different for different Maasai districts at this point in time- Narok and Kajiado county being the ones resided by Maasai peoples as of now. Because the Maasai have been isolated from Western civilization for so long, many traditional ways of life are still practiced. Young girls are often promised to men three times their age in marriage before they reach adolescence, and therefore it is considered a waste of money to send these young girls to school for any length of time. Young boys are also often needed by their families to help with herding and other household responsibilities. Between these responsibilities and making the long trek to school every morning and evening, it is not surprising how many children drop out before reaching secondary school. The two Maasai districts were considered “closed districts” nobody could come in/out during the colonial period and as such, missionary schools and other forms of modern civilizations came late to these areas. When we got independence in 1963, government regimes that came to power continued to marginalize the Maasai, taking away the lands, a complete neglect of any infrastructural development in terms of roads, clinics and good schools. It has been one part of the country that the leadership continues to ignore, yet has so much promise. Coupled with this has been a terrible educational system introduced across the whole country where kids sit for the same national test in grade 8- thereafter children join high schools that their grades allow.

There are three levels of high schools- national, provincial/county and district. The highest a kid can go the greater the chances of joining a college- so for instance a kid who joins a national high school has a 90% chance of eventually joining college, a county level one gives a child a 50% chance of joining college and only a 10% chance of a kid joining college in the district-level category. Since a majority of our students in different public primary/elementary schools perform dismally in national examinations, not many of them are capable of joining college eventually. The big question would still be, are the Maasai children and their neighbors not smart enough? The answer lies in how each student has been given an opportunity to prepare.

This has been my quest for my entire life- creating a quality educational system that can rival schools in Nairobi and beyond. The year 2012 provided us with that first chance of sitting a national test- and in a district that sometimes hardly sends more than three students to national level high schools, Sirua Aulo Academy was able to send eleven of our students to these kinds of schools. In 2013, seventeen of our students joined the national schools and we hope to keep the tempo of this even further- again, we managed to scoop position number 1 in the whole of Narok County. In a nutshell, this has been a success story borne out of a sacrifice of so many volunteers who have believed in the mission and vision of this broad program. I believe that the only way to end poverty in our region is through a robust educational program that will target the very poor with educational support. That is why we have orphans, partial orphans and completely poor kids attending school at the Sirua Aulo Academy courtesy of organizations like Dream Sponsors and One Way Out. Our goal is to eventually build five elementary schools, two high schools and possibly a college. At the current location, all the infrastructural developments are almost complete, with only teacher-housing remaining.  We also hope to add a community clinic.

Sirua Aulo Academy is the school of firsts in many current educational programs, with well-developed core values, guiding principles, and school anthem and school prayer. We are the first school in the region to:

• Implement a non-violence policy and replaced it with a virtue program that has instilled our students with values they will live for along time. 

• Integrate special education programs within our school system.

• Implement an IEP- Individualized Educational Plan for our weak learners as a way of leveraging their abilities.

We have been blessed with so much expertise and provision from well-wishers across the globe. We will be blessed to have 4 Africa Now as one of our partners in this endeavor. We wish to replicate these quality programs in other elementary schools that professionally run. Public elementary schools are in disarray- lots of ineptitude, laziness, and a complete lack of a drive towards success.

If Sirua Aulo can send ten plus kids to national schools, what if we had two, three, four or more elementary schools around the county?  The results of course will be phenomenal! 

In addition, we are focusing on empowering our parents through economic programs to be able to pay fees for their children- through beads’ projects, we are figuring out on a bee-keeping project and possibly a carbon-credit project that will empower farmers in our neighborhood.   These and many more are dreams we plan to actualize.

Special Gratitude to Village Volunteers, a non-profit based in Seattle, WA; Northpointe Community Church based in Fresno, CA, whose support has been evident through our massive construction; One Way Out based in North Carolina; and Dream Sponsors, Inc. based in Wellington, FL whose joint support has allowed us to have almost 100 orphans attending the Academy.