Ngong and Shiners Choice Clubs

January 21, 2019

AIC Ngong Hills Secondary School is a girls’ school located in Ngong town. Ngong is a town that has a cosmopolitan group of people. Originally the town was inhabited by the Masai. They owned huge chunks of land but with time they started selling off parcels of their land, and people from all over Kenya rushed to purchase the parcels. They were known to sell their land very reasonably, and many people were able to buy. With time the Masai sold most of their land and what was left were very small parcels. The Masai, being pastoralists in nature, tend to move from one area to another looking for pasture for their animals. They do not have sentimental value for land; they care more about their animals. The flip side to this is that they also marry many wives, and consequently, have many children. Their families need substantial land to grow their food, but now they don’t have much. The women, therefore, make beads to earn an income. Their children rarely attend school because they are required to take care of the family’s livestock. The girls are married off early, oftentimes as early as 13 years of age.

AIC Ngong Hills Girls School is run by the AIC church (Africa Inland Church). It has a large population of the Masai tribe, and I was very impressed to see that though the parents are struggling, they have seen the need to send their girls to school. As a result, we picked this school for the Choice Club Mentorship Program. We held a meeting with the school administrators. They were happy to have us form The Choice Club here. They have been offering counselling and guidance to the girls, in-house, and were thrilled to have an outsider come help support them in their efforts. We met the girls and held the Introduction class. The girls were vibrant and eager to start the mentorship program.

We met with a group of 56 girls. We will officially start classes on the 4th of Feb. We will be meeting the club members every Monday at 4pm.

We also had our very first meeting at Shiners Girls School. We met a group of 50 girls who will form part of the Choice Club. We have mentored different groups of girls at Shiners Girls School for the last 5 years; they always look forward to the new year so new girls can join. The Choice Club is very popular. We have a tough time choosing the girls for membership because most of them want to join the club, so we ask the school administration to help us.

We also introduced the book club at Shiners School. We plan to discuss the 21 topics in the book in addition, to our own curriculum. We plan to meet the girls at Shiners twice a week, the Njabini Girls twice a week, and the girls at AIC Ngong and Kimuka every week since they are within the town.