Olchorro Olepo Preschool (meaning The Spring that never ends) is an initiative by the village to educate their own children. Rebecca Tikili started teaching children from her village under the big umbrella tree a number of years ago and Walking with Maasai has been partnering with them ever since. Walking with Maasai aims to make a holistic change in the local community. Education is a very important part of community empowerment. The school is managed by a committee from the village, in partnership with Walking with Maasai.
After a short closure due to lack of funding, the school restarted in 2016 with 14 students, again under the tree. Currently the school has 91 students in Preprimary 1 and 2, Class 1 and Class 2. The village’s dream is to grow the school up to class 3, from where the children are old enough to walk to the Government school. From Olchorro Ngusor Village the next primary school is 2km walk and the government Primary is 6 km walk. This is too far for young children to walk by themselves. Since the start of the school another two new villages was formed close by and the need for education has grown beyond our capacity.
A beautiful new classroom was built through sponsorship from Give2Get and the school toilets and fencing was done thanks to help from Global Challenge Expeditions and the Butterfly Foundation.
Two teachers from Olchorro Ngusor village are starting their Early Childhood Development Diploma this year to ensure quality education. We are currently fundraising to make that happen.
The Preschool is also a tool to influence and teach the village and community at large on new lifestyle developments, such as the use of toilets, planting of trees and conservation farming.
Current project:
At Olchorro Preschool we decided to use murals to teach fundamental principles and themes relating to the environment and health. On one mural depicts a big illustrative map showing the relationship of the community to their natural environment. All the benefits that comes from conserving the environment versus the losses of depleting and destroying the forest and other natural resources will be illustrated. On the newly built school toilets we will make a mural with fun cartoon characters of all the wild animals in the area that naturally use latrines in the wild. With this we will teach the children that it is okay to use one place as a toilet. All the kids at Olchorro Preschool has never used a pit latrine before, so the concept is very new to them even though they know well that there are several wild animals that use latrine sites as toilets.
Future development (pending funding):
1. Upgrade of previous classroom
2. Building of another classroom
This video is made by sue strack. www.stracks-adventure.com Youtube Channel Music:
- Olchorro Olepo Primary School Kids singing
- Kay Rauber "Open Doors" - his youtube channel