Service- My debrief: "The Invisible Curriculum" Brainshine school (11)

The Nairobi Service Trip for me was more than just traveling daily to the Brainshine School and teaching small children between the ages of 4-12 years old for 7hrs, this trip was all about reaching out to these children as well as facing and studying about Kenyan culture and building a relationship with the local community.

Leading an educational curriculum was no easy job, we had to put into consideration not only the grade level, but also knowing our roles at all time, being very flexible, developing a high energetic voice, making the kids participate more in what we are teaching, having a good pace and speed, and lastly constantly defining vocabs. However, what we thought was going to happen didn’t, given that the local school gave us a whole different teaching schedule, which left us to make one ourselves. This situation shows the Kenyan culture, as Kenyans love to please to make their visitors feel more contented which however backfires on them most of time so giving us a different teaching schedule at the beginning was to make themselves look good, Nevertheless the bright side is we got to experience the culture and we as a group we not only quickly adjusted and able to adapt to these last minute changes but also made the effort to do what we have now, like Mr. Bismeyer said “you do what you can with what you have”,  in other words we’ve shown as a school that we were resilient.

Teaching the kids was no easy job too as most of them didn’t speak English and looked puzzled, so we’ve tried every possible angle for them to learn as well as understand, we’ve used methods like taking them outside to teach, known as “exploration time” and we’ve also tried incorporating our teaching with singing and dancing known as “sing a song”. The effort of not giving up in trying to reach out to the kids was something we definitely took from.

This trip became a very significant part of my life, because I not only bonded with these kids but I feel like I’ve known them for such a long time as I cared for them like my own sisters and brothers would to me. No matter what the lesson was that we were teaching them, confused or not, they never gave up, they would always be smiling and looked forward to seeing us, they just loved us. Its really fun working with kids, it was a great experience, especially knowing that we are making a difference for these kids’ lives. We learned a lot for example; the adaptation skills we used are gifts we will carry on for the rest of our everyday life.    

Most importantly everyone on the trip made some sort of contribution, like Mr. Bismeyer said “its like putting together a big puzzle” without everyone’s contribution it wouldn’t have happened.