For Miriam, Education Is The Only Sure Ticket Out Of Poverty

Don’t mind your background and all the hardships that you are faced with right now. I know most of you don’t even know whether you will go to secondary school, but I can promise you there is plenty of things you can do out there to prosper in life.” This was Miriam Mwongeli’s simple message to pupils of her former school — Kingutheni primary school in Kibwezi. 

“Here in school just make it your job to cooperate with your teachers and work hard. Struggle with your homework, do not copy from others. That is how you learn. God will open the way for you to move to the next level,” she added during a visit to the school last week. Mwongeli, a Starehe Girls Centre alumni was one of the country’s best performers having scored an impressive A of 83 points in last year’s Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education.

She was the best girl at the school having scored straight As in all the subjects except for computers and English in which she scored A-. She makes it look easy but Mwongeli’s achievement has been against great obstacles. 

All through her primary school education, shoes were  a luxury she had to learn to do without. She struggled to read and complete her homework with the use a wick lamp which was all they could afford.

Orphaned at the age of nine, after the death of her mother in 2007, she was left in the care of her aging grandparents. And since they could not adequately take care of her and her two siblings they asked an uncle for assistance.

“I was nine and in class five when my mother died. I call myself an orphan because my mother was a single parent and we have never known who our father was,” says Mwongeli who is a second born of three children.

Mwongeli’s mother had been sick for a long time and growing up had been a delicate balance between school work, nursing  her ailing mother and attending to house chores.

“We were living here when she fell ill. My grandparents helped us take care of her until her death,” she relates, “but even after she passed on, they were very good to us.”

Miriam Mwongeli with her grandfather, aunt, uncle and grandmother outside their homestead in Kingutheni village. When her grandparents realised that their grandchild was book smart, they did all they could to encourage her. “My grandmother especially, always tells me I am the family’s only hope; which is true. All their hopes are pinned on me. And that gives me the drive to do my best,” she says.

Miriam has always been top of the class. When the 2010 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education results were released, she was the best girl in Eastern province with 412 out of 500marks.

“My background has made me become more focused. I know I have to work really hard to get out of this life and secure a better future for myself as well as for my family,” she notes.

She says she is aware that a lot of children from disadvantaged backgrounds like hers do not get the kind of opportunities she has gotten. “I am lucky,” she says.

Mzee Pascal Musau, Mwongeli’s grandfather, says he hopes that when she is done with university education she can break the cycle of generational poverty for his lineage whose children are not schooled. All his aspirations of a better future for the family are hitched on Mwongeli, he maintains.

“I have no other child or grandchild who has gone beyond secondary school. Mwongeli will be the first. The most educated of my children was Mwongeli’s mother, who went up to class four. So she is a big blessing to us as a family,” the 71 year old man observes, with a hint of contentment and appreciation in his eyes. All of Musau’s children dropped out school even before they could start due to famine.

“These land barely gets any rainfall. It is always dry. There is no food here,” he says, “If I tell you sometimes we have gone for days without a proper meal you may not believe it. Here we plant maize and it dries up. If getting food is a problem….now, where do we get fees?” he pauses.

It has always been a hand-to-mouth existence. The Musaus live in a sparsely inhabited rural region in Kingutheni Village situated on the border of Kibwezi and Kitui. It is almost a hundred kilometers away from Kibwezi town and barely accessible by regular public transportation.

“I am a bee keeper. I have nothing. What will I educate them with?” the father of four asks again and quickly adds, “Not that my children were stupid. They may have wanted to go to school but there was no school fees and they were always hungry. The energy wasn’t there.”

He puts the family’s combined income at an average of Sh5,000 per month. He says because he doesn’t get much from the honey and farm, they have to frequently seek out manual labour in the neighbourhood to survive. Dried up maize stalks piled in a heap in the backyard is all he has to show for this season’s harvest. The result of another scorching blast from the sizzling sun. Now his one acre piece of land is bare. This is the life here, a life of adversity and hardship. One that Mwongeli has had to live through. At school she was assured of three meals a day. Not here.  

At the primary school, children are given free lunch by a feeding programme to encourage them to attend class. Mwongeli herself was fed on free school lunch from class one to class five. Her hard-up guardians could not raise even the lowest of tuition she would have needed had she not been admitted to Starehe no matter how much they would have tried to save up, she concurs.

Her Aunt Rebecca Bangi who already has eight children of her own, and a girl Mwongeli’s age, says, “We were very lucky that she helped herself by studying hard.  Ours was just to look for bus fare and personal effects. My daughter who sat the KCSE exam with her was constantly home due to school fees balance. Even today we are still struggling to raise money to clear some balance so she can get her certificate.”

But it has not just been the family’s role to take care of Mwongeli, her aunt says. “Other people who understood our situation chipped in too. A teacher from her primary school always made sure she had school uniform.”

Mwongeli also spent her holidays working at the family farm to help raise money for her cousin who is also in secondary school. The studious girl says school work did not stop her from helping around the house.

“Saturdays were taken up fetching water and firewood and water,” she says with a chuckle.

“I have constantly been worried about my guardians raising the money for fare and the personal necessities I need when going back to school. It is by God’s grace we made it,” she says and considers herself a good example that poverty isn’t insurmountable when one has the right focus and resolve to succeed.

“They say you don’t choose where you are born. But you can do something about it. I believe I will inspire a lot of change not just in my family but in my society,” she declares.

According to her the oft-traded argument linking poverty to poor academic achievement in parts of the country, is tragic.

“That is like saying that just because you are born into a poor family then your brains are as bankrupt. I think that’s just an excuse adopted by system apologists.”

This teenager is so determined to convince her older sister, a house girl in Machakos town to go back to school. “She dropped out in Form Three and even though she is 20 years old now she can still go back and finish her education. If not in a secondary school then she could go to a polytechnic.”

Mwongeli whose aunt describes as level headed has not been phased by life in the city.

“I went out there and was shocked at how different the world was from what I knew. I realised that there were millions of opportunities. And that there are many people who after getting such a golden opportunity choose to squander it,” she says

Mwongeli  has taken chances given to her and hopes to create a better life for herself and her family. “I chose to focus and make something of myself,” she says. 

“I believe the children in this place need more exposure. They need to see what the world out there is like so that they can aspire to be more than surrounds them.”

Mwongeli would love to be pilot — a career she has always dreamed about.

“Because I know the best colleges for piloting are very expensive. I have been patronising the Kenya Airways website to check for when they call for application. But they are yet to post any on their website, so I am still waiting,” she says.

She admires Captain Irene Koki Mutungi who for the longest time was the first ever and only female pilot at Kenya airways and was recently promoted to be the first African Captain of the Boeing B787 Dreamliner.

But that is just one of the things this girl who favoured Mathematics, Kiswahili and Chemistry and Physics wants to become. She is also interested in studying Quantity Surveying and Architecture, so she can invent new building technologies that are more in tune with the times.

While at Starehe, Mwongeli also benefited from the Global Give Back Circle a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) which supports disadvantaged girls and boys  through an education and empowerment based transformation process designed to transition them from poverty to prosperity and into global citizenship.

She has already been picked by Equity bank for internship. But is still mulling over the offer.

“She was an extraordinary girl,” says Ms Margaret Wanjohi, Head of Starehe Girls School. Who recalls Mwongeli being a student who knew where she had come from where she was headed.Ms Wanjoi describes her as focused and driven to achieve her goals.

“At school she told everyone, ‘I know why I am here’. And she was easy to along with. She guided other girls. She may be an orphan and might have been highly disadvantaged but I know she is going places. I wouldn’t be surprised if on top of the Equity offer she gets other huge offers.”

Reference : www.nation.co.ke