Amagoro Primary School

Amagoro Primary School has 840 students and 18 teachers. The building is condemned, the windows in the 2nd and 3rd grade buildings are missing, and the students wear tattered blue and white school uniforms. The poverty is ever-present and intractable. Steps away from the school sits an empty magnificent government building, built by a provincial governor as a monument to his power--it was never used and sits abandoned. I heard that it cannot be used because provincial men still argue about who has authority over the building. So as it lays abandoned, several feet away 840 students ramble over the broken and uneven terrain to sit 5 or 6 children to a desk. It was at Amagoro that I met an extraordinary young girl named Millicent. Millicent is 13-years-old and in the 7th grade. She is as small as an average 4th grader, and wears a uniform with a tear that runs from her left armhole to her belt. Millicent is a natural teacher and leader. As I teach her how to use the computer and create an email account, she leans over and, in Swahili, teaches the girls to the left and right of her. Millicent wants to grow up to be a lawyer, and is the type of student that teachers in the States salivate over: bright, inquisitive and eager-to-learn.  But, it is uncertain if Millicent will even make it to the 8th grade. Her mother does not want her to go to school. Her mother is one of her father's three wives. She lives with her father and second step-mother in Amagoro and hopes that her father will let her stay in school one more year. 

When you meet a girl like Millicent on your first mission trip, your desire is to save her, take her back to America with you, adopt her, support her, keep her safe. You cry a lot, some tears for Millicent, and some for a world that would allow 840 students to cram inside a condemned building while a governmental palace lays moldering steps away. Millicent deserves a building with books, and exam books and pens and pencils. Millicent deserves her own desk. Millicent deserves to go to University and become a lawyer. Millicent deserves a future. It is said that the tragedy of Kenya is that Kenya always wins. We pour our hopes and dreams and tears and sweat into saving the Millicents of the Kenya, yet Kenya always wins. But the only way we can stave off despair and keep going is to lean hard against our small victories. Kenya may always win, but we must never stop playing.