What if you spoke English and German at home, Spanish to your friends, and then all of your textbooks were in Kiswahili?

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Happy Home houses 32 children from seven to sixteen. I’m still trying to connect names with faces, but the children don’t seem to mind when I ask for their names repeatedly. During a normal week, the kids are in school most of the day. However, the Kenyan school system is on an all-year schedule that starts in January and ends in November. The children, therefore, are currently studying for their final exams. Their last day of classes was Friday, but this week was a sort of “reading week” between classes and exams, which start this Friday. This has a number of consequences for us—the volunteers: the children have been home all day instead of at school (excellent for learning faces and playing games), we’re preparing practice exams (I’m in charge of nine of them, so not so excellent for actually having time to spend with the kids), and we have revision (review) every evening after dinner.

Review time has turned in to my favorite time of the day. We divide the kids up approximately into their grades and work out of their textbooks. So far I’ve ended up with the fourth and fifth graders. The first night we did English as a group, and the second night I worked on math problems at the chalkboard with three of the girls. They’ve been doing long division, fractions, word problems, simple geometry, and budgeting money. I had a blast trying to dredge up the tricks I used to remember my multiplication tables, and making up word problems about shillings. For example:

You go to the market with 163 shillings to buy pineapple and paraffin. You take a matatu which costs 15 shillings. A pineapple is 50 KSh and you buy two. You fill your bottle with paraffin for 34 shillings. Do you have enough money left to take a matatu home?

Fun, right? It’s actually been the best way to learn names because I’ve ended up helping different kids each night. The amazing thing about schools in Kenya is that they learn in English. Every class except Kiswahili is taught and studied in English. I asked one of the girls how many languages she knew. She answered, “Four—English, Kiswahili, Luo, and Luhya.” She’s nine. And going to school in her fourth language.