Last week, Alex, our East Africa Programme Director and founder of The Walk Centre, along with his wife Patricia, joined us in the UK to deliver some training to our staff, visited some of our groups and started planning for what is going to be a very busy 2025!
Alex and Patricia spent some time with our UK team, sharing their story and also how African Adventure began…
2000
In 2000, we moved to Nakuru with our son Colins as part of rural-urban migration. We rented in a place called London. In London, there is a dumpsite called The Hilton, which we first discovered when we walked around the area. In the rural village where we previously lived, there were no dumpsites, so this was a massive shock to us, and it touched us to see people living on the edge of all the rubbish. These people depend on the dumpsite to live, searching amongst the rubbish for food and items to sell, including children who would not be attending school.
We started visiting the dumpsite weekly on a Wednesday night and took bread and juice to give the children.
The Hilton Dumpsite
2005
Patricia and I volunteered at this children’s organisation, which provided a safe place for children to go in the morning. In 2005, we rented our own place where the children from the dumpsite could come each morning. Around 45 children came, and we borrowed a blackboard to teach them a basic education.
Through the work we were doing, we met a gentleman who used to run a volunteer organisation. He was attracted to the work we were doing in the slum area, and he started sending us volunteers.
2006
Two volunteers who stayed with us for three months raised 500,000 Kenyan Shillings, which we used to purchase a permanent site for the project, and, in 2006, The Walk Centre was officially registered as a pre-primary school. The school provided an education and daily meal to 120 children from the dumpsite. We started with just two small tin classrooms.
2007
We set up a football team for the older boys from the dumpsite who could not attend school. We used an old field on the dumpsite, which didn’t have rubbish on it as their football pitch. We told the man from the volunteer organisation about this, and he started sending us sports coaching volunteers to work with the football team at the dumpsite. In 2007, Dan was one of the sports coaching volunteers who came to stay with us in our house for two months. In the evening, Dan would spend time with us, and we would talk about the community and the slum area and share ideas about what we could do to make a long-term impact.
Dan returned to Nakuru for a second time in 2007, and that’s when we spoke about creating a volunteering organisation and Kenyan Adventures (now African Adventures) was born! Individuals came to The Walk Centre to volunteer at the start, and then it grew to group visits. With more volunteers coming, the amount of donations that The Walk Centre received from Kenyan Adventures increased. Volunteers also bought books, pencils, and pens with them, which allowed us to grow the amount of development work we were doing at the school. We received more money to feed the children and more volunteers to help build the facilities.
2014
By 2014, volunteers had helped to construct and renovate five classrooms, including a Standard One classroom. This classroom was built to allow the children to complete their first year of primary education for free before they would have to find a place at a local government school, which often comes with costs.
2015
Chichester College visits and volunteers at The Walk Centre each year. I picked the group up from the airport, and Lisa, the group leader, asked me what can we do for The Walk Centre. I told her that my dream is for the children in the slum area to have a good school.
After their trip, Lisa went home and spoke to Dan about what could be done and African Adventures Foundation teamed up with Chichester College to fundraise the money needed to construct a brand-new primary school, which would allow our students at The Walk Centre to receive a full primary education for free. It was an ambitious construction project with the goal of raising £80,000.
The whole college got behind the project by organising fundraisers, which included a fire walk, skydives, and bake sales. Dan and four friends also took on a challenge called ‘The Big Bike Ride’ to raise funds, which saw them cycle from Nakuru in Kenya to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 10 days.
Construction began in 2016, and the new primary school officially opened in August 2017, which completely changed the school forever.
Opening ceremony of the new primary school
Present day
Today, if you go to the dumpsite during school hours, you will not see any children. When we first set up The Walk Centre, we would go to the dumpsite and locate any children who weren’t in school. If this were for financial reasons, we would enrol them at The Walk Centre for a free education. Over time, doing this allowed us to achieve our goal of ensuring all children were in school receiving an education.
Every January now, we open The Walk Centre for new intakes, so any children who are in the slum area and aren’t in school can come to us and enrol. On average, we get around 40 new students a year and try to meet the community’s needs.
Through our method of helping the community, we are taking the children and giving them an education, which opens doors for them to get a job and have a brighter future. Eric used to live on the dumpsite with his grandmother and brothers in one of the temporary houses. We took Eric to The Walk Centre to give him a primary education and then connected him with a High School. Eric was the first child ever from the dumpsite to go to university. Today, Eric works for an NGO in Nairobi and has bought land for his grandmother so she can move out of the dumpsite. Eric has also visited The Walk Centre during his time off in the summer, helping to teach lessons.
If I think about The Walk Centre and what could have happened if we hadn’t set it up, I think maybe some of the children wouldn’t be alive today because of malnutrition or because they may have joined gangs rather than being in school.
We have had so much positive progress because of African Adventures coming in and giving us a continuous flow of volunteers who have worked alongside us to improve the quality of education The Walk Centre provides.
Thank you to everyone who has been a part of our journey, and we can’t wait to welcome more of you and familiar faces back to The Walk Centre.