Case Study: Albert Wambugu
One of the goals of the Simama Project is to celebrate the children that we work with in a positive light. We are opposed to the marketing of children as victims and instead choose to focus on their successes.
However, we also believe that it is very important that our supporters understand the situations that some of our children come from and their experience leading up to their time with Simama.
With that in mind we will be featuring several posts from some of our students telling their stories in their own words. The students featured have agreed to share their experiences with the public. This is in no way a requirement for them to be involved in our program and the children can choose whether or not they would like to participate and what they would like to share/withhold. There are only slight grammatical edits for clarity and, occasionally edits for appropriate content. All parenthetical statements have been added by the editor for clarification.
That being said, I would like to introduce another one of our most promising young students, Albert Wambugu.
Here is Albert in his own words.
Tell us a little bit about yourself
I was born in 1999 in a small village which is located in Nyeri. When I was 6 years old I started my education in a small nursery close to my home. When I was 6 years old my parents had a domestic violence and they divorced. From that moment I was left with my 3 years old sister and I had to take care of her. After a while my mother came back and took my sister with her. Regarding my father, he was very often coming home drunk and that is when I decided to run away from home and join the streets.
One bright morning I found a young man called Matt Orcutt who I could read between the lines that he was a good man and I was all right! He told me that he could help me make my dreams come true and that he would take me back to school.
I actually went back to school and I just scored 354 out of 500 on the national exam known as Kenya Certificate of Primary Education, now I’m very looking forward to join secondary school in 2017.
(*A score of 354 on the KCPE is very high! The national average was well below 250 this year)
What famous person do you admire and why?
I admire our president Uhuru Kenyatta because he has good heart, he really wants to eradicate poverty in the small communities.
What is your favorite subject at school?
I really like Math and Social Studies. Math might be boring for some people but you only need persistence to understand the tricks.
Regarding Social Studies I like the fact that the world is so big and contains different people with different mentalities and different ways to conduct their lives.
What is your best quality?
I’m very respectful, generous and hard working
What do you want to become when you are an adult and why?
I want to be an engineer because there are a lot of well paid opportunities for engineers, so I will be able to eradicate poverty in my family and in the whole community.
What do you like the most about Simama Project?
The way they take care of the children in the transition home, and the way the kids start loving their Simama brothers.
What do you like the most about Kenya?
In Kenya we are blessed with a variety of beautiful sceneries such a sandy beaches, we Kenyans are very hard workers; Harambee is our motivation to work as a team. It also means the spirit of working together and fight against proverty.
How do you think you can best contribute to make the world a better place?
By attending school and by creating awareness in the villages of the importance of education.
What do you think that government can do to eradicate poverty?
Providing job opportunities and loans to farmers so they can trade their agricultural products; endorsing security in the cities; providing homes for the elder people and orphanages for street kids.
