By Ján Michalko
(Faith’s story was part of the 2020 series on alumni association leaders in Kenya prepared by inHive in collaboration with Future First Kenya to commemorate the start of Term 3 of the school year, which was cancelled due to the COVID -19 pandemic)
Know your past, to understand your future.
This saying springs to my mind as Faith tells me about one of the online activities that she organised for the Moi Forces Academy (MFA) Alumni Association just a few weeks ago. The event showed the former students of the Academy the rich history of their school. Because it was online, it attracted alumni currently living in the USA, UK, South Africa and other parts of the world and was a huge success.
Faith shares some of the history with me and it is very interesting indeed. The Academy started in the early 1980s to provide education for the children of military personnel. As the school’s website puts it, it was the brainchild of then President of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, who went to become the country’s longest serving head of state.
Moi died earlier this year. Dignitaries from around the continent attended the state funeral just before the COVID-19 pandemic stopped all international flights to Kenya. His legacy is contested, as it is the case with many politicians, but as Faith and I talk, we don’t discuss politics. Instead, our chat is filled with laughter and positive energy that carries through Faith’s many interesting stories and experiences, including from the Academy’s Lanet campus in Nakuru not too far from Nairobi, where Faith herself attained her high school education.
Mediating and leading by example
Lanet campus is one of the four schools, whose alumni are part of the MFA Alumni Association, and include a school in the coastal city of Mombasa. As Faith tells me, many siblings who are MFA alumni, would have had very different experiences of the Academy because of the changes the schools have gone through.
One of them was the opening of girl’s school in Nakuru. Faith transitioned to a girls only primary school when she was 11 and later joined the academy’s girls campus for high school. I am surprised to hear that the decision was done through a family conversation with her parents, whom I expected to be very conservative. You see, Faith’s father was a military chaplain and her mother was a primary school teacher.
With my parents, as much as their professions sound to be one of those who would really be tough, we had family conversations. When I ended up moving from the school where my mom was to a different one, that was a conversation.
Asking questions and having conversations is something that young Kenyans do not experience very often, either at home or at school. Many Kenyan communities, as most societies in East Africa, are gerontocratic, which means that they are based on power of elders, and of older men in particular.
That is why mentorship and discussions with alumni are so important to help young people navigate challenges, ranging from sex lives to drug abuse, but also to resolve problems at the school.
Faith tells me of an incident at the Academy, in which the alumni intervened as mediators, between students, teachers and parents.
It was a very touchy issue. It affected the ecosystem of the school. It affected the current students, the teachers, of course it affected the parent-teacher association, of course it affected the alumni.
So, during one of the mentorship sessions, the alumni asked the teachers, who would normally sit in on the sessions to step out to allow candid conversations.
We had to walk that journey with the school, with the students, with the leadership of the students.
But their efforts paid off and they build strong sense of trust with the young people:
By the end of that year, some of the students just reached out to different alumni personally. So the children really opened up about the issues that they were dealing with.
The alumni motivate the students also to do better academically. Another proud achievement of the association that Faith shares with me, is the challenge that the alumni put to the students: those, who succeed in getting an A at the end of the year exams, are given a prize. From just 1 awardee in 2016, the association now gives out the prize to 16 students for 2019.
Connecting with who’s-who of Kenya
Just like the alumni associations which Victoria and Vedis lead, MFA association is trying to help alumni as much as they are giving back to the current students. Faith tells me about two other online events she helped to organise earlier this year: one to help alumni with job-hunting and being aware of the skills required for the present day labour market, and another one about financial skills and personal banking, as many alumni face COVID-19 induced economic hardships.
But Faith also admits that alumni are interested to come together because they want to be connected to some of the important people, who sprung from the school, such as politicians and government officials.
Some of them are a name to reckon with. And just be able to sit down with them, was a privilege. And even to get to hear what they’re thinking, for me, on a personal level was a motivation.
Many of the school’s alumni went to do great things, and Faith herself managed to get funding to get her undergraduate degree in the USA. At first, her parents were keen for her not to succumb to the pressure from her peers to go abroad, as many of the children of servicemen did back then. After an intervention from a group of her peers, however, her parents were convinced to let her go.
As inHive works with many scholarship recipients from across Africa, I am aware of some of the challenges young African students experience when they travel to the USA. I cannot help but smile, as Faith recounts some of the adjustments she had to go through.
All my life I was very guarded. I lived in military barrack. I didn’t realize the sense that everything was cool, calm and collected. Nobody would even attack us, we lived in the barracks for crying out loud! We were practically taken to school with the military vehicles. That was my life
But in the USA, she found herself without the same support and privileges, and away from her family. Based on her experience, leaving at a tender age, Faith says she would recommend to young people to get their undergraduate degrees in Kenya and to travel abroad for short term visits or for further studies.
I finished high school at the age of 17 and so I left Kenya at the age of 18. That transition from Kenya was very fast. I didn’t have time to mentally prepare. For an 18-year-old, I felt the change was too sudden and too much at the same time. Maybe that explains why I chose to come back to Kenya.
I am convinced that Faith’s experiences must speak to the young people that she meets at the Academy; who are trying to decide whether to stay or to leave their home and their country in hope of better future prospects. And I am also convinced that knowing the past of their school’s alumni, will help them plan their future.
