A Fulfilling Decade…..

The journey began in 2012. I always wanted to do something in the field of education and so when the opportunity arose, we purchased a kindergarten school. . I had no knowledge of the Montessori method. I had to take over the school and then study the method. Then the owner left after the handover. I had to compress a two year course into one year. We took over when just thirty students were enrolled. I was teaching and studying as well as trying to implement what I was studying. So it became more interesting. Then it started becoming very fascinating as I began implementing innovative ideas. These were not exactly in the syllabus but closely connected to it . Then I began studying child psychology to understand young children better.

Then came a point when I wanted to educate more and more mothers about the Montessori method so they could implement it at home too. Thus children would benefit more. I used to do home visits to educate mothers. I also used to invite them to school, not to make them admit students to the school but to give them an idea of what the Montessori method is like. It was a business venture but I did not want to keep the knowledge to myself . I wanted to ensure that I shared it as much as I could. I studied the psychology of adults too and also that of younger parents, more specifically the mother who is sending her first child to school for the first time.

I also began a YouTube  channel so I coud reach out to more parents.  https://youtube.com/channel/UC-jx6ZMrNF--rJm2eksy-8w  Another idea that the school gave birth to was the library set up. I have managed to establish about forty five libraries and a couple of places have virtual libraries, which sprang up during the pandemic. We used Zoom to broadcast lessons to children from the lower socio economic strata so they would not lose interest in studying and pick up bad habits while idle. Five hundred thousand students are now benefitting through these libraries.

Then I had the idea of starting a college to teach the Montessori method to train teachers to teach students between the ages 0 to 9. There was a paucity of such courses in the Kenyan market. And the demand was high. So the time was ripe for yet another venture.Then I realized that to grow further and to give wings to my dreams, I required international affiliation. While I was working on this, a new rule came up in Kenya that all teachers had to be registered with a teacher registration number. I needed the number to validate the Montessori method qualification.So I ended up opening two colleges in the same campus. One for the Montessori system and one to train teachers in the traditional kenyan kindergarten system. In this manner, the teachers trained by our colleges would be job ready immediately.

Then we received a conditional affliation from an organization in Norway. The condition was that we would need two lecturers on ground and so I had to complete two courses during the pandemic. I also had to ensure that all the documents for the affiliation were in order. The future plan is to expand further and start an Elementary school which would cater to students until the age of nine. The highest number of students in the kindergarten, at a time, has been forty five and the lowest has been just one student, when the school opened after one long year, post the first stages of the pandemic.All these challenges only made this cause of making education available for all closer to my heart. I feel as if the journey has just begun and at times I find it hard to believe that I have been active in this field

for ten long years. I feel I have been privileged to interact with such young children as this age group has extremely observant minds. Every year we do three different types of events after the year begins in September. The first program is the Christmas Play in December. Then we celebrate International Day in February as we have students from multiple countries. The third program is held in June every year and it is Sports Day.

Education, I feel, need not be a very expensive proposition. One only needs to be self driven and to understand well exactly what one wants to study. We have had two large cohorts of students who graduated from the teacher training colleges. And I am so happy to see that teachers trained by us stand out, no matter in which school they are placed after graduation.It is a matter of intense pride that our kindergarten students too stand out when they join Elementary schools. Their self confidence and other abilities put them a step above others in their peer group and we have had teachers visiting us from a very prominent International School in the area to ask us what we were doing that made our students so different! The teachers even observed a few classes . So it was very clear to us that the Montessori Method was working well and how!

These small successes have kept me going even through the toughest of times on both my personal and professional fronts.