Our Kenya Adventure Begins
Kenya's sights offer a refreshing escape from bustling Sacramento. Here, Ben is leading GLAD Kenya's 10-week web development bootcamp for 16 young adults.
It's hard to capture the beauty of this place and what that means for a learning environment.
One of our students meeting with his American mentor, a web developer, while enjoying a Kenyan sunset!
Tucked back against a hillside overlooking a pink-streaked lake filled with migrating flamingoes, we feel like we are really on safari. We are living off the land: milk from the cows, water from the rain collected, and power from the sun. It's both invigorating and vulnerable. As rainy season approaches, we are having to constantly monitor our solar power to handle the 16+ computers that need to be charged on cloudy days. But with that comes the gift of rain we can collect to fill our water tanks. Let's just say that we are learning a LOT!
Yet, we are all loving this beautiful place -- especially our students, who have shared how much they love walking around the farm after class, and enjoying the soft mattresses and cozy wool blankets on their beds.
View from our girls' safari tent, housing 8 of our 16 students. The light pink around the lake in the distance are migrating flamingoes!
The Learning
Our bootcamp isn't your typical coding program. Ben spends his day teaching under our colorful tent (we didn't anticipate the tentmakers' color choices). Instead of lecturing all day, he has the students do paired exercises each afternoon to practice the coding they learned in the morning. We often find them staying late into the evening working together to figure out the problems.
They also meet with American professional mentors over Zoom who ask thought-provoking questions, provide career advice, and offer encouragement.
Tonight, we had a guest lecturer, Kelly Soifer, joining us via Zoom to teach Clifton's StrengthsFinder, which helps students figure out their unique strengths. She went through each and every student's profile and you could see on their faces that they felt so understood!
We really believe this is an excellent education.
Unfolding Joy....
You put all these things together: a beautiful place, vibrant learning, and quality students, and the joy unfolds. After classes are over, we hear laughter throughout the farm. We see smiles as delicious meals are served.
In short, we see a lot of hope for the future. Because this experience is already changing all of us.
