Don’t allow where you come from to determine where you are going

Have you ever heard of a sport called roll ball? No? Well, Monicah Ndunge, 22, and her team recently brought home the World Cup in this sport few seem to know about.

Not only that, she also won the coveted title of Most Valuable Player, awarded by the World Federation of Roll Ball, which organised the 3rd World Cup Roll Ball tournament in Puna, India, in December last year.

To appreciate this accomplishment though, you might have to go down memory lane, to when Monicah was about seven years old.

She and her younger sister were brought up in rural Ukambani by her mother and grandmother, mostly by her grandmother because her mother would wake up at the crack of dawn and make her way to the neighbouring town to look for work.

It is at her rural home, in Kamwala village, Machakos County, that Monicah first learned to play ball in bare feet on stony, dusty pot-holed ground, and where she also learned to toughen up and compete with mostly boy players on the field.

She was seven when her mother took her and her sister to live in Nairobi’s Soweto slum. Her education was then interrupted, since her grandmother had been the one paying her school fees.

Their new home was a stone’s throw from a school and orphans’ home, where Monicah would spend most of her time playing football. Her mother, who was keen for her to get an education but could not afford to pay the school fees, implored the school’s

founder, Nehemiah Ndeta, to allow her first-born to learn at the school. Not blind to the poverty that besieged the family, as well as the cruelty Monicah, her mother and sister were going through in the

hands of her step-father, Nehemiah allowed the young

girl to learn at no cost at his school. That same year, she moved into the children’s home, a place she still calls home to this day.

Nehemiah had started Kwa Watoto Centre and School in 1999, the aim to assist poor children like Monicah to get an education, as well as a refuge where they could live in peace, have enough to eat, study and subsequently make a significant contribution to society in future.

Nehemiah, a Starehe Boys’ School alumni, had been inspired by the School’s late headmaster and founder, Geoffrey Griffin - he wanted nothing more in life than to follow in his mentor’s footsteps and start a school and children’s home that could educate and save lives, as Starehe had saved his.

COULD NOT PAY SCHOOL FEES

Though his family had land in Western Kenya, Nehemiah’s father had donated it all to the local church, which built a school on it. Nehemiah attended that school until his father’s death. After he was

buried though, the church elders demanded he start paying school fees for the first time.

He says,

“My father was so devoted to the church, he served as an unpaid catechist. At the time of his death, he had nothing, so he left us nothing. My mother, who was deaf, struggled to provide enough for us,

and could therefore not afford to pay school fees.”

Outraged at the injustice of it all, he informed the church elders that he would not pay a cent, since his father had donated the piece of land on which the school stood. He was only 12.

“They mercilessly beat me, perhaps thinking that this would cow me, but once they tired, I reminded them again that the school stood on our family’s land, only then did they relent – they never asked me for school fees again.”

His own pain and suffering after his father’s death would later on influence his decision to reach out to less fortunate children, whose only way of escape from poverty was through education.

This is why Nehemiah did not need any convincing to take Monicah under his wing, even inviting her to live with his family until space was available at the home, the first of three that he would later put up.

The school was relatively new when Monicah moved in, and Nehemiah was funding it from his meagre savings, therefore there was a lot that the children he was assisting lacked.

This was the main reason why, when Monicah spotted two strangers approaching the school, she impulsively ran to them and asked one of them for a pen.

NOT A PENNY, A PEN!

The man she had approached was Michael Knapp, an American philanthropist who was stunned, but equally impressed by the small girl’s bold request. He took a pen from his pocket, handed it to her and told her to look after it since it was a “magic” pen.

As it turned out, the pen might indeed have been imbued with magic, because Monicah’s brief encounter with Mr Knapp influenced his decision to have the Warm Hearts Foundation, (which he and his wife Laurie started in Grand Rapids, Michigan) sponsor

Kwa Watoto on a long-term basis.

It also led to his taking Monicah under the Warm Hearts’ wing and fully funding her education, all the way from primary school at Kwa Watoto, through secondary school at St. Mathews, a sister school of Kwa Watoto. The foundation is also sponsoring

Monicah’s university education at St. Paul’s University, where she is in her third year, studying community development. It is here that Monicah discovered roll ball.

“It is a combination of basketball, handball and roller blading, and was founded in India by Raju Dabhade. The sport came to Kenya in 2011,” she explains.

Roll ball hasn’t yet caught on in Kenya’s collective sports psyche though, which partly explains why the national women’s team was not flagged off when they flew off to India in mid-December last year, and why they were not received with fanfare like

other award-winning Kenyan athletes do when they return home victorious.

“The fact that Monicah won the coveted title of Most Valuable Player in the sport makes her the best roll ball player in the world,” says Nehemiah, who allows her to live in Kwa Watoto’s Warm Hearts Home whenever she takes a break from school.

This home, says Monicah, will always occupy a special place in her heart.

“During school holidays, I cook for the children at the home, just like someone cooked for me when I lived here many years ago,” comments Monicah, who fondly remembers the weekly ‘duty roster’ prepared by her then “house mother”, Rose Odera, who

determined whose turn it was  to either cook or clean.

Monicah has also taken it upon herself to teach the children at Kwa Watoto to play roll ball, as well as football, which she says was therapeutic while she was growing up. She hopes that the children will find the sports as enjoyable as she finds them.

Though still basking in the warmth of her big win, she has no intention of sitting back and relaxing – she is already training hard for the next event.

“At the two previous roll ball World Cup games, the Indian women’s team won hands down, so they are a team to reckon with. We are working hard because we intend to retain the title at the next World Cup,” Monicah adds. Kenya beat India 2-1, pushing

them to position two, while Iran came third.

WE AIM FOR SELF-SUSTENANCE

Kwa Watoto’s school farm is only 25 by 70 feet, but it nonetheless supplies the school with everything, from sukuma wiki, kunde, terere, avocados and onions to bananas, maize, pawpaws, and even sugar cane.

“We call it Maggie’s farm, in honour of a 10-year-old girl from the US called Maggie, who helped us raise some of the money we needed to buy the land,” explains Nehemiah.

The school’s small livestock centre is, like the farm, carefully locked away behind brick walls that Nehemiah erected himself. But the fact that Kwa Watoto also keeps chicken, rabbits and ducks as well as a cow and several goats, is yet another aspect of the school and home that makes it special.

It is impressive how much this centre, which Nehemiah started 17 years ago with only a vision, a little money and the supportive wisdom of Mr Griffin, who donated desks and chairs for the primary and pre-primary children, has grown to become such a

big institution.

“I started by going around Nairobi ‘slums’ – Mathare, Dandora, Kibera and Soweto, collecting data on the number of school-age children not in school and the number of free public schools that serve the needs of the same poor school-age children.”

“It turned out that Soweto had the highest number of poor children not in school, as well as the lowest number of free public schools.”

He continues,

“From that data, I knew where to start my first school,” explains Nehemiah, who has put up three more schools, including a secondary school.

“We started small since I initially had to pay the teachers out of my pocket, but as we have been able to fundraise both locally and internationally, we have gradually bought adjacent land - the school now has three self-contained homes.”

Each home contains cooking, eating and sleeping facilities, as well as a leisure space where the children watch TV.

As it stands, over 130 children who passed through the home are university graduates. Some are doctors, others engineers, teachers, and human resource managers.