Returning to a changed Turkana after 8 Years
Senior Content Manager, Shona Shea, reflects on her first trip to Turkana since 2015.
My last trip to Turkana in Northern Kenya was in 2015. Back then, the capital Lodwar was little more than a dirt track road, with a little bridge that became impassable if it rained. There were a reasonable number of buildings, but I don’t remember many shops, and just one or two places to eat.
Just eight years on, the place has changed beyond all my recognition. There are tarmacked highways, a huge bridge near the centre of town, shops, restaurants, industry everywhere. When I arrived and saw this shift, I was excited to see if Mary’s Meals’ presence in the area had changed just as much too.
When I was last here, Mary’s Meals occupied a small office with two rooms and a couple of motorbikes. Now we have a whole office building with a separate warehouse and a fleet of vehicles. The reason it’s grown so much is because the size of the school feeding programme and the number of children now being served by Mary’s Meals in Turkana has increased more than I could have imagined back in 2015. We started off working with a partner to reach a few thousand pre-school children, and now we’re delivering meals directly to more than 150,000 learners! In fact, combined with that partner programme, we’re now feeding more than 170,000 children in Turkana every school day.
Our first stop on this visit was to the Mary’s Meals warehouse where we saw just a fraction of the huge logistical operation involved with keeping our promise of a daily school meal to children in Turkana. We learned about the ‘Third Eye’ process – otherwise known as Quality Assurance – and witnessed just how quickly 300,000 servings of Mary’s Meals can be offloaded from a truck!
One of the biggest physical changes I saw in Lodwar was the huge bridge that has been built in town. There wasn’t much of a river to see when I was last there, but when water rushes down from Ethiopia, things can change dramatically in just a few hours. It’s hard to reconcile the idea of a flooded river with what I know of desperate drought in Turkana, especially when it looks like it does in this video…
When I think of my first visit to Turkana, I remember it being a desolate place. With its vast, barren landscape and an occasional thatched hut appearing as if from nowhere, it didn’t just feel like a different time, it felt like a different planet. Now, setting off for Naurendudung ECDE (Early Childhood Development and Education centre) before the sun had risen, I am reminded just how remote – and at times, alien – Turkana can feel to me, having travelled here from Scotland. When we arrive, there is no school and no hospital but the community shows us what they have instead: a tree as a classroom and a small straw hut as a maternity ward.
But, to focus on that first impression is to miss the beauty of the landscape and the strength and spirit of those who live there. Visiting schools and meeting communities offers an honoured glimpse into a completely different way of life, with some of the most resilient and hard-working people I have ever met. People like Peter, a remarkable community leader with a fierce passion for education; and an amazing mother and volunteer midwife called Martha, who has brought more than 100 children safely into the world.
We spent our last couple of days in Kenya at a school in Lodwar town, in a more urban environment that simply wasn’t there during my first visit in 2015. We were at a school which, in many ways, is the epitome of Mary’s Meals. It started life with a small group of students who had lessons under a tree and has grown into a lively school community of more than 600 children – thanks largely to its partnership with Mary’s Meals. So many of those children simply wouldn’t be receiving an education, if it weren’t for the promise of a consistent school meal.
Shona Shea
Senior Content Manager, Mary's Meals International
You can play a direct role in ensuring we're able to keep feeding the children of Turkana, who in recent years have struggled with severe droughts and food shortages. For just £19.15 we can feed a child for a full school year. Providing them with life changing meals that encourage them to stay in school and get their education without the worry of where their next meal is coming from.
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