Students on mission to Kenya

SEVEN St Virgil’s College students will walk in the footsteps of Kenyan children when they visit a slum in Nairobi these school holidays.

The Grade 9 and 10 boys will spend 12 days working alongside students at the Mary Rice Centre in Nairobi, a school for children with disabilities that has ties to the Hobart college.

The boys will provide sup- port and to gain a hands-on understanding of life in Africa’s largest slum.

They’ll participate in a 21km walkathon, which they’ll do while pushing their wheelchair-bound counterparts.

“The focus of the visit is immersion,” said Mark Waddington, the college’s director of development, and one of the three teachers accompanying the students on the trip.

“We expect the boys will get a greater sense of them- selves and see that we’re very fortunate.

“For the rest of the school community, having the boys there makes the efforts they’ve put in for fundraising very real, and gives them extra motivation for the future,” he said.

In preparation students have done a semester-long unit studying the issues confronting the Mary Rice Centre and the students who attend there, such as extreme poverty and disadvantage.

Grade 10 student Tadhg Waddington said he was “getting very excited” and hoped to get a better understanding of how people are marginalised in the world.

“We had a dinner of beans, rice and corn and curry; eating the food they eat to get ready,” said Grade 10 student Sebastian Hay.

In Kenya, the students will also visit a couple of other schools, a giraffe park and an elephant sanctuary.