Read: ‘Failure is accepted’: Kenya reflects the challenges deaf pupils face worldwide (Guardian)

The Guardian has published an insightful article about issues in education affecting Deaf children in Kenya, featuring interviews with students and teachers.

Read it here.

Extract:

‘I didn’t talk before I came to school, I had no stories with my parents,” says Nyamula Mandoro, 15, with a grave expression, her eyes fixed on the sign language interpreter sitting opposite, who is translating her emphatic gestures into English. “I don’t have a best friend but I have a favourite teacher. She is very good, she sometimes gives me clothes, food and things. Many of us here have a teacher who is special.”

We are talking on benches under the thatched roof of an open-air meeting room. On the other three sides of a square of brown grass are one-storey buildings with corrugated-iron roofs: classrooms, kitchen and dormitories, where more than 40 boys share one bedroom lined with bunks. The toilet blocks and water taps are set back.

This is Kinango school for deaf children in the county of Kwale at the coastal south-eastern tip of Kenya. Two hours away across the Shimba Hills is the white sand of Diani beach. But the land surrounding the school is arid and the people who live in its villages, mostly peasant farmers, are very poor. The school, like most deaf schools in Kenya, is boarding, and many children here have been rejected by parents.