Ruben Centre at 25 :A Legacy of Service
It seems 2025 is passing like a silent ship in the night and as the third month of the year sets in, maybe it is high time to say hello to all our friends out there.
2025 Ruben Centre is celebrating its silver jubilee this year 2025. Twenty-five years of being a light in the darkness for the often forgotten people of Mukuru slums.Ruben Centre is a dynamic service provider in areas of health (120,000 services in 2024) child care, disability/ special needs, free education from Pre-primary to Year 9 junior Secondary ( Over 3,500 students ), Youth empowerment with five NITA training courses, and other forms of social welfare, all expressions of its three core values of Presence, Compassion and Liberation. It seems to go on and on.
We produced an annual report of 2024 to capture all this The jubilee year began by inviting Sister Mary Klleen RSM and Br. Tom Kearney CFC back to the Centre to re-enact the occasion when 25 years ago on January 7th, they signed the hand over agreement to the Christian Brothers.
In this jubilee year, hopefully as the year pans out, we will have various functions and create ways to gather together again significant people of those years and also gather up memories of achievements of these past years. Much has been achieved during these years and a great foundation has been laid to build the next twenty five years.
March 1st was one such jubilee event as the community and especially former students of Ruben were invited back to the place. Here is a trailer of the great day.
A real highlight for me was welcoming to the stage former students of the school who are now staff members. I think there are ten staff who all got their early formation at Ruben primary, with several of them benefitting from scholarship in high school and tertiary education.
(Former students of AEF Ruben Primary who are now staffs alongside Br Frank O’shea)
The year will hopefully draw many visitors and partners to Ruben and already this is happening. Partners Brighton Jones from USA, Sue O’Neill Aust and Edmund Rice Foundation team Aust. Edmund Rice Development Ireland, along with Paywise Financial Services -Gone fishing visitors have all been here. Paywise have long time links to Ruben through the Melbourne based Alison family and now are a major sponsor of the 500 Supporters Luncheons.
Ruben Centre is always welcoming partnerships and links with people as we know here in Africa the saying ‘it takes a village to rare a child’ so too Ruben needs many willing people and organisations joining with it to achieve its mission. In this area we are being greatly assisted by the Australian International Development Network (AIDN) which leverages and shines a spotlight on the good work being undertaken in the International Development sector. Last year various Development agencies and Foundations assoicated with AIDN visited Ruben Centre and now some of. the benefits of this initiative are impacting on our future financial viability. I am very hopeful about a brighter future with this greater funding diversity.
Having said all that, the other side of the coin reveals that these two months of 2025, have been filled with plenty of challenges as you can expect when broke. Staff went seven weeks between pay days during fiscal challenging times of Christmas, with travel expectaions for family gatherings and getting kids back to school.
These are incredibly challenging times in Kenya where the country is in free fall, with social cohesion disintegrating due to the political and economic mess and the slums are first to feel it like skin telling a person he or she has a fever. Casual jobs have vanished into thin air with company closures and tightening of belts.
A further issue is the collapse of. the health system and the complete failure of a new health insurance scheme. Currently no private health facility is admitting patients who are depending on the scheme, and various levels of clinicians are on strike in government health facilities due to lack of salary payments.
Ruben Health Centre is in huge demand with patient numbers through the roof including the birthing unit where over thirty mothers have been admitted in the first week alone of March, further indicating the importance of Ruben’s wide range of services. Only last week at our Jubilee gathering, I was approached by a former student, and now is a mortician, to start a mortuary but I said, ‘that is taking our ‘Womb to Tomb Care.” Motto too seriously.
2025 is also the last year of. this current 5-year Strategic plan and we are busy in this first six months preparing data from this period which will be essential information for a new Strategic plan to be prepared in the second half of the year. Already we have engaged consultants to do data harvesting of our main Strategic objectives. These findings, together with the reality of being broke, has teased me enough to create a Ruben Efficiency Team ( RET) which is currently creating an operations framework to monitor and evaluate all project activities. These Standard Operation Procedures (SOPS) will help fine tune all projects, ( 5 in the health Centre ) contributing to both cost cutting measures and the decision making processes needed to determine what projects continue into the new 5 -year Strategic plan.(2026-2030 )
So plenty happening including pressing the Trustees to be planning for a new leadership paradigm to take all this forward without Br. Frank.
By Br. Frank O’Shea OAM
Director
Edits: Benson Kagwima