Covid-19 (Ruben Centre update)

Ruben Primary lower grade students seating at a distance during a food distribution exercise.

It has been 108 days since Kenya announced her first Covid-19 case. The cases have exponentially risen to 6,070 with the margin widening in a shorter period. To put into perspective, since the first case was announced to June 1st, two thousand confirmed cases had been announced. This means from June 1st to today (June 29th) Kenya has recorded over 4000 cases, averaging 144 cases each day. This is a scary figure, considering we are not near our peak yet.

The pandemic has affected every citizen of the world, directly and indirectly. Partial and full closure of public places has led to loss of jobs. Hobbies and activities that we were part of our lives are starting to become sweet memories. The boredom levels are rising higher than the Covid-19 cases!

The Government of Kenya is working on a way of re-opening the economy, which I think is a terrible idea for now. With lockdown in places and curfew times stipulated to reduce infection rates, the country is still far from managing an uproar of cases. The President on June 6th had placed a list of requirements for the economy to fully open. These included beds in all facilities countrywide and sufficient workforce in the health sector. None of this has been implemented nearly a month later; well at least not at the Ruben Centre despite numerous requests to do so. The Ministry of Education is also hinting in reopening schools by September.

A school such as Ruben Primary with a population of over 2,500 students is somewhat expected to have its students sit fifteen in each class. We currently host a minimum of 70 in a class. The Director of Ruben Centre says he will need to somehow build 45 new classes by September to have this government directive implemented. To further ensure the school-going children are safe, the government said it needed to make 24,000,000 face masks that will be given to the children. The same children leave home and go back without a sweater are supposed to keep a mask on their faces a whole 8 hours.

Whilst all these plans, barely anything is being done about the outstanding number of teenage girls who are expectant mothers. The number stands at a staggering 160,000 girls nationwide, a number of them being victims of rape. It is also a new normal to have school boys turned into boda-boda riders and petty offenders.

It is time the Government to pick a way to deal with the pandemic and stick to it. Juggling between opening and not opening the economy is juggling with millions of people’s lives.

By G.B