Our society is as strong as how diverse our opinions are, yet unity in progression
Social Amenities
You can’t separate the topic of places of worship and schools in my neighborhood and in my town, so I will cover this topic in this one article. My neighborhood has really grown in population and in diversity. Much of the changes have been in my adult years with a little reference from my childhood. I will discuss some bit of my neighborhood changes and also in the town at large.
Places of worship
When the town was still in her infancy, I was young then too so we had 5 churches in the town -AIC, Catholic, ACK, PCEA and Salvation Army and 1 mosque. Currently the town has over 30 churches-not including those I had mentioned before, but purely new and customized by different preachers.
My neighborhood has also evolved by a great margin, before only AIC church was located in it about 300m from our home while the rest were in the heart of the town. Key to note also they had a school in their compound, their congregation was about 30 Pax on Sundays, the school was purely kindergarten- then called a nursery school, my little brother attended the school which had a population of 30 students from baby, middle and top class, well, those who were born in the 90s will understand this school system.
There was a boom in the number of residents who won USA green card between 2003-2007 and as some of them relocated and sold off their land, the new land owners weren’t so keen on keeping the area’s purpose so pastors made it an evangelizing neighborhood. Fast forward, there are about 10 churches in our neighborhood, currently there is an estimate of about 50 churches in the whole town.
Schools
Moving on to schools, in the early 2000’s we had 6 public schools (Township, St. Patrick, DEB, Utumishi, 2 national boys’ high schools and 1 district secondary school) that served the whole town, private schools were about 9 including secondary schools) 1 polytechnic and a famous international school.
For a year, I attended one of the public schools with my elder siblings before moving to one of the private schools in the town. Most of our neighbors’ children especially those from class 1-8 had to attend the public schools as those provided by the church offered kindergarten level exclusively. The other private schools were located so far away about 10km because they targeted police officers and the military.
We walked to school, it was very fun as we would always walk in crowds, break at 12:30 then head home for lunch before returning to school by 2pm for afternoon classes until 5pm. Like fate would have it, entrepreneurs were always on the look out and as the new churches cropped up they introduced schools.
Out of the 10 churches in our neighborhood about 5 offer education services: a learned and spiritual neighborhood. An urban planner’s perspective? Nothing, just as it is. The new education centres have really improved access to education. My opinion on the quality of these educational facilities: I presume and rate them fair on offering educational services of high standard, because education is power, or as my grandfather would say ‘a certificate never rots’. Also, the town has about 3 polytechnics excluding driving schools which are in plenty (currently this number stands at 10).
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