Young environmentalists visits the Maarifa centre

Students from Patterson memorial secondary school environmental club paid a visit to the Maarifa centre on Sunday on their field tour to Nguruman area. Accompanied by three teachers, the 54 students were excited to have a touch of technology when they were given opportunities to operate computers, got to know the parts and their functions as well as knowing other equipments used along with the computers like scanner, digital camera and a printer.

Patterson memorial students being introduced to computers at the Maarifa centre

They  were also informed of all other services offered at the Maarifa centre and most interestingly, they all wanted to enrol for computer training.

The students were also excited with library services and publications like Baobab and Joto Africa were of great interest to many. They wished the centre was close to their school so that they can fully utilise the facility. They requested if they could be allowed to borrow books from the library through their school and they were informed to organize with the teachers and draft the subject areas they feel that they need Maarifa centre support then action can be taken immediately.   

Patterson memorial students at the Maarifa centre library

Mr Mathu, the divisional Agricultural extension officer  took the students through green house drip irrigation system where students taking Agriculture as a subject had many questions to ask. The students were interested to know inter-row and inter-crop spacing in drip irrigation system and were professionally answered by the officer in charge. Mr. Mathu also urged the students not to look down upon Agriculture since its the backbone of our countries economy and that they need to come up with innovations which will help improve the current systems.

Mr. Mathu explaining  green house drip irrigation system to students 

The students expressed their desire to be trained on computer skills and appreciated the services offered by the Maarifa centre. The same sentiments were echoed by their teacher Mr. Jeremiah Kutanya adding that, students from Nguruman area have advantage over others and have shown competence in computers because they do their training during school recess. He urged the Maarifa centre management to plan and see how they can train the students at school since they have computers which are not optimally utilized.