Honour and reward those who impacted our society!

In every village, there are individuals who nurture and shape young people. They do the shaping tirelessly and with a clean heart expecting no monetary reward. More often than not, the village and the general public end up believing that the selfless effort by such individuals in a responsibility bestowed upon them (the shapers) and it is the right of the public to be accorded such privileges of being shaped.

 As young people, we often do not see the sacrifice such shapers and role models play until when we are grownups and maybe when these shapers are long gone. Sadly a majority of them pass on while very poor because their effort was never motivated by money. Unfortunately, no one makes an effort to nature and motivate the shapers’ children. A thankless job indeed!

Today I do dedicate my time to thank two individuals from Kisii County who were great positive influencers in my community. Despite their great effort, they passed unnoticed. They never had much but they positively impacted the villages they lived in. They were both primary school teachers. To be specific they were headteachers of primary schools. Their names were Joseph Omariba and Jackson Ong’ondo.

When headmasters in neighbouring schools were busy looking for ways of making money, the two great men were looking for ways of nurturing young Kenyans to excel in life.

Their hard work and dedication to teaching explained why the schools they headed year in year out came at position one and two in the then Marani division. The two were “rivals” positively. They had a healthy completion for years. They were never involved in any scandal of helping their pupils cheat in examinations. They never stole school property.

 Parents respected and any time the teachers’ employer wanted to transfer them, parents had to intervene. They placed the schools on a national map. They encourage many pupils to work hard and in many years, the schools that hardly had desks produced students who joined National schools.

With all their hard work, these two educators were never promoted to anything above school headmasters. They retired while doing not so well economically. The government never recognized their effort.

No one took a step of nurturing their children the way they had done to other people’s children. Luckily, their children were well mannered hence the reason they are doing fairly well. Sadly the two great men died a few years ago.

I know we have such great men and women from where we come from. We need to stand up and recognize them. I do kindly ask the Kisii county government and even the national government to recognize and award these two great men post-posthumously.