REAL WORLD: Beni Oburu arrived in Fermoy, Co Cork, from Kenya seven years ago. Now she's part of a community that has embraced her talents, she tells Fiona Murdoch.
When she turned 11, Beni Oburu's parents could no longer afford to send her to school. But thanks to "pennies for the black baby" donated by people thousands of miles away, Kenyan-born Oburu was allowed to stay on in her local school run by Irish nuns.
Still feeling indebted to the Irish people when she set foot on the Emerald Isle several decades later, the first person she looked up was her favourite nun from schooldays. And, just as Oburu could name the 32 counties and sing gustily It's a Long Way to Tipperary as a child, now hundreds of Irish children can speak Swahili and perform Kenyan dances and songs.
It all started when she arrived in Fermoy, Co Cork, seven years ago and enrolled her four children in Adair National School. Since they were the first foreign nationals to move into the area, the teachers invited Oburu into the school to share something of her culture with the pupils.
The visit proved a resounding success - the children loved listening to the stories and learning the songs, dances and crafts that Oburu herself had learned as a child - and soon she was making weekly visits to the school.
Did this embarrass her own children? "It didn't bother them at all," says Oburu. "I have always been close to each and every one of them and I have always done lots of activities with them at home."
Word quickly spread about this vibrant Kenyan woman, who brought great energy and enthusiasm into the classroom, and invitations came pouring in from schools, near and far. The result has been full-time employment with the newly formed Cultural Links organisation, funded by the National Committee for the Development of Education.
As a single parent, Oburu tends only to accept invitations from schools within commuting distance. Occasionally, she will venture further afield "as a favour", but she does not like to leave her children to fend for themselves, even though Randy (19) and Roger (18) are quite capable of looking after their younger siblings.
"If they have no school, Robbie (14) and Ruth (12) love to visit other schools with me," says Oburu. "They are very good at weaving and hammering."
The Oburus have settled into Fermoy "brilliantly". They all love the "craic" and, according to Mum, the children have become "real culchies" who would be "lost anywhere else".
Speaking of herself, she says: "In certain ways I am Irish now, but in a lot of ways I am still Kenyan."
Although they have heard many comments made out of curiosity and/or ignorance, they have experienced only one incident of blatant racism.
An important aspect of Oburu's work is to challenge people's stereotypes. The first thing she does when she visits a new school is to hold up a picture of a beautiful, modern city and ask pupils to guess where it is. Invariably, 99 per cent of them guess New York.
"They are always gobsmacked when I tell them that it is Nairobi, the capital of Kenya," says Oburu. "I say to them that sometimes we need to change our thinking about things and we talk about the different kinds of people we see in Ireland.
"I then show them pictures of shanty towns and we talk about poor children and about food, education and clean water. We talk about how if a child's parents can't afford to buy him toys, then he has to make his own."
Oburu then shows the children how to make toys out of materials that would otherwise end up in the bin: they learn how to turn plastic bags into soccer balls and they weave sisal grass, which grows naturally in Kenya, into skipping ropes.
Some classes learn how to weave grass skirts, others to make percussion instruments out of baked-bean tins filled with stones. After several days of frantic activity in a school, parents are invited to a concert to see all that the children have learned. It is always a completely cross-cultural and cross-curricular experience.
Cultural Links can be contacted on: (025) 37940.
