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Amazing things can be done with little money and a great deal of faith and determination

It is amazing what some people can do with very little.
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Tracy Wright (left) and Celestine Oduge teamed up to sell chocolates as a church fundraiser during the St. Peter’s Anglican Church tea and bazaar in November.

It is amazing what some people can do with very little.

During the past seven years, Celestine Oduge, against seemingly insurmountable odds, has managed to send $4,000 a year home to Kenya to make sure four of her siblings complete their education and also found a way to continue her own education here in Canada.

As a University of Lethbridge student she is here in Williams Lake for eight months as part of a co-operative work experience with Taseko Mines Ltd.

Oduge was born and raised in a village in the Kisumu area near Lake Victoria.

She attended a village school for grades 1 to 4 where her classrooms were sometimes huge rocks under a tree. Grades 5 through 8 were spent at a girls’ boarding school in Maseno. For her form 1 to graduation years, our grades 9 to 12, Oduge attended the Lwak Girl’s School in Asembo, a place nicknamed Oasis of the Dessert because it was the nearest place for villagers to get clean water.

“It was a very dry place but had a very good school which was attended by the children of many ministers and members of parliament,” Oduge says.

Both of Oduge’s parents were teachers so ensuring their children had good education was important to them. But with seven children to raise, the low wages paid to teachers in Kenya, and mandatory retirement at 55 for civil servants, Oduge says her parents were not able to help all of their children finish school.

Oduge is the third eldest of seven children in her family. She graduated high school in 1997 with a B-plus average and it was expected that she would attend university.

But after high school she would have to raise the money for university on her own. “Life became very hard. I had no income, no job and no money for college,” Oduge says. Then one of her former teachers invited her to become an untrained teacher working as a tutor in her home region.

For a year she worked as a tutor, then in 1999 went to live with an uncle in Nairobi to try and find a better paying job.

“It was really hard. I had never been to a big city before. Everyone was so sophisticated and I didn’t have money to dress the way they did,” Oduge says. “But eventually I got a job as a sales agent in an insurance company.

The pay was by commission so it was difficult at first.”

After six months Oduge took and passed the two proficiency exams to become a sales and marketing executive with the company. She stayed with the company another four years working with a staff of seven other representatives who reported to her.

In July 2003, Oduge took a leave of absence from her job to participate in a cultural exchange to Germany. “I wanted the adventure and to know about everything that is going on elsewhere in the world and what makes their life more interesting compared to ours,” Oduge says. She had been saving for two years for the return plane ticket and the agency fee to place her with host families in Germany. During that time she also took courses through Germany’s Goethe Institute in Kenya and learned to speak German.

“To obtain a long-term visa to Germany, I had to participate in an interview process where the whole interview at the embassy was in German,” says Oduge.

While in Germany she shared her knowledge about Kenya and her culture and helped to tutor the children in her host families. “They learned from me and I learned from them too,” Oduge says.  She says people in Germany had trouble understanding her accent so she continued to take German language courses there. She spent a year and a month in Germany during which time she was also able to spend six weeks travelling in Poland with some girls she had met who were Russians and Polish.

While in Germany she made up her mind to go to university. She applied to the University of Western Ontario as an international student and made the change using savings from tutoring and her job in Kenya. Four months after starting university in Canada her parents were forced to retire.

“As a civil servant in Kenya you have to retire at 55 whether you like it or not,” Oduge says.

Without their parents’ help her brother, a year younger, had to quit college and three of her other siblings also had to quit school early because there wasn’t money for them to continue. So Oduge changed her status in Canada from foreign student to foreign worker.

She found a job on an Ontario dairy farm and started sending money home to make sure her siblings finished their educations. She worked at the dairy farm for a year and eight months then found a job as a nanny for a family in Calgary.

“They are a very, very nice family,” Oduge says.

“They are some of my very close friends to this day. If something serious would happen to me in Canada today they would be among the first people to know.”

The dairy farm and nanny jobs both included room and board plus a small monthly wage — $811 at the dairy farm and $1,250 as nanny.

From those incomes Oduge managed to save a bit of money each month and still send about $4,000 a year home to help her four siblings finish their education.

She is proud to say her youngest brother has now finished college and is a teacher.

In the eight years she has been in Canada Oduge has only been home for a visit once, because the trip costs about $5,000 Canadian dollars. But she says she keeps in touch with family by cellphone. There isn’t any electricity in the village where her parents live so contact is all by cellphone.

In 2007, using her savings, and relying on part-time jobs Oduge returned to school herself.

She took a two-year diploma in commerce at Red Deer College then enrolled at the University of Lethbridge where she has eight courses to go before completing her degree in Human Resource Management and Labour Relations with a minor in Information Systems.

In Red Deer she held down three part-time jobs: as cashier in the campus restaurant, residential assistant at the college’s residence office and as a ladies wear sales associate at the Bay.

In Lethbridge she worked at Pier 1 Imports and as a weekend caregiver lo-cum at group homes for persons with disabilities.

Last September Oduge came to Williams Lake as part of an eight-month co-operative work term experience with Taseko Mines, where she has the opportunity to put into practice the skills she is learning in the classroom.

“Taseko is a very good company to work for. They take very good care of their employees,” Oduge says. “The most important thing for me is happiness. An employer who really cares about me will get 200 per cent of me.”

She also found lots of friends at the St. Peter’s Anglican Church here in Williams Lake which she chose because it is close to her apartment.

“This church was very welcoming. Once I walked in, I didn’t need to look any further.

“I felt as one of them and stayed,” Oduge says.

She enjoys cooking, reading, visiting with friends, listening to all sorts of music and figure skating.

“I love watching figure skating, I just can’t skate!” Oduge says.

Oduge has been a permanent resident of Canada for three years now and is looking forward to becoming a citizen sometime this year.

 

“I miss home but I have more opportunity to help my family here,” Oduge says.