As we celebrate ten years of Corner of Hope, I have all the reasons to celebrate. I got to know about the Montessori approach through Judy Mugambi, who was among the first teachers of Corner of Hope. She used to discuss the materials with me whenever I would visit her home. It is there, in her house, that I fell in love with the educational method. I was among the second group of trainees from the New Canaan community, that was trained from 2011 to 2013. I later trained as an elementary teacher from 2014 to 2017.

After we had completed our training, we started the 6-12 classroom with nine children. In the second year we enrolled fourteen children. In 2020, we enrolled twenty-one children. This increase has been possible by having meetings with parents, by inviting them to come and see what their children are doing and by comparing the government system to ours. It has not always been all that easy to convince the parents, as this type of education was different from what they were used to. But the newly introduced competency-based curriculum of the Kenyan government has a great deal in common with the Montessori method. They have implemented the use of learning materials, every teacher has to make moveable alphabets, something we were already doing in Montessori. Through the great support of everybody involved and the hard work of the teachers, Corner of Hope has made the Montessori method well known in Kenya within the past 10 years.