House Checks

To get into the School of St Jude you have to be smart!!! Then you have to be poor... in that order. So, at the moment we have testing each Friday and thousands (true) of children turn up to sit on the gravel to wait their turn.
The first test is a reading test: for Prep and Standard 1 it's in Kiswahili for Standard 2 it's in English. If they pass that they sit and wait again, then off they go to do a written test with reading and maths, if they get above 16 out of 20 they get to the next stage.
The next stage is to come back the following day, Saturday morning, with their birth certificate and school reports and exercise books. We go through the paperwork and mostly find it's fake, altered or the handwriting in their books is different etc. If they get through that stage with nothing fake that we can find, we go with the child and parent to their house to check how poor they really are. We check off a list about what's in their house, what it's made of (mud, wood, brick), who lives there, how much money they earn etc. many are rejected at this stage too.
If they get through that they sit another test and passing that they are on probation from now until February next year, coming to lessons in the afternoons until then.
I decided that I didn't really want to be a part of it all but then curiousity got the better of me and I joined a house check session last Saturday.