Visitors from USA

Next week, Upendo Junior School will with pleasure be hosting two friends, Maria Brown and Michele L. Turner. The visit comes at a time when the school is putting in place plans to put up new classrooms that will include a computer suite and a library and a modern kitchen/dining that is environmental friendly and one that would allow the children to eat while sitted.

Maria Brown Maria lives in Illinois. She believes in being natural as this she says "is the best state for all things." Working with children, Maria is nice, kind, family-oriented and a lover of children, people and life. Her favourite quote is "only give what you want to get". Of children, she advises that we should not worry so much about what a child will become tomorrow yet forget that the same child is someone today! Her advice is that we should do what is right NOW before it is too late. Maria is very charitable and has committed herself to supporting UJS morally, materially and financially. It was she who invited her friend Michele to accompany her on this visit. She has indicated that she will be able to bring along some basic school supplies and looks forward to meeting both the teachers and children.She would love to see any sights i.e. parks, beautiful outdoors scenery, water and the zoo if time permits! Michele L Turner In the 1990s Michele Turner caught the IT bug. Her job at the time was in business recovery. "I knew there was another, more technical side, and I wanted to know more about that," she says. She went into consulting, did some network engineering, built backup servers. "It was all a way for me to help people out," she says. "If an organization had been through a disaster and really wanted to make sure it could do things more proactively in the future, it was great for me to show them the big picture." Turner started college focused on music, but changed her career path and graduated from Roosevelt University (Chicago, IL) with a 1998 BA in professional admin. After moving to the West Coast and working for Washington Mutual, she saw a job opportunity with Microsoft (Redmond, WA) that excited her. "It was in business continuity. I put my resume in and got a call." That was five years ago. Today Turner is director of policy governance and risk management in the office of the CIO at Microsoft. "I make sure the IT organization understands the likelihood that a certain risk could occur, the impact it would have and the level of control that management has," she explains. "If we understand that, we're able to develop action plans and be more proactive around risk." She works across Microsoft IT to ensure consistency in the way risks are identified and action planning is conducted. "My job is a little different from what you normally think of as IT," she explains. "When people think of IT, they almost always go to the technical focus where we're ripping up servers or following packets through the system. Given her IT expertise,she hopes to support Upendo's IT development by networking with Microsoft Kenya. She hopes to come with Microsoft's surface tablet (http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-surface-pro-price-leaked-2012-11). She hopes to visit Mama Sarah Obama in Kogelo before her flight back to Washington. We are all looking forward to hosting our two visitors here next week. We hope to share with them our School's vision and mission and learn from their experiences in the USA