Susan Murabana, Co-Founder of The Travelling Telescope, takes a picture with students from Let Maasai Girls Learn before entering the planetarium.

Author: Naliaka Odera

On a warm cloudless day in mid-December, the Mawazo Institute hosted a follow-up to its Girls in STEM Career Day that invited 30 Maasai female students to spend a day learning about science and science careers. Held as an extension of the 2019 Next Einstein Forum’s (NEF) Africa Science Week-Kenya, Mawazo partnered with the Travelling Telescope and Let Maasai Girls Learn initiative, founded by 2018 Faces of Kenyan Science awardee, Dr. Damaris Parsitau, to organise the day’s events.

The Travelling Telescope is a social outreach programme dedicated to promoting science and technology with astronomy, but on this day, they would be giving us a sneak peek into Kenya’s first planetarium. The planetarium is a passion project that Susan Murabana (also a 2018 Faces of Kenyan Science awardee) and Chu Owen, the organisation’s co-founders have been working on for years, driven by their enthusiasm for improving access to the science of astronomy in the region. This would be their first public show, and it’s safe to say that they were as equally excited as we were. Our students, aged 14 to 21, would not only get to experience a planetarium for the first time, but would also be engaged in robotics and some sky-watching, using powerful telescopes.

The morning began with a crash course in robotics, a programme developed by Airbus Little Engineers Space Workshop. The excited students, under the tutelage of the Travelling Telescope’s small but enthusiastic team members, Sally, Bernard and Ronald, learnt how to put together a basic robot with a motor and issue it with computerised instructions. Their dedicated teachers from the Let Maasai Girls Learn Initiative, Mrs. Mary Lemanken and Mrs. Veronica Mitua, explained the importance of the exercise to the students. Getting first-hand experience in the sciences opens up the possibility for a scientific career in a young student’s mind, they told the girls.

“Maybe this one will be an engineer,” the teachers exclaimed excitedly to each other as they watched one of their students construct her robot with speed and efficiency.

The excitable chatter continued amongst the students as Chu gave each of them a chance to experience the power and clarity of a telescope as they took looking at the sun, close up. Afterwards, the girls were invited to explore objects closer to home, like the building under construction nearby, emphasising the magnifying powers of a telescope. While still a bit shy, many of the girls stood in small groups talking excitedly about what they had seen.

After a lunch break in the Travelling Telescope’s lovely garden space, the afternoon session got underway as Chu and Susan ushered our group into the domed darkness of Kenya’s first planetarium. While the structure is still temporary, the dream they have for it is not, and as the students settled in, a quiet, awed hush fell over them. Our group would spend the next hour huddled together as they watched the planetarium’s dome come to life, revealing to them the wonders of our galaxy and beyond.

Earlier in the day, when Mawazo Institute’s CEO, Dr. Rose M. Mutiso, had addressed the students, she explained that the importance of the day was not so much that they should all pursue careers in the sciences, but rather that science could ignite a sense of curiosity for the world around them, and their place in it. A point that resonated with the students as they filed out of the planetarium, reflecting on everything they had just experienced. For many of them, this will likely be a once in a lifetime experience. A fact that underscores the importance of the work of the Travelling Telescope, Let Maasai Girls Learn initiative, and Mawazo itself in promoting the empowerment of young girls and women within the sciences. If nothing else, the day ignited our student’s sense of curiosity, the spark that is so crucial to invention and innovation. As we left the Travelling Telescope’s lush grounds, there was buoyancy in the air as we each contemplated what the future holds for science in Kenya, with investments like this.

To learn more about the Travelling Telescope and its planetarium, or to partner with them, you can contact them at: info@travellingtelescope.co.uk or by visiting their website or Facebook page.

To learn more about Let Maasai Girls Learn, you can visit their website here.