It was at night at around 11 pm and we were already asleep. Suddenly, I heard my phone ringing hence waking me up from my sleep. I wondered who could have thought of calling me at this time as I reached out for my phone at where I had placed it. I unlocked my screen and I saw that it was an SMS. I opened it to check the contents and to my surprise, the SMS was saying that we had received KES 55000 from GiveDirectly. I was so happy on seeing the message that I wanted to wake up my wife to tell her the good news, but on seeing how fast asleep she was, I decided to change my mind. I went back to my sleep happy. In the morning, I broke the wonderful news to them and they were so happy to hear about it. We thanked God and GiveDirectly for their support..

The transfer has brought a very big difference in our lives as a family. We have had some peace of mind having paid school fees for our three children who are in secondary school. We still have a little bit of balance to clear but at least they have not been sent home due to arrears. I no longer struggle a lot like before since the money that I am nowadays making from the casual jobs, is only going to the purchase of food for the family.

We spent the transfer money on two main things, that is, paying school fees and buying a calf. We spent KES 25000 on paying school fees for our three children who are in secondary school, and another KES 25000 on buying a calf. We had not managed to get money to pay the school fees for the children and hence they were about to be sent home due to the arrears. Paying school fees has not been easy for us since we do not have a stable source of income. We depend on casual jobs to earn a living where we get paid around KES 500 per day. We usually divide this amount so that it can cater for school fee payment and purchase of food for our family of seven. We also wanted a calf because we no longer had one and also because the calf was going to be of great help to us in future when it calves. This is because, we will be able to get milk for our consumption and for sale. We will also be able to get the calf's offsprings which we can sell and use the money in paying school fees for our children. School fees payment has always been our biggest challenge and as a result we had to sell all the cows that we had before so that we could raise the money needed. We have hence been purchasing milk where we usually buy a litre daily at KES 50. Apart from doing the above, we were also able to buy clothes with the remaining amount of money. Thank you so much GiveDirectly for the help.