by NTS Staff
At Nyamboyo Technical School, we often talk about what our students do with their hands. Electrical Wiring. Tailoring. Masonry. Hairdressing. These are the trades that will shape our students’ futures. We are enormously proud of what they learn and accomplish in our classrooms and workshops. But hands, it turns out, are only part of the story.
Our students arrive at NTS carrying something that cannot be measured on a national exam. They carry the weight of lives shaped by poverty — by hunger, by crowded homes, by worries no teenager should have to hold alone. If we only address the technical side of our students’ education and ignore the emotional and psychological side, we are not truly preparing them for the world. We are only doing half the job.
That is why we launched our monthly counseling program.
What Poverty Does to a Young Person
Nyamboyo Village is a community of nearly 58,000 people. It is rich in culture and natural resources. It is also a place where many families live on very little. For our students, this means daily realities that most people in the outside world rarely have to think about.
It means going to bed hungry and coming to school the next day and trying to concentrate. It means living in homes that are deeply overcrowded, where there is no quiet space and no privacy, and where sleep is not always restful when you share a bed with 4 others. It means having no reliable access to clean water or sanitation. It means watching family members go without medical care because there is simply no way to afford it.
It also means something that is harder to name but just as real. It means growing up in households where the adults around you are under tremendous pressure. Poverty is exhausting and demoralizing. When adults are stretched to their limits by stress and hardship, children can become the nearest target for that frustration. Many of our students have experienced anger, harshness, or worse, directed at them at home — not because they are unloved, but because the adults around them are drowning.
These experiences do not simply disappear when a student steps through our gates. They travel with our young people. They shape how students feel about themselves, how they relate to others, how they handle setbacks, and how they imagine their futures. Research on poverty-related trauma tells us that when these experiences go unaddressed, they can hold a person back for years.
Small Groups, Big Conversations
Once a month, we gather our students into small groups to talk.
The groups are intentionally small. We have found that our students open up in ways they never would in a large assembly or a full classroom. When there are only a few people in the room, it feels safer. Students can speak at their own pace, in their own words. They can listen. They can discover that the thing they have been ashamed of or frightened by is something their classmates understand — because they have lived it too.
The Professionals Behind Our Program
One of the most important decisions we made in designing this program was bringing in professional counselors from outside NTS.
Our sessions are led by Alyce Ngige, director of Renewed Hope Counseling Center, who brings a team of six trained local counselors to work with our students each month. Their expertise is invaluable. But beyond their professional qualifications, something else matters enormously — they are not our students’ teachers.
That distinction turns out to be everything.
Our teachers are trusted, respected figures in our students’ lives, which is precisely why students may hesitate to be fully honest with them. Shame and embarrassment are powerful forces, especially for teenagers. A student who loves and respects a teacher may not be able to tell that teacher that she goes to bed hungry most nights, or that the anger in her home frightens her, or that she has questions about her own body that she has never felt safe enough to ask. The relationship that makes a teacher powerful in the classroom can create an invisible barrier in a counseling context.
With Alyce and her team, that barrier lifts. Students know that what they say in the room stays in the room. They are speaking with professionals whose entire purpose is to listen without judgment — not to grade them, not to report back to school leadership, not to see them in the hallway the next morning as their teacher. That distance creates freedom. And in that freedom, our students speak.
What We Talk About
The conversations are not easy. We address things that are rarely spoken about openly in our community. What it feels like to be hungry and embarrassed. What it does to a child to witness adult rage directed at them. The weight of worrying about a sick family member and knowing there is no money for a doctor. The shame that poverty can place on young shoulders.
We also discuss psycho-sexual health which is rarely addressed honestly in schools or homes in our region. Our students are teenagers navigating changes in their bodies and growing awareness of their own sexuality, often without reliable information or anyone safe to ask. Alyce and her team create a space where students can understand their bodies, ask questions without embarrassment, and receive accurate, respectful answers. This knowledge is not separate from their well-being — it is central to it.
What happens when these things are named aloud, in a safe space, among peers and guided by professionals? Something shifts. Students begin to understand that their struggles are not personal failings. They are the predictable consequences of circumstances that no child chose. That understanding is not a small thing. For many of our students, it is the beginning of something new.
What We Are Building
Experience has taught us that vocational training alone cannot accomplish that mission. A young woman who graduates as a certified hairdresser but has never been given the chance to process her own experiences — to grieve what was hard, to understand her own resilience, to build the kind of inner confidence that carries her through the inevitable obstacles of adult life — is less equipped than she could be.
Our counseling program is not a replacement for professional mental health services. In an ideal world, every student would have access to trained therapists and sustained psychological support. We are working toward expanding what we offer, including family support programs and crisis resources.
But what we have created is something real and meaningful. It is a monthly space where young people are seen, heard, and reminded that they matter. Where the experiences they have survived are acknowledged. Where they build bonds with peers who understand. And where the idea takes root, quietly and steadily, that their futures are not determined by the circumstances of their childhoods.
An Invitation
If you are reading this, you are someone who cares about what happens to young people in Nyamboyo. We thank you for that.
Supporting NTS means supporting the whole student — the skilled professional they are becoming, and the full human being they already are. Our counseling program, like all of our support programs, depends on the generosity of people who believe that young people in remote, under-resourced communities deserve the same investment in their wellbeing that young people anywhere deserve.
If you would like to learn more or help us expand this program, we welcome you to get in touch at info@nyamboyotechnical.org.
Together, we are building something that lasts.