Strike pause, brooms out: Laikipia students clean up local market

With lectures suspended, a group of students turned an idle period into a community service initiative, clearing waste and unblocking drainage at the town market

By Victorine Nekesa

When a strike brought normal academic life at Laikipia University to a halt, most students headed home. A handful stayed behind — and picked up brooms instead.

The students, who remained near the university for various personal reasons, chose to spend part of the unexpected break serving the surrounding community. Their initiative involved collecting litter, clearing waste from the local market and unblocking drainage channels clogged with rubbish — unglamorous work, but work that made an immediate and visible difference to traders, customers and residents who rely on the market daily.

Omar Joram, one of the students who took part, said the decision was straightforward. “Since our studies have been interrupted, we can still use our time to do something useful. A clean market benefits everyone, and we hope our efforts will encourage others to take care of the environment,” he said.

Local residents welcomed the gesture. One trader described the students’ presence as a reminder that maintaining clean public spaces is a shared responsibility, not someone else’s problem. “We appreciate seeing young people helping to clean the market and clear the drainage channels. It makes the area better for traders and customers,” she said.

Laikipia students clean up local market group photo

Markets are central to the daily life of communities — places where people earn a living, buy goods and interact. But poor waste disposal and blocked drainage create conditions that deteriorate quickly, particularly during rains when stagnant water accumulates and health risks rise. The students’ intervention addressed those conditions directly, if temporarily, while drawing attention to the need for more consistent collective action from traders, residents and local authorities alike.

For the students involved, the exercise carried a lesson beyond sanitation. Community service of this kind teaches responsibility, teamwork and practical engagement with problems that exist well outside lecture halls. The gap between academic knowledge and its application to everyday life is one that universities often struggle to bridge; these students narrowed it with a few hours of physical work and a willingness to show up.

The initiative also reflects something broader about the relationship between Laikipia University and its surrounding community. Universities do not exist in isolation. Their students live alongside, and depend upon, the communities around them — and those communities, in turn, are shaped by the presence and conduct of the institution. When students use their time and energy to improve public spaces, they reinforce that relationship in a tangible way.

The strike has disrupted timetables and created uncertainty. But for this small group of students, it also created a window — one they chose to fill with purpose rather than passivity. Their example is a modest but genuine one: that being a university student is not only about accumulating qualifications but about developing the habits and values that make a person useful to the world beyond campus.

The post Strike pause, brooms out: Laikipia students clean up local market appeared first on The Mt Kenya Times.