Sheila Wasonga did not expect a milling line to decide her future. But somewhere between the crushers and the spinning centrifugals at Sukari Industries — watching juice pressed from cane and sugar flung from syrup — the Waondo Mixed student found the thing she wants to do: Mechanical Engineering.
Over two days in late July, more than ninety students from two schools in Sukari’s catchment traced the same journey Sheila did, cane to crystal, step by step. On Friday 24 July, 50 students and 6 teachers from Waondo Mixed Secondary walked the factory floor. The next day, Saturday 25 July, 46 students and 4 teachers from St. Benedict Otaro Secondary followed the same path.
Received at the front office and guided by instructors from the Safety Department, the students followed sugar’s full production line: weighing and preparation, milling and juice extraction, clarification, evaporation and boiling, crystallisation and centrifugation, drying, grading and packaging. At each station, instructors unpacked the science, the machinery and the quality checks — turning the STEM they meet in a classroom into something loud, hot and real.
For several of them, the visit did more than illustrate a syllabus; it set a direction. Alongside Sheila, her Waondo classmate Collins Otieno Ologi left set on Industrial Science, taken by the technical depth of what he had seen. At St. Benedict Otaro, Form Four student Fredrick Ochieng was drawn to the cane reception and preparation stages and now plans to study Agriculture, while his classmate Sharon Auma — fascinated by how the plant handles its by-products, from bagasse to molasses — intends to pursue Environmental Science.
Their teachers noticed what the instructors did: genuine curiosity, question after question, and a technical team patient enough to answer them. One accompanying teacher singled out the instructors for the depth of their knowledge in handling the students.
For Sukari, days like these are the point of an outreach programme built around the schools nearby — not a favour, but a bridge that lets young people from the community stand inside a working industry and see a place for themselves in it. For the students, the takeaway was simpler and more personal: four names, four futures — Industrial Science, Mechanical Engineering, Agriculture, Environmental Science — carried out of the factory gate by young people who arrived as visitors and left with a direction.
Congratulations to Waondo Mixed and St. Benedict Otaro on a memorable week — and to every student now looking a little further ahead than they were before.