The weight of relief
These strange days
Under normal, non-pandemic circumstances, our KKC teachers arrive at school each day to teach back-to-back computer classes, their students clustered in twos and threes around illumined screens. Across the yard, cooks pick through beans and maize to fish out errant twigs. They fan oxygen onto cooking fires, and spend the morning angled over vats of simmering githeri. As the sun crests past noon, a head teacher clangs a makeshift lunch bell, and children swarm the outdoor kitchen armed with bowls and empty margarine tubs.
Under normal circumstances, our schools are bustling, nourishing places. But these days are anything but normal.
Shrinking in the quiet
Right now schoolyards sit vacant, the wind snaking currents through the grass. When we drive through the gates, it surprises me how small our schools seem, their fields and classrooms contracting in the absence of children.
Even in the best of times, the bulk of our students hail from a background of hunger. Enter Covid and its disruption of health and income, and you can nearly see the desperation coiling through communities.
But let me tell you about Lucy and our teachers.
A team effort
Lucy is a wonder. She and Mark ordered literal tons of food: 49,050 kilos of maize and 12,780 kilos of beans to keep our students eating during this time of scarcity.
Then Lucy and Harun, our head accountant, placed dozens of calls to schools, head teachers, local chiefs, and area police to orchestrate food distributions. She traveled from school to school with our KKC teachers, measuring out dried grain and legumes into thousands of family-sized portions.
Our teachers shifted from instructing technology classes to sloping their backs into weeks of manual labor. They didn’t bat an eye.
I watched as they placed heavy bags of food in the arms of parents and grandmothers and kids, and I saw shoulders sag with the weight of relief. Chiefs and local police kept everyone in order — no crowded jostling for food, not even a sniff of an injury. I cannot say enough good about our communities and our people.
All told, thanks to our teachers and Lucy and all of you, children from 33 KKC schools will have meals at home for weeks to come.
Quietly saving the day
We’ll soon hear if Kenya will reopen schools in June. Opening means we will fire up our laptops and kitchens again. If closures continue, we’ll prepare for another mass coordination of kindness and food.
In either case, we know we couldn’t feed our students without you. Even as you stare down your own giants of anxiety or health concerns, loneliness or job loss, still you’ve continued to care for our children with your hallmark generosity.
Thank you. We are praying for you.
Not all acts of heroism involve grand gestures
or superhuman feats of strength.
Some stem from steadfast, compassionate people showing up for another day of service. These lionhearted folks heft bags and measure staples with monotonous precision. They hand parcels of food to the next person in line, thousands of people in a row.
To our KKC heroes both here and abroad: Thank you for preserving the lives of our students.