In the span of a year

December 31, 2024 by Nicole Owens

As we ring in the new year at Kenya Kids Can, we’re welcoming several thousand ninth-grade students to our school lunch program.

Many girls and students from poorer communities stop attending school once they’ve completed 8th grade – the end of their primary education. In response to this reality, Kenya is shifting Grade 9 from high school to upper primary school.

We’re thrilled about this change. For our KKC students, this amounts to an additional year of reliable nutrition and education. A...

A walk to school

July 2, 2024 by Nicole Owens

Daybreak
We arrive at Nathan’s house at dawn, just as the sky is growing bright around the edges. When his dad comes out to greet us, we learn that Nathan isn’t home – he’s across the field at the neighbors’ house milking cows and working through the morning chores.

This arrangement helps everyone involved: Nathan earns money for school fees, and the neighbors, well along in years, benefit from his youthful capability.

6:18 am
When Nathan comes jogging toward us, he’s smiling but visibly...

A trip north

October 12, 2023 by Nicole Owens

The cost of drought
Drought has its winners and losers.

The winners are few but easy to spot: hawks and vultures cutting circles in a white-hot sky while scavenging dogs pick through the rocks below.

Then there’s everyone else. A somber, silent mass of livestock, wildlife, and people move through their daily routines, bones growing sharper, tissue collapsing in slow motion.

In the past three years, northern Kenya has weathered five failed seasons of rain. When I think about drought, I assume thirst is...

Rift visit, part 2 (Rachel’s story)

January 17, 2023 by Nicole Owens

Home
Home determines so much of who we are, of the people we become.

Some mornings I watch the dawn’s slow light bleed across the valley, its wash of gold brightening the thorn trees, the houses, the spotted goats below. I wonder who I’d be if I had been born into a home here, waking beneath a low sweep of thatch or corrugated tin. What would I hope for? How would the cadence of my days drum out?

Last year we visited a...

Rift visit, part 1 (Olivia’s story)

September 16, 2022 by Nicole Owens

Arrival

It’s half past nine in the morning and warmth radiates from the valley floor. We climb from our vehicle onto bright, hot dust, stretching limbs gone stiff from eighty minutes of a jostled negotiation with brush and backroads.

We’ve looked forward to this visit for weeks: two former KKC students, Olivia and Rachel (their names changed to preserve privacy), are both home on their break between school terms, and it’s been a while since Lucy has seen them. Lucy is our...

Heat comes from the stomach

June 9, 2022 by Nicole Owens

Last week Mark and Lucy stopped in at Sision Primary, a schoolyard of marbled grass and dust where the escarpment eases into the valley. Sision’s not yet part of our lunch program, but somehow Lucy still manages to get food into the hands and stomachs of these students anyhow.

Listen to Mark share about the visit to Sision in this season shot through with cold.

Heat comes from the stomach:

Thank you for pouring into KKC to keep our children nourished and warm....

These past 11 months

February 18, 2021 by Nicole Owens

Dear friends of Kenya Kids Can,

The fascinating and terrible thing about a pandemic is how it leaves no place untouched. Even the isolated swaths of the valley floor, where many of our KKC students live, have felt the reverberations of illness, school closures, a contracting economy.

Here’s what the past 11 months have looked like for our students:

March

Kenya confirms its second Covid-19 case, prompting the government to close schools.

April

With the help of area chiefs, Lucy and our teachers distribute our remaining stores of maize and...

The weight of relief

May 28, 2020 by Nicole Owens

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...

Posts By: Nicole Owens