An early start
We rose before the hot African sun, gathered our gear and lunches and climbed into the old rugged 4X4. Our destination was a school in Maasai land far off the GPS grid. But we had Mark Daubenmier’s memory to guide us.
Our journey began on a paved road in the center of this farming and commercial area of Kenya’s vast Rift Valley. More than an hour later we left pavement for bumpity-bump, dirt roads into the area where...
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The 20-foot metal shipping containers that sit in the yard of 17 primary schools in the Rift Valley don’t carry cargo. They carry dreams.
Because these containers have been transformed into solar-powered computer classrooms, Kenyan kids can pursue a future their parents and perhaps even older siblings couldn’t imagine.
Students in schools where we provide computer education and teachers are discovering futures. They want to be pilots, doctors and teachers. They want to strengthen Kenya.
Catherine is one of those students. She is...
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Steve Peifer, founder of Kenya Kids Can, recently visited Kenya for the first time since 2013. He shares this account of his time here.
It had been six years since we had left Kenya, and the twins were about to graduate from high school. Their high school was taking a senior trip to Iceland, and it prompted a conversation with my youngest son:
Ben: Our senior trip is to Iceland.
Me: Nice!
Ben: Dad, black people don’t go to Iceland.
Me: I didn’t know that! Where do...
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Four years ago, Kara, a friend of our ministry, got to experience the joy of kids helping kids across the world. Kara is the children’s director at a church in Ohio, and she loves seeing children engage in compassionate service to others.
Kara’s project was simple: the children collected spare change to purchase lunches for kids in Kenya. It was such a valuable experience for all of us that we wanted to share it with you, along with resources to recreate...
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Listen to Mark’s AudioChronicle
Lunch becomes dinner.
One of the first times I was in a school with our feeding program, I noticed that a couple children weren’t eating their meal. I asked the teacher standing next to me, “Do they not like the githeri?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “They do like it. But a student will not eat their lunch if their younger brother or sister is at home and has no food to eat. Those children will save their meal and...
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January isn’t when most of us think about starting a new school year. But for kids in Kenya, it marks the start of the first trimester of the 2019 academic year.
It also marks the return of the Kenya Kids Can food truck—a food truck unlike the ones we frequent over the lunch hour here at home.
Our food truck has one item on the menu.
Githeri. It’s a blend of maize and beans simmered for four hours and served hot.
The githeri...
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Once upon maybe five years ago, we bumped into Steve Peifer’s blog and fell headlong in love with school children in Kenya.
When I first found Steve’s site, where he shared accounts both funny and piercing about his work with Kenya Kids Can, I binge-read the posts in reverse to the very beginning. It was not unlike my Downton Abbey marathons—just one more, I’d say, and suddenly it’s 2am. (If you haven’t traveled back this far in our archives, please make...
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We drove to the stone gate of an orphanage at the very top of the hill, where the earth crests to graze the blue of a wind-raked sky. It was Good Friday, which should have been a school holiday for our KKC teachers.
I used to teach first grade in the good city of Goshen, Indiana, and I thought about how that conversation might’ve gone down in the teachers’ lounge:
“Hey, so tomorrow is a holiday. What do you say we all...
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