A headteacher’s fight for her students

May 20, 2024 by Kenya Kids Can

A few years ago, the Kenyan government sent five headteachers to schools in rural Kajiado county. Most of the county is an open expanse of scrub and water-stressed earth. It’s a challenging place to staff due to the difficult living conditions.

Of the five headteachers, only one stayed: Headteacher Mary Silole.

Listen to Headteacher Silole share about Soitamurt Primary School and her drive to secure food for her students.

Since the KKC school lunch program...

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...

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...

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...

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....

Another face of hunger

June 2, 2022 by Mark Daubenmier

A few weeks ago we visited a student and her family, and after several restless nights of sleep, I felt compelled to tell you about it. In the following video I share a bit about that experience and some of the challenges we are currently facing here in Kenya.

Please join with us in our 2022 food drive, and tell a neighbor as well. Together we can do this!

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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...

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...

Stories from the Field

Stories
from the Field