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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Some three miles down the escarpment sits the town of Maai Mahiu, a truck-stop community built from tin and painted block. The air in this place is fevered and dry, the earth itself a picture of the quality of life. Barren. Hardscrabble. Desolate and unyielding.
It’s also one of my favorite places on the planet, because it’s home to some of the small folk I love best.
On Sundays Todd and I bring a team of high school students to do street...
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Sukuma wiki is a scrappy little plant in the collard green family, and it usually looks just like this—wiry and half-combed; a mass of leaves perched on a knobby stalk. Its name means “push the week” in Swahili, as it’s a popular culinary choice when one is short on food and long on week.
Several of our KKC schools have seeded gardens with sukuma wiki, cabbage, or potatoes, and as the plants mature, the schools augment lunches with chunks of vegetables....
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It happens at nearly every school. We step from the car with skin veneered in dust, and half the students constellate around us. The brave among them press in as close as breath to hold my hand and twist my hair through their fingers, hair that hangs in a bewildering sweep instead of wisping into proper clouds on one’s head. The shyer kiddos risk furtive glances before skittering off to giggle in the shade.
And nearly every time, at nearly every...
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It was a Wednesday, and the sun was cutting its trail across a limpid Kenyan sky. We met up with our KKC teachers on a snatch of dirt just off the highway, where everyone packed into a couple of cars and collectively inhaled as we coaxed the doors shut. If you imagine tins of sardines with wheels tacked on, you’ll have a pretty accurate picture of transport in Africa.
This was our first-ever KKC service day, where the teaching staff...
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It was a side trip tacked to the tail of a long, blistering day. We’d been out visiting KKC schools, and I’m sure we looked a fright, sporting grime and sunburn, our hair blown tumbleweed-stiff.
But still the good folks at Oiti Primary welcomed us like dear friends. They’d been writing for months with a candid plea: Please include us in your feeding program. When we finally made it out to their school, they pumped our hands with gusto, radiating nervous...
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