The Nobelity Project's Kenya Schools Fund

Almost ten years since Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai first invited me to East Africa to plant trees with The Green Belt Movement, I am heading back to Kenya for what may be my 20th working trip. With our work in Kenyan schools accelerating the past few years, I'm looking back at what we've helped to make happen and also how our work has been a catalyst for so much great change.

At our home base of Mahiga, Mahiga Primary and Secondary now have almost 600 students enrolled in 14 grades, including two years of pre-school. The first class of high school seniors graduated in December and the school now has more and better teachers and grades theat improve each year. The high school alone has 8 classrooms, science labs, a library, computer lab, athletic facilities for boys and girls, multiple purified water systems, a kitchen that serves 150,000 meals a year and huge gardens that are planted and maintained by students as part of their course work. Acting on their own, the school is now building a big greenhouse that will provide even more food for the school. 

Mahiga is an inspiration for all who support increased access to education, and also for many other schoos in Kenya. Ten miles away, our partnership with the new and growing Simbara High School is also bearing fruit. Purified water, a library, music and computer lab, and a new science lab have now been joined by three new classrooms and a basketball court that will create the first league play for girls in the district. 

We've also helped build water systems and/or new libraries at many other schools in the area - Kiguru, Bondeni, Honi, Muthuini, Mogaka.. it's a long list. And our direct work at several very remote schools has played a key role in all kinds of additional work. At Irbaan Primary, two new purified rainwater systems will be completed in the coming days, providing water and lights for the girls dormitory, and for the kitchen, offices and library. Since my first visit to Irbaan, the little school on the edge of the Masai Mara Reserve has grown into a substantial multi-building campus. 

A ten hour drive to the north, Daaba Primary has grown from outdoor classrooms and a deep and dangerous open well into a beautiful campus of stone classrooms, kitchen and library and a purified, solar-powered well - all of it enabling girls in this dry and remote Turkana village to attend school for the first time.

There are too many stories to tell them all, too many pictures to show them all... but the big picture is that well-targeted investiments in education infrastructure working with great local partners is highly effective in bridging the gaps in global education. Your support has helped us to do great and effective work. And our support in these communities has helped them to find additional ways to overcome obstacles that once seemed high, and now seem like small steps towards a brighter future for their children, and for ours.

Let's keep it up!

Links:

• The Nobelity Project
• Elephants! Live webcam from our school partner, The Ark
• Turk's Commencement Address at UT Austin

The success of our original 1000 Books for Hope campaign at Mahiga Hope High School inspired us this past year to expand the program to a dozen more of our partner schools in Kenya. As with the first book drive, we invited our supporters to do something special. Instead of donating old books they didn't want or like, we asked for their favorite books, in new or gently used condition, and whenever possible, with a personal note inside about the book and the donor.

By the the fall of 2012 we'd collected 14,000 great books from individuals, families, partner schools (let's hear it for the third grade class at the Trinity School in Austin!) and from libraries as well. A giant volunteer day at the warehouse of Word of Mouth catering in Austin sorted the books according to ages and subjects for 12 partner libraries in Kenya. It was a lot of work and a ton of fun, but by the end of the day, we had the books packed, labelled and loaded onto ten shipping pallets, enough to fill a shipping container.

The following day, our U.S. shipping parnter Ceva logistics had the books ready for a U.S. customs pre-shipping inspection, and within weeks the container of books was on a ship headed through the Gulf of Mexico, across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean Sea and the Suez Canal, and past all those Somali pirates who apparently don't know what makes for a truly precious cargo. 

Last week, our great Kenyan shipping partner Freight Logix cleared the entire load through Kenyan customs without delay and brought them to Nairobi where the pallets were separated for delivery to the indiidual schools. We'll have photos of these libraries after our June working trip to Kenya, but in the meantime, the books (and some first class metal library shelves) will find great use by students of all ages at Irbaan Primary, Arambe Secondary and Jobe Polytechnic College, Kabiruini Girls Secondary, Daaba Primary, Mahiga Primary and Mahiga Hope High School, Mogaka Primary, Mutaki Primary, Kiguru Primary, Amboni Primary and Simbara Secondary (the Joe Gracey Library), Bondeni Primary and Muthuini Primary. 

The largest single group - 2 full pallets of 50 boxes of books weighing 2,500 pounds - are now in storage in Maai Mahiu with our friends CTC/Comfort the Children, and will be the first books at the new CTC Knowledge and Resource Center, a very large library and computer center that will be the first library serving the community and many schools.

Thanks to everyone who donated books (including Half Price Books who donated and boxed a 1,000 great kids books for us), to everyone who contributed funds for shipping and shelving, and to all our partners along the way. We have more schools and more kids clamoring for good books, and especially for quality Kenya-certified textbooks at every grade level from 1 to 12. Your support makes all the difference.

Where there are books, there is hope.