Ayuda En Todas Partes: Another Answer to the Desire to Help

Last week, in preparation for Steven Labarakwe's visit to ESHA member schools in the Washington, DC area, we offered information on a nonprofit organization providing school supplies and textbooks in northern Kenya. This week, we offer a second charity to consider for those desiring to provide financial assistance to schools in Steven' Labarakwe's region.

Ayuda En Todas Partes means “help in all directions." A foundation in that name was established in March 2003 to offer concrete help to people in developing countries. The Ayuda En Todas Partes Foundation's primary focus is realizing small-scale construction projects, each using Dutch volunteers over a two- to three-week period, to improve the living conditions of the local community and offer opportunities for building a better future.

In northern Kenya, with Steven Labarakwe as coordinator, Ayuda has focused on the building of primary schools in Samburu villages. In 2007, three classrooms, a teacher's office, a kitchen, toilets, and sports fields were constructed in Ngurunit. Similar projects were constructed in Farakoren in 2008 and Mpagas in 2009. In 2010, Ayuda returned to Ngurunit to add two classrooms and a girls' dormitory. This year, the foundation intends to return to Mpagas to construct additional classrooms. In addition to its building projects, Ayuda has funded mosquito nets for Farakoren families, fees for teacher college for students from the area, an agriculture project at the Ngurunit school, micro-credit for women's groups, and a well in Mpagas.

Ayuda is an officially-registered charity in The Netherlands. For more information about Ayuda, see http://www.ayuda-en-todas-partes.nl/ (in Dutch) or email Rob Ypmea at ayuda-info@ayuda-en-todas-partes.nl.

This information comes from direct email correspondence with Ayuda En Todas Partes at Steven's recommendation. Ayuda is mentioned elsewhere in the ESHA's Kenya Experience blog in "School Visits Prompt School Thoughts," October 10, 2010.

Claudia

Photo: Steven Labarakwe gives ESHA guests a tour of the Mpagas Primary School (Photo credit: Claudia Daggett)

KURA: One Answer to the Desire to Help

As we prepare for Steven Labarakwe's visit to ESHA member schools in the Washington, DC area, it seems important to anticipate the desire to help that is inspired, inevitably, when audiences hear about conditions in northern Kenya. With that in mind, this week we offer information on the Boma Project's new program, KURA -- Kids Uniting for Rural Africa.

KURA's purpose is to effectively improve the quality of education in the Laisamis District by providing textbooks and school supplies to primary and middle schools there. The Boma Project offers some background here:

Laisamis District in northern Kenya is one of the poorest areas in Kenya where 74% to 97% of the people survive on less than $1 per day. According to the Kenya Human Rights Commission: “Schools are insufficient, with enrollment of 25% of children in primary school against a national average of over 99%. Literacy and completion rates are also the lowest in the country."

The vast majority of the schools have no textbooks or supplies. A typical classroom, if there is a building, would have desks and chairs as well as a few pencils and pieces of paper that the children all share.

Photo: One of the better classrooms in Laisamis. Children share desks, textbooks and pencils. (Courtesy of the Boma Project; Kathleen Colson, photographer)
















Photo: A classroom under the tree in Lengima, northern Kenya. This school has no supplies or textbooks. (Courtesy of the Boma Project; David duChemin, photographer)

A typical KURA package, at $500, includes:

• pens
• pencils
• pencil sharpeners
• geometrical sets
• storybooks
• rulers
• graph books
• English dictionary
• Swahili dictionary
• composition books
• sanitary towels
• exercise books – ruled, squared and drawing
• crayons

A package of 35 textbooks for a grade 1 and 2 classroom, at $750, provides learning materials in English, Swahili, math and science.

Gifts to KURA are tax-deductible through Boma, which is a U.S.-based 501(c)3 organization. For more information about the Boma Project, see www.bomaproject.org or contact Kathleen Colson, Executive Director, at (802)236-3018 or kathleen@bomaproject.org.

Other ESHA's Kenya Experience blog posts about the Boma Project include: For the Answers, Look to Those in Need, November 7, 2010, and Prosperity with Dignity, November 14, 2010.

Claudia

We are pleased to announce...

A Meeting with Steven Labarakwe
Educator from Northern Kenya

Thursday, April 7, 2011
6:00-7:00 p.m.
Norwood School
8821 River Road
Bethesda, MD
RSVP by March 31 to info@elementaryschoolheads.org

We hope ESHA members and their school-leadership colleagues will join us to meet Steven Labarakwe, education officer for the Laisamis District in northern Kenya, and participate in discussion about global citizenship and meaningful global partnerships at the elementary school level. This event includes leaders from the six DC-area ESHA-member schools that Steven will be visiting and all other ESHA members interested in participating.

Claudia

Illustration: Nina, Cambridge Montessori School (MA)

Invitation Accepted, Visit Preparations Begin

United States visa awarded, Steven Labarakwe, educator from northern Kenya, begins to prepare to visit and make presentations next month to ESHA-member schools in the greater Washington, DC area.

On our side of the globe, host-school leaders will come together by conference call this week to outline their hopes for these visits. I look forward to the discussion about how to make this experience for our elementary school students one that is meaningful and promotes a sense of curiosity about the world and its cultural diversity.

Claudia

Photo: Steven Labarakwe shares pen pal mural, Mpagas, Kenya (Claudia Daggett)

An Invitation to Steven Labarakwe

At the 2011 Elementary School Heads Association Annual Dinner last week, Laurel had the opportunity to share artifacts from the ESHA trip to Kenya and to tell members about our invitation to our Kenya host, Steven Labarakwe, to visit schools in the Washington, DC, area.

Steven is the education officer for the Laisamis District in Northern Kenya. Introduced to us by Joseph Lekuton, Steven was the guide, driver, and mentor for the ESHA group's two-week Kenya stay. As Laurel discussed in last week's post, "Preparing the Manyatta," Steven has agreed to spend two weeks with us in the U.S. to make presentations to students and faculty about the Samburu culture and life in northern Kenya. We look forward, too, to the possibility of including in his visit an evening discussion for school leaders with Steven, where topics of global partnerships and meaningful service learning could be addressed.

Six schools have stepped up as hosts for Steven's visit, including: Beauvoir, The National Cathedral Elementary School, Washington, DC; The Calvert School, Baltimore, MD; Green Acres School, Rockville, MD; The Harbor School, Bethesda, MD; Norwood School, Bethesda, MD; and The Woods Academy, Bethesda, MD. We're in the process of scheduling a planning meeting by conference call to consider program possibilities in order to shape the visit to suit the needs of each host school.

Our next immediate step in moving this forward is to support Steven's visa application. Toward that end, I will be poised by the phone tonight, on standby should the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi wish to speak with me. He meets with Embassy officials on Monday at 8:00 a.m. Nairobi time -- 12:00 a.m. in my part of the world.





Our hope is for Steven's visit to take place from April 4-15 of this year. In this two-week stretch, there is room in the schedule for visits to two or three additional ESHA-member schools. Interested? Contact me at info@elementaryschoolheads.org.

Claudia

Photos:
Artifacts, ESHA Annual Dinner, 2/23/11 (Tom Shipley)
Steven Labarakwe & two of his children, Ngurunit, Aug. 2010 (Laurel Seid)
Kenya travelers with Steven Labarakwe & Joseph Lekuton, Parliament, Aug. 2010

Preparing the Manyatta

I sometimes marvel that six months have passed since we traveled to Kenya. Part of the marvel has to do with the strange way time has of moving on whether we want it to or not, but the largest part has to do with how present the memories still seem to be. I look forward to Claudia's thoughtful blog each Sunday morning which never fails to remind me of some aspect of our trip. As I put together a large box of materials this morning to display at this week's ESHA Annual Dinner, I realized that, if all goes well, the next big event could be/will be Steven's visit to Washington.

Already, thanks to Claudia's leadership, a small group of people are beginning the process of planning his school visits. I feel confident that we will present, in varying formats, both a beautiful and powerful narrative of the life of the Samburu people. I understand that many good and talented folks would become intimidated by the prospect of planning what will essentially amount to a week long intensive Samburu workshop at different locations. As an educator and school leader, with good support, this planning feels like business as usual. My thoughts, however, keep turning more frequently to my role as Steven's hostess and friend. I have to prepare my manyatta!

Hopefully, in less than two months, Steven will come with his clear professional purpose of raising awareness and seeking on-going support for education in the Laisaimis region of northern Kenya. But, as I well know from our own travels, this may turn out to be the easy part. Steven has been traveling to northern Europe, specifically Sweden and The Netherlands, for several years with this same agenda. He knows how to make formal school presentations. This trip to Washington, however, will be his first trip to the States and, apart from the four of us who traveled to him, a handful of missionaries from his schools, and some interest in President Obama (hugely popular in Kenya for obvious reasons), he has had little exposure to real Americans.

When I think of this, suddenly, I have a brief spasm of mild hostess panic which I can't ignore. We live in an area of fairly great wealth and privilege, particularly by Kenyan standards, and there is just no getting around that. Compounding my concern about the clear difference in resources is my worry that, even if this inequity did not exist, I am not sure I will be as gracious a hostess as Steven was a host. For countless miles and in different types of scenarios, Steven patiently explained Samburu culture, taught us some useful Swahili and Maa phrases, drove for hours, engaged in stimulating conversations about politics and education and saw to it that we ate and slept well. So, now my thoughts turn to how we make our life here seem inviting while not intimidating, pleasing without being overwhelming, and generally positive. I am filled with so much excitement that I am mostly thankful that I have time to wrap my brain around the magnitude of it all.

Laurel


(Photo: Claudia Daggett)

Telling the Story with All of Its Elements: FGM as a Samburu Tradition

Our local village library has a devoted group of volunteers, the Friends of the Cotuit Library, that hosts a monthly speaker and luncheon. This month, I am that speaker, and the topic is ESHA's Kenya experience. I decided in short order that the focus would be limited to the week we spent among the Samburus in Ngurunit. Nevertheless, what a challenge to try to synthesize and select 30-40 minutes of key ideas and photos!

Many of the thoughts that I plan to share have been articulated on this blog over the past several months. A theme that we had not explored in print (electronic or otherwise) is the internal conflict one can feel when -- while wishing to treat all people with respect and dignity, appreciating the richness of cultural differences, and feeling a strong desire to help ease human need -- one is faced with the clear sense that one's own core values conflict with that culture.

Such was the case as Laurel and I were introduced by Steven to what we came to call the "wedding village." Here we met a just "circumcised" fourteen-year-old girl about to become a bride. How can I both wish to preserve cultural diversity and feel abhorrence with coming face to face with the practice of female genital mutilation?

While I don't plan to dwell on this question in my remarks at the village library, I believe I need to include this aspect in the telling of the story. I will tell about the warmth of the Samburu people in Ngurunit, their remarkable perseverance, and their needs. But I'll tell the whole story, in the hope that it gives those present a more complete picture, a fuller understanding.

I had a bit of a warm-up this week when I spoke with a reporter from my local paper, the Barnstable Patriot. Thanks to Kathleen Szmit for capturing the essence of my comments and the nuance of the issues with sensitivity and respect in her article: "African Adventure," Barnstable Patriot, 2/11/11.

Claudia

Understanding the Human Condition: Worldmapper

How do we teach about the human condition?

As an accompaniment to powerful first-hand stories, Worldmapper offers a vivid visual resource. Produced by folks at the University of Michigan and University of Sheffield, Worldmapper is a collection of nearly 700 maps in which territories are re-sized according to the subject of interest in what is know as "equal area cartograms" or "density-equalizing maps."

Take this fairly standard-looking world map, showing land area...

http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=1

...and "re-size" it to display available water resources...

http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=102

...or the distribution of the Human Development Index combining health, wealth and education measures to represent quality of life...

http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=173

...or the world population of illiterate young women, ages 15-24...

http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=197

...or any of 692 other variables. The Worldmapper website includes maps in PDF poster format for sharing in print form.

Thanks to Christian Harth of both St. Andrew's School (MS) and the Global Studies Foundation for sharing this resource in his 2010 NAES Biennial Conference presentation.

Claudia

Map use is permitted by Worldmapper under a Creative Commons license, © Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

A Small Act

Roger Ebert published his annual list of top ten documentaries earlier this month. What a pleasure to see that he has included A Small Act! Released by HBO Documentary Films in January 2010, this film by Jennifer Arnold will be of interest to those considering global partnerships and service learning in Kenya.

This is the story of Chris Mburu, a United Nations human rights advocate, Hilde Back, the Swedish sponsor of his primary and secondary school education, and a scholarship program that Mburu has founded in her name. The film follows several children competing to participate in the scholarship program and, in the process, gives us a small window on living in rural Kenya and on the country's nation-wide achievement test for secondary school eligibility. While the issues to which it alludes are complex and troubling, this is an essentially optimistic film that reminds the viewer about the power of relationships, of the individual to make a difference, and of each "small act."

Screenings are being held currently in the U.S. and Canada.

Claudia

The Global Education Collaborative

Another rich source of information about global education philosophy, initiatives, and partnership projects is The Global Education Collaborative. This Ning, an outgrowth of the Global Education Conference, is administered by Lucy Gray (mentioned last week in our discussion of Connect All Classrooms). With over 4,000 members worldwide, it offers plenty of opportunity for sharing and discussing ideas with colleagues. The Global Education Collaborative calendar of events is a particularly good resource, listing events offered by a variety of organizations including Primary Source, Flat Classroom, and PhotoVoice.

Claudia