The smallest church in the world...

We have driven past this little church dozens of times this year and finally stopped in on Saturday. It's a tiny chapel in the Rift Valley and it was built in 1942 by Italian POWs. According to Mrs. Miller, the woman who has been restoring the church over the last several years, this is the smallest church in the world (although we're not sure of the validity of that statement!). It is a very tiny church and the original paintings are still preserved. The story goes that the POWs built the church on their lunch breaks over a period of five years.

Last visit of the year to the Vumilia IDP Library...

On Saturday, June 4th, we made our last trip of the year down to the Vumilia IDP camp in the Rift Valley. ISK art students had painted an old desk for the library (to serve as the librarian's desk) and their vibrant designs gave the desk a new sense of life and purpose. We delivered the desk on Saturday along with a box of books from Canada that arrived last week. A wonderful selection of Robert Munsch stories, Clifford and Franklin stories, and young adult fiction titles have now joined the offerings on the library shelves. During our visit we were able to chat with the country director for Habitat for Humanity; he was on site to direct a team of 200 doctors and church members building houses for the day. We are already looking forward to finishing up projects at the library in 2011/12, and we are also excited about the budding women's cooperative and our involvement with their economic empowerment projects. What a blessing to be involved with this community!

Shangalia... celebrating the performing arts in a Nairobi slum

On Saturday, May 21st, Brian and I (along with a teaching friend and colleague, Misha) visited Shangalia, a children's centre in one of Nairobi's slums. This is a very special place that, for 16 years, has been using the performing arts to help street kids deal with their experiences. Next year Misha and I are planning to have our Global Issues Network students visit Shangalia on Wednesday afternoons to help with the school program at Shangalia and to partner in many other ways; while we were visiting to chat further about what the partnership could look like, we were treated to some performances by the children. Acrobatics, brass band, dance... many performing arts are celebrated at the centre which, in English, is called Rejoice.

Shakespeare on the outdoor stage...

At ISK we have a beautiful arts centre that includes a circular outdoor ampitheatre, the perfect place for our grade 9 students to perform Romeo and Juliet last week. Cora played the nurse at the Capulet ball, and the entire grade 9 class presented key scenes from the play with a great sense of dramatic flair.

Starehe Girls' School... a new partner

On Saturday, May 7th, Brian and I spent the morning at the Starehe Girls' School on the outskirts of Nairobi. Surrounded by coffee fields and forest, the school sits on 55 acres of donated land and, since 2005, has been educating high school girls. All of the girls (almost 400 are enrolled at the school this year) are on scholarships and come from poor families. The girls' school was started as a partner school to the Starehe Boys' School (which we've also partnered with), which, for 50 years, has been offering excellent education to underprivileged boys. There were so many impressive things we saw at the Starehe Girls' School: polite, hard-working students; immaculate classrooms and dorms; beautiful grounds; innovative and hands-on learning projects such as a small farm with gardens and cows (the manure produced by the 14 cows at the farm is mixed with water and fermented to produce biogas that fuels one of the stoves in the school's kitchen and the cows are milked every day to provide fresh milk for meals). What a beautiful school and a beautiful vision for education. I can't wait to get some of my Global Issues Network students out to see this school, particularly because some of them ran a workshop about the value of educating girls in developing nations at the recent GISS conference. (See www.girleffect.org for more information about this, and about how the Starehe Girls' School is such an important investment in Kenya's future.)

New Maasai Partners & a Visit to Amboseli...

On Monday, May 2nd, we traveled down to Amboseli National Park to meet with Daniel, the schoolmaster at the Ilkengaare Community School we've been working with all year. After catching up with him, we drove to a nearby Maasai community where Daniel introduced us to friends and family living there. The school in this village (called Inchurra Maasai Community School) has some needs that we may be able to help meet through Freedom Through Learning. We were treated to a welcome dance and a visit with village leaders, as well as a visit to the school before we went back to Daniel's traditional home for tea and chapatis. It was a fabulous day, topped off with some close-up encounters with beautiful elephants on the way out of the park.

Books on the shelves...

On Saturday, April 30th, Brian and I traveled back to the Vumilia IDP camp in the Rift Valley with a team of 20 ISK students to engage in a Habitat for Humanity build. Since our last visit about 10 houses had been completed, with just over 120 left to go until everyone is housed. In one of these photos you can see a makeshift tent (from UNHCR tarps) that a family has been living in for three years. During the build, we took students over to our Freedom Through Learning library that will officially open on Tuesday, May 2nd! Books are now on the shelves, posters are on the walls and community members will soon be reading the many donated books we have collected. It is so exciting. I took time to read with the kids while I was there, and I also met with two enterprising women, Monica and Rosemary, about the possibility of getting a women's cooperative started to make and sell purses made from recycled plastic bags. There are so many wonderful things happening here, and we are building some beautiful friendships with this community. In fact, we went home with some eggs from Rosemary and Monica's chickens and some hot peppers from Monica's gardens - people can be so generous when they have so little.

Community library set to open!

Almost all year Brian and I have been working on a Freedom Through Learning project linked to the IDP (Internally-Displaced Persons) camp we are connected with through Habitat for Humanity. A goal of the youth leaders at the camp was to establish a community library, as there are absolutely no books and educational resources available in the community. So, all year we have been collecting books and on Friday we were able to deliver boxes and boxes (over 500 books!) to the IDP camp. We spent the day cataloguing and organizing books under the supervision of Edmond, a librarian from nearby Naivasha who came to volunteer his time. In a week or two the library will officially open, and in about six months we will be able to deliver many more books that are en route from Canada, the States and Korea. This project has been an absolute blessing to be a part of and we can't wait to see some of our favourite kids from the camp (particularly Cecilia, Eunice, Stephen and James) reading books in the newly-painted space. What a beautiful way to spend Good Friday.