Every month we spend $1,065 to feed and provide clean drinking water for the 40 full-time kids in our education program. Nutritious and balanced meals have an enormous positive impact on the health of our kids and significantly reduce the economic burden on parents in Maai Mahiu, where the land is semi-arid and food production is low.
Our team and community of parents, students, and patients have shown unheralded resilience over the last six months. Their commitment to our mission and our community has lifted my spirits and warmed my heart in the most challenging times.
Khalid Salim Omar, a Madrassa teacher, travels three hours from his home in Ngong Town with his wife, Hawa Asman, infant son, and four-year-old daughter Latifa Atieno Khalid to our Centre in Maai Mahiu twice a month. Latifa, who has Spastic Quadriplegia, is enrolled in our neuro health program. Our kids are almost exclusively accompanied by either their mother or mother figure on clinic days, so Khalid, the only father, stands out.
Happiness requires something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. - Swahili proverb
Tribe members know this proverb and live it every day. To be an Ubuntu Tribe Heart member is to seek meaning and connection beyond oneself. That meaning and connection changes all of us. In a broken and fractured world, we seek connection. In the work with our children in Kenya, brokenness is healed every day. Connections are made every day.
This partnership with our community in Kenya is not just a good idea; it is changing the world!
Our children have so many needs, and your partnership makes it possible to heal the brokenness around us. They may never get a chance to say thank you, but many who have experienced the smiles and hugs from these kiddos know that it is worth it.
As featured on One.org as part of a global campaign to urge world leaders to develop a global response to the learning crisis resulting from the global pandemic by asking them to invest in quality education for all children, regardless of where they live. The situation is particularly dire considering that even before the pandemic, 90% of 10-year-olds in low-income countries couldn’t read or understand something simple, like a school test or health leaflet.
Maai Mahiu is a bustling trading center that never sleeps. It is a long-distance truck stop that sits in the shadow of a massive escarpment at the bottom of the Rift Valley, about an hour west of Nairobi, the Kenyan Capital. Here, tucked between single-story shops selling household consumables, agricultural supplies, and truck spare parts, along a dusty street parallel to the Nairobi – Kampala highway, you’ll find the Ubuntu Life Education Centre.
