Samburu youth.....

My group of students from Colorado State University left about a week ago after spending 12 days in Samburu with me.  This annual trip started in 2006 as an option for students to do something meaningful over the 5-week winter break between semesters.  In planning for that first trip six years ago with my CSU colleague, Jen Johnson, we estimated that we needed 9-10 students to sign-up in order for the trip to be affordable and worth the effort, and were unsure if that many students would have both the interest and the resources.  More than 70 applied. 

That trend has generally continued every year, and an advantage of this situation is we can select a group of students with diverse backgrounds, prior experiences, academic majors and so on, and create a group dynamic in which they learn from each other and be exposed to different reflections of the same Kenya experiences. So the trip can not only rock your world from a global understanding standpoint, but it can clarify the strengths that you contribute to help make a group successful.  There’s also the risk that it turns into a mild version of Lord of the Flies. Over the years I know we’ve had moments in which some within the group didn’t so much learn from each other as much as they learned to tolerate each other.  I s’pose that’s a worthwhile skill to acquire as well. We all have people that we have learned to tolerate, and vice versa.

This year, my group was awesome. Mature, flexible, supportive of each other and opportunistic of every chance to experience something new. Within days my role was narrowly focused on practicalities such as buying supplies for projects and food for consumption; the group took primary responsibility to take care of each other in terms of emotional well-being and support.  That works out really, really well for me because ensuring others’ emotional well-being is not my specialty. I really do care, it just displays itself in unintentionally awkward ways, like offering a mango to deal with the feelings.  I could have a student in full scale meltdown and my response would be to slice an avocado, share it with a nice cold Fanta and assume we’ve sufficiently addressed the issue at hand through nourishment (side note: Fanta’s grip on the developing world extends to Kenya, as well). 

The timing of the trip coincides nicely with the academic calendar in Kenya in which the new school year begins in early January. So we have local students around for most of our visit.  A few years ago, my good friend Adam Beh and I started a non-profit to support secondary school for Samburu youth: the Samburu Youth Education Fund (www.samburuyouth.org. Donate now!). Long story short, secondary school in Kenya is not free. Students must pay for tuition, text books, uniforms and boarding fees. Most secondary schools are boarding schools, and while that increases the costs, boarding schools are especially important for girls, many of whom would otherwise be diverted from their studies at night to assist with chores and child-rearing at home.  So with that big barrier to education in place, it's particularly troubling when our research in this area keeps circling back to the need for education (and investment in women) to address its conservation and poverty issues.

The average amount we pay annually per student is $580. It’s a completely prohibitive amount for most people in a place like Samburu where household income in a year probably doesn’t surpass that school fee total. So clearly there’s a systematic problem with how Kenya delivers education and its failure to address the cycle of poverty.  That’s a big problem, and much bigger than two mzungus from the U.S. can or should tackle. In the meantime, we started SYEF to assist a number of hard-working students every year.

And I mean it when I say “hard working.” Some of our recipients we first knew six years ago when they were in primary school. While Adam and I would do our research thing (and sometimes our boxed wine and card-playing thing) at one end of the table at our camp, they would be on the other end working diligently in workbooks for hours and ask us for help when they were stuck or when they were finished and wanted us to make up story problems so they could continue. The kicker for me was this wasn’t required homework. They were just doing the extra work because they knew that their school didn’t have the resources to teach them everything they were supposed to be learning in a given year. I was struck by their diligence and the value they placed on education as 11- and 12- year olds. These kids also offered to help us cook, clean up, handwash our dirty laundry, and rarely asked for anything in return. When they did, it was typically school-related such as a uniform shirt or a text book.  When they completed primary school (8^th grade), it was going to be the end of the education road for them. Most came from families with a single female care-giver, and this is not a region where it’s easy for a woman to earn an income. Secondary school would be out of the question.

So voila, Samburu Youth Education Fund emerged from the depths of a pile of required IRS paperwork in December 2010.  Two years later, we’re supporting 32 students and will add 9-10 more in a few weeks.  About two weeks ago, we convened our 32 current recipients for a forum to hear their stories about the previous school year and for them to share advice with each other based on their respective experiences.  It was a terrifically fulfilling morning.  At one point I noticed maybe about 15 or so younger kids looking in the windows, listening attentively to what was going on.  Here’s an excerpt that I recorded:

“We can all agree that we must honor where we come from. I am Samburu but I will be a different Samburu than my father. I will make this place better and I will show all of these young childrens looking in the windows right there that education makes us Samburu and not the poverty or not the way we have treated the womens and each other in our past.”

This was from a young man who didn’t know he would be asked to speak until literally seconds beforehand (a classic Samburu meeting tradition).  This came off the top of his head. And these young kids peering in heard it too, and maybe, just maybe, a different way of thinking is showing the earliest sign of taking root here. A way of thinking not presented or forced by an outsider with their agenda, but from the young people within this community.