York Town News
Coastal Ridge Elementary School students reaching out to Kenya
By Jennifer L. Saunders
Students in the Coastal Ridge Elementary School Kids Cabinet pose with a display they helped create to raise funds for the Kenya School Project, a nonprofit organization committed to making a difference for children in one of the world's poorest regions. The students have collected money that will be counted this week and donated to the cause as part of an ongoing Coastal Ridge-Kenya connection.
Photo by Mary Zane
YORK VILLAGE - When Coastal Ridge Elementary School art teacher Mary Zane learned about the nonprofit Kenya School Project an old friend had founded, she knew immediately that she wanted to help.
What Zane did not know, however, was how moved her third- and fourth-grade art students would be by the photographs her friend Mary Stusek sent to her when she returned from her most recent trip to Kenya.
The photographs show the children who attend classes in a cramped, one-room school with holes in the walls, without plumbing, without heat - even when temperatures plummet to near-freezing - and without the basic school supplies that fill York's classrooms.
"The children were amazed to see there is no electricity, no plumbing," Zane said in an interview at the Coastal Ridge art room last week. "This project really evolved because of those photos. The children kept asking, 'What can we do?' It's been remarkable."
Enter fourth-grade teacher Alicia Marquis, advisor to the Coastal Ridge Kids Cabinet, a group of student ambassadors from each classroom that work together on school and community initiatives. This was just the kind of project the Kids Cabinet members wanted to be a part of, Marquis said.
Earlier this month, the Kids Cabinet hosted a coin drive to benefit the Kenya School Project - with local children, parents, teachers and staff contributing to the glass jugs placed in front of a display of Stusek's actual photographs from Kenya.
The Kenya School Project was established to educate and empower Kenya's poorest children with what Stusek has described as a "two-prong" approach: providing schools with library books and educational texts and materials and following up with "self-sustaining philanthropy" to help people help themselves. To do this, the Kenya School Project partners with secondary schools where teens, whether from the heart of Nairobi or the base of Mt. Kenya, are able to learn trades: tying flies for fishing, raising honey bees and silk worms, sewing, weaving, kitting, welding, agriculture and natural resource management, to name a few.
"Every penny we collect we spend in Kenya," Stusek said in an interview last week.
The goal, she explained, is to provide education and an opportunity for these young people to become young entrepreneurs, giving themselves - as well as their families and, ultimately, their villages - a sustainable economic base for the future.
Students at Coastal Ridge said they hope they've collected more than a few pennies to help that cause, and were even beginning to take guesses as to how money they could raise.
"The kids advertised the coin drive within their classrooms," Marquis explained. "They just couldn't believe the conditions after seeing the pictures."
The coins and bills they collected are scheduled to be counted this morning, Wednesday, Jan. 31, as the Coastal Ridge connection to the Kenya School Project continues with the coin drive and with upcoming art and writing projects Zane will undertake with fellow Coastal Ridge teachers Sharon Prosser and Patty Raitto and their classes.
"I can't believe she would take the time and have the interest," Stusek said of Zane, describing her happiness at learning so many York students have come forward to donate to the effort.
For her part, Zane points to Stusek as the one who is the inspiration behind the local effort.
From her Wisconsin home back in 2004, Stusek, who holds a degree in anthropology and attended Oxford for archaeology studies prior to her marriage, decided that her retirement should be spent helping those most in need.
"All along, I knew I wanted to do more on the world," she explained.
She described the moment when she made the decision to begin the nonprofit, after reading an article on the plight of the poorest children in Kenya.
She remembers thinking, "What am I doing sitting around here? I don't need to be putting paper on my cupboard shelves or working in my garden; I've got to do something about this."
Her plan, at first, was simply to donate the excess from American schools, but she soon learned that would not meet the needs of the students in Kenya. For example, sending science textbooks to a country where there was no laboratory equipment available to the students made little sense. And, too, their was the cost - ranging from $8,000 to $10,000 just to ship a container of books - funds Stusek believed could be better spent directly supporting the mission of the Kenya School Project.
In a country ravaged by AIDS, Stusek said, creating a sustainable economy where single mothers are able to earn a wage means it is more likely for children, and especially young girls, to remain in school.
"It's all intertwined," she said, explaining the skills taught are not only self-sustaining but also replicable from one village to another, across the Mount Kenya region.
In addition to the poverty and the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, hunger is a major concern, Stusek said, and the Kenya School Project has been working to develop school gardens with a water-harvesting system to catch rainwater from the roofs of the buildings to then be purified for drinking or for watering the gardens.
"The gardens can provide a noon meal for kids who often have no meal a day," she said, with the extra produce available to be sold in the local market and used to create a seed bank for gardens to be grown in future years.
In Kenya, only primary education is free, so fewer than 10 percent go on to secondary school. In parts of the country, 85 percent of the girls do not finish primary school - many becoming the third or fourth wife to elderly men, which Stusek described as tantamount to slavery to the established wives in the household.
"The parents will make any sacrifice for education because, as you hear them say over and over again, 'It's the only way they won't end up the way that we are.' … I can't tell you the sacrifices they will make," Stusek said, adding, "It's the women and girls who work so hard that I would love to help. … They are behind before they start."
There are ways local residents can help as well, with tax-deductible donations to the efforts of the Kenya School Project. The most pressing need, at this time, is to raise about $18,000 to purchase a bio-diesel processor.
"We have the technique at our vocational school for getting oil out of sunflower seeds" and other plants, Stusek explained, and the students could make bio-diesel fuel in small quantities, opening up a wealth of opportunities. "It would just make a tremendous difference. It would start to work immediately because everything is just sitting there waiting for the bio-diesel processor."
The organization has even found the equipment it needs available for purchase, so it is just a matter of securing the funds.
And, Stusek said, any donation can make a difference - as about $350 will send a teen to secondary school.
"We ask people to contribute their age and do it every year," she said, adding, "If everybody would contribute their age, it would change a whole corner of the world."
To make a tax-deductible donation or to learn more, write to The Kenya School Project - Sharing the Excess, W6657 Firelane 6, Menasha, WI 54952, visit www.kenyaschoolproject.org or e-mail info@kenyaschoolproject.org.
This is the first in an ongoing series on the work of local students and teachers to support the work of the Kenya School Project in one of the world's poorest regions. For the results of the Kids Cabinet Kenya School Project Coin Drive, see the Feb. 7 edition of The Independent.
