Hamomi

So I guess this goes with the whole third world education thing. Calvin and I intern for a nonprofi organization called Hamomi Children's Centre, which is an elementary/middle school near Nairobi, Kenya. It started about 15 years ago with a Kenyan guy who realized how many kids there were sleeping on the streets and looking through garbage cans for food, so he found 7 street orphans and started to teach them. They started without a building and he was earning next to nothing, but he figured educated street children are better than uneducated ones so he continued to teach them. Here it becomes a cliche-but-still-quite-inspiring story about how he got together with some other teachers and they got more and more orphans and started fundraising until eventually they were able to buy land and build a school and then somhow they got connected with people in the USA who started a nonprofit to support them. Now we feed over 100 students 3 meals a day, 7 days a week, and pay for textbooks. We pay to feed the teachers too, and have a support-a-teacher program where you and your coworkers (or whoever) can pay $100 per month to pay the salary for a teacher. That isn't very much to live off of in Kenya, but it's something.

It's been interesting to see the American side of the whole thing--the wealthy Caucasian donors or buyers at auctions, buying signed movie posters or dinners at nice restaurant, and it's hard to connect that side with the Hamomi that is a school for the poorest of the poor on the other side of world, but I can only hope our work is valuable enough that it really does affect boh sides.