Volunteering in a Kenyan Orphanage Changed Laura Walker’s Perspective
My story with children’s education in Kenya goes back to 2008. Dreams of traveling through Africa with my college boyfriend on a post-graduation trip were quickly smashed when he broke up with me two weeks after moving to Spain. I was crushed. At that point in my life, I had never met a single person who had been to Africa; and, I was nervous to go it alone. That’s when a dear friend of mine came to the rescue. As I sat in design class one day, staring blankly at my computer and still wallowing in my breakup sorrows, she passed me a small, folded scrap of paper. I opened the note and it said, “If you need a travel buddy, I’m in.” One short sentence that changed my perspective and gave me the courage to go. And so it goes, just a few months later, we were on a flight bound for Nairobi, Kenya. While I thought volunteering would be fun, I also saw it as a safer way to visit the continent than as an independent traveler. I figured it was within my comfort zone- I could explore the adventurous country of Kenya and have the security of staying with an organization.
And that is how I ended up at a corrupt and abusive orphanage in Kenya.
I immediately fell in love with all of the beautiful kids at the orphanage, with their big smiles and eager personalities. There was one boy in particular though, that I became very close to. I met John that first night at dinner. John was a 17 year old neighbor, orphan, and newly sponsored child at the orphanage. In fact, when I met him, it was only his second night there. As the oldest child at the dinner table, I figured he would probably know the most English… so I wasted no time and started asking questions on that very first night. I spent a combined five months at the orphanage, and I never stopped asking questions. I have always been inquisitive, and the more I asked, the more I realized I didn’t know.
My tumultuous relationship with the orphanage led me to witness on a large scale how many children did not attend school. I saw intimately, from the relationships I made within the community, just how devastating it can be. Add in a large dose of corruption and a lump of abuse and child labor, and as you might imagine, it deeply impacted me on an emotional and very personal level.
I couldn’t sit by and see the kids suffer. I couldn’t return to the U.S. and simply pretend that I was oblivious to the abuse and corruption. It kept me awake at night. It was the first thing I thought about when I woke up, and the last thing I remembered before I went to sleep. I walked out the gate of that orphanage for the last time in 2012 with John by my side on a bus bound for a brighter future. He was the first child Stahili rescued. John is bright, very driven, highly respected in the community, and was not being sent to school by the orphanage. Instead, he was being used as child labor. He had been taking himself to a village school, which I sent him money for, but it was not going to help him achieve his potential. He was essentially enslaved to this organization/orphanage.
At the time, I was in unknown territory. I didn’t want him to give up on his dreams, and yet by 2012, he was too defeated to leave the orphanage. I will never forget John telling me that when he received his acceptance letters to secondary schools, and the orphanage I had been working with refused to send him (despite having a sponsor), he ripped up the acceptance papers and threw them in the fire. I will also never forget the day he told me he had been building a fence for the same organization and, exhausted, hot, and tired, he sat down under a tree and began to cry. That was the day he said he gave up on his dreams of going to school and that was the day I knew I never would.I would never give up.
It wasn’t until a close friend of ours told him over lunch that he needed to take the opportunity I presented. I am forever grateful for that friend who gave him the nudge he needed to be brave enough to chase his dreams and step away from a controlling situation.
John gained back his confidence and I saw excitement in his face that I had not seen for a long time… maybe that I had not even seen since that first summer we met. Impassioned as I was and clueless as can be, I started visiting any boarding school that would listen to me, petitioning for a spot for John to go to school. I spoke to one principal after another. I even cried in one principal’s office after being told that John was “too old” to go to boarding school. I got turned down school after school, after school. I felt despair. I felt helpless. I was afraid of broken promises and lost dreams.
A glimmer of hope- After numerous petitions, the school search was finally settled.
After I got John settled into school, I started speaking to government officials. I spent a week in government offices, reporting, among many things, that an employee of this organization beat a child for wetting the bed and broke his leg. To be specific, she broke his femur bone, the strongest bone in the body. There were so many reports flooding in from other former volunteers: people donating for the same projects, kids being forced to work late into the night, other kids being beaten for ridiculous reasons. I saw too much, and I had heard too much. While so many had remained quiet, I knew I could not (this is not to say that I had a lot of support behind me. My family was, understandably, fearful for my life). A former employee of the orphanage went to the offices in Nairobi with me, and we made every effort to get an investigation going. I was sent to offices all over, but in the end, no one from the government did anything. I even contacted an organization in the US who got a Kenyan reporter involved, but that lead ended when the reporter was in a car accident. After I started making the reports, the director forced the kids to chant that I was the devil.
Yes, you read that correctly.
He had them chant: “LAURA IS THE DEVIL.”
The director literally forced them to march on the football field and chant. It would be a year and a half before I would see those kids again. I had no idea what they would think of me.
The day I was reunited with some of those kids, to take them away from the abusive walls of the orphanage and bring them to a boarding school where they would be loved and supported by Stahili, was a day I will never forget. It was nonstop chatter, hugs, and quite plainly- true happiness. I was hardly viewed as the devil that the orphanage director had portrayed me as, and I knew we had made the right decision to start Stahili.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of how I came to co-found Stahili. I met Hannah on my third trip to Kenya and we stayed connected after I sent John to school. I met Michelle my very first trip to Kenya, as we came to the orphanage the same day. We are very fortunate that our paths crossed and we came to the conclusion that enough is enough. While we are the co-founders on paper, there were many other ‘co-founders’. This would not have happened without the support of a close-knit group of former volunteers and supporters who assisted with all of the initial planning.
Another dubbed saint to Stahili has been Onesmus, our field manager, who is the older brother to John. He has been a sounding board and supporter for me through all of my ups and downs in Kenya. He loves each and every child as his own. Finding a local that has so much love for our kids and is passionate about education and brighter futures, we are incredibly lucky. It took a small army to put Stahili together- and we are growing each and every day. While I have always felt impassioned about education, I also feel like we were given no choice; no child deserves to go through what our kids have experienced. Every child deserves an education, a happy living environment, and to feel loved. Stahili, meaning ‘to deserve’ in Swahili, cares for the entire well-being of a child, and I am humbled each and every day by our kids and our work. We hope that you stick around to find out more about us.
And as they say in Kenya,
Nice times!
Laura