Today our Jambo Blast comes to you from Chao and Nicole Odera, our new WFCF volunteers who have come alongside Chitra to help administer the fund and supervise our many volunteers.

This is so exciting for us to share with you!  We have been able to start extra programs in three of our schools- art, football, cooking, and music - all thanks to you our wonderful donors!

We are so pleased to announce that Bethany Joy School phase Two is on schedule to be opened this November! Our crew from Buffalo Construction have been working daily, and you ,our donors, have been giving faithfully!

Watumull Children partners with Helping Hands International to bring a hot healthy lunch to children in two sprawling slum areas of Nairobi. Hundreds of children depend on this Saturday meal as the sole meal of the weekend.  They wait patiently at the stations, bringing plastic containers from home to receive their portion.

Today let me introduce you to “mandazis”, a triangle shaped fried bread very popular for breakfast and snacks in Kenya.  A small charity startup in Nairobi called TenX, has found a way to produce a heavily fortified version of this treat, providing extra nutrients and protein for children just like ours suffering from food insufficiency. They are aptly named Power Mandazi

There has been much activity in Bethany Joy School’s backyard, as we add much needed classrooms to our campus! These new classrooms will enable us to move our remaining 250 students from temporary steel sheet structures to join their schoolmates at Bethany Education Center.

“What an amazing event the TLC was!”, Holly writes. “We left early in the morning to get out to Destiny school to see the teachers and staff setting up and preparing lunch for 200+ children who would be attending the event.

Happy New Year to all of you!  Today I share a very necessary facet of educating our students…..Feeding them!!!!

Let me introduce you to 26 very special children in Nairobi, Kenya. They are the beautiful kids who live at Voice of Hope Children’s Centre.  There are 26 children who are orphans being cared for here. Their home is a cramped 4 room space in the slums, but these children all work together, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of each other.  

From Keith and Trish Krumm

As I take a moment to reflect on the past 4 years, I am so amazed and grateful for everyone's support in our endeavor to honor Sasha's memory. As I have often said, he would love this project of supporting education. This fund now supports 53 high school students throughout Western Kenya.

Here is a glimpse of our most recent Teen Leadership Challenge ( TLC) that we held at Amati Initiative in Kakamega in rural Kenya. We chose 100 girls representing 4 poor schools in this area.  We taught them all about puberty and their changing bodies.  Culturally, Kenyans don’t talk to their girls about these subjects, so it’s a scary and very confusing time in these girls’ lives, and because of lack of money, pads are not readily available.

Here in Kenya, we come alongside of many schools, helping out in any way we can as we serve these children in poverty.  Twice a year, we give all our 2000 +students a chewable tablet to prevent ringworm and tapeworms.  These are contagious and is a huge health concern for our students, due to the open sewers running through the informal settlements where they live.

In 2017, Bethany Joy’s 400 students were housed in small, dark classrooms constructed of iron metal sheeting and old timber on muddy ground. Because of your generosity, we were able to build a beautiful, sparkling school, where currently two thirds of our students attend.  But the number of students we serve has grown, and we need more classrooms!  250 current pupils are still left in the original temporary structures down the busy road.

Today we want to show you some of our scholarship students not in the actual city of Nairobi. This is Zare Primary School nestled in Taita Hills.  We took the 6 hour drive down Mombasa Road to visit our 21 students in this rural area.

One of our biggest goals in Kenya and India is to boost English literacy among our students.  Our children’s’ reading skills will determine opportunities for their future employment. I was dismayed to find that most schools in the slums have no reading books whatsoever.  Picture books are essential for young ones to learn!

We are writing to you today about food.  It is our biggest expense every month.  We buy all the ingredients for school breakfast and lunch in bulk, thereby getting the best prices. We serve uji (hot fortified porridge) every morning to all of our children and teachers.  Many have not had anything to eat since lunch the previous day due to food insecurity in their homes.

Let me introduce you to some of my favorite boys in Kenya!  At Bethany Joy School, we have about 20 young men living next to us.  They are all orphans, and have been abandoned by neighbors and relatives.  Walter , our principal at Bethany, has brought them to a small corrugated metal building next door to us, and now they are part of the Bethany Joy community!

Excessive rain has been falling in the country of Kenya, leading to widespread flooding, loss of homes and lives. Our school families have especially been impacted, living in temporary corrugated metal sheet dwellings, packed together in the slums.  Many have lost everything because of the overflowing rivers.

Everyday on our lunch menu we serve cabbage to our (almost 2000!) students. But last month, we decided to boost nutritional content by adding skumawiki once a week for lunch at Bethany Joy School.

Greetings from our happy teens at our first Teen Leadership Challenge (TLC) of 2024! We gathered 118 girls at Bethany Joy School for a day of learning about puberty and the changes it brings physically, emotionally, mentally, and socially. We have frank discussions about it all with whole group Kenyan speakers and small discussion breakout groups.