A chance meeting at Pearson International Airport between an elite Kenyan runner and a Hamilton middle school teacher led to a school presentation outlining what it is like being a primary school student in a rural area of Kenya known as Ol Joro Orok.

Click to see a video of our history.

Two students in the audience became so emotionally upset and angry with the school sanitary conditions they heard about that they decided to mobilize their entire school to initiate change. That effort became the project known as Road Race to Kenyan Relief. Quite unexpectedly, their actions set into motion a chain of events. Over the next few years their passionate notion of “giving back” developed into a registered Canadian charitable foundation known today as Connecting Countries Adopt-a-School.

Though more refined and defined today, the founding students’ original mandate of empowering school children to assist other school children still remains firmly intact, and students remain at the centre of all efforts. In fact our thinking and actions are greatly influenced by  those who really understand what is needed in the Kenyan schools: the students who attend these schools. We are told through Kenyan student letters:

“We use latrines which even made us to have different kinds of diseases… we lost one of our school pupils who was ill because of going to such bad latrines”
—Leah Wanjiru, student, Kirima-Ngai PS

“Our school has over 600 students… we need about 16 more toilets”
—Japheth Nguura and Lucy Muthoni,
Students,   Madaraka PS

The connections between sanitation and education cannot be overlooked. Most aspects of the Kenyan students’ lives at school are connected in some way to access to basic sanitation. This issue has focussed our direction and ultimately that of our local Ontario students. So serious is their commitment to improving the sanitation conditions in our “adopted” Kenyan schools that, since 2005 a large contingent of students at various schools within the greater Hamilton area have funded the building of 66 sanitation pit latrines and urinals at primary schools within the Ol Joro Orok division of Central Kenya.

In addition, some local classrooms have decided that funding latrines in Kenya would become even more meaningful if they knew more about those who were to use them. What has emerged is a Pen Pal Letter Program where cultural information is exchanged between our students and their counterparts in Kenyan schools.

Connecting Countries Adopt-a-School continues to empower school children in Kenya and in our local community to become agents for social change. During a recent “Character Builds” presentation Carissa, one of the two original founding members of this program stated: “…if these children and I can be better focused and learn about ourselves we can improve our lives together and this has to make our worlds better places to live.”