History
The project was started in 2002, when Dorothy Selebwa from Kakamega visited the Northeast of the United States. Focusing especially on Quaker meetinghouses, her fundraising tour brought the plight of Kenya's AIDS orphans to the attention of many Quakers. One woman, Sukie Rice of Freeport, Maine, decided to start a fundraising organization to support the feeding program. Soon, Friends of Kakamega planned a dining hall, and later a dormitory-style Care Center. In 2004, the dining hall was opened, and by 2005 the dorms were completed and full of children.
Since then, the project has steadily grown. Today, there is a small library with several hundred donated books that have been brought to Kenya by the Friends of Kakamega. Additionally, a computer lab with eight donated laptops has been set up, providing instruction to the older children in word processing, internet, and other essentially skills. The idea behind these projects is to augment formal schooling with other educational opportunities, to try to help the children into jobs and a more promising future.
Read more about this topic: Kakamega Orphan Project
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)