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:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
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“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)