Slater Middle School students raising money to help Kenyan children

It didn’t sit well with Herbert Slater Middle School students when they learned children in a small village more than ?9,000 miles away were desperate for books, school supplies and medical and health items.

In response, the students earlier this month launched a fundraising drive, holding bake sales and starting letter-writing campaigns to aid the Kenyan children living near the border with Uganda.

“They’re trying to build a library, and we have a library with (thousands) of books,” said Spencer Byrne, a Slater eighth grader taking part in the “Boxes to Bungoma” project to provide much-needed supplies to the Star of Hope Centre in Kenya.

He’s one of more than 50 students in Sandi Martin’s leadership classes heading up the project on the Santa Rosa school campus.

Martin, who teaches English, leadership and multimedia classes learned about the Boxes to Bungoma campaign from Selah Brown, a childhood friend who now lives in the Seattle area and sits on the board of Star of Hope America, a nonprofit that raises money for the school in the tiny farming village of Chebukuyi.

“We’re teaching them to be global thinkers and to show they can make a difference in our world,” Martin said about her students.

The students created posters to blanket their campus and encourage classmates to donate to the project, which has a fundraising goal of $5,000.They also launched what’s been deemed a “friendly competition,” dividing into four groups - the green, orange, purple and turquoise teams - to collect money during lunchtime.

For every dollar bill a team collects, it earns 100 points. However, teams get points knocked off if classmates dump loose change into their collection boxes.

Students also sent handwritten letters to local businesses and have stood outside a nearby Whole Foods store on the weekends, selling baked goods and educating shoppers about their project and the needs at Star of Hope Centre, which doesn’t have electricity or running water.

“All the things we take for granted, they don’t have them,” said Anna Schultz, an eighth grader and leadership student who organized one of the bake sales. “They need basic things like Band-Aids, toothpaste and cough syrup.”

The money she and her classmates are raising will be used to buy and ship those supplies, said Schultz, 14.

The deliveries will be sent by boat to Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, and then transported by truck to Bungoma, an hour southeast of Chebukuyi, where the school’s executive director will pick them up and take them back to the remote village.

It should take a total of three months for the supplies to reach the school, which has become an important center for the villagers, said Brown, Martin’s friend who is coordinating the effort.

The Star of Hope Centre serves 160 children from preschool to fifth grade, Brown said. Some live at the school, which was started a decade ago by director Leonard Muyelele and his mother as an orphanage for children who were abandoned or lost their parents to armed conflicts, malaria and HIV/AIDS.

The students from both Slater and Star of Hope have been communicating through video messages.

Slater principal Shellie Cunningham said that has made the fundraiser more meaningful and personal for her students, who have organized many service projects over the years, including raising money to build wells and a different school in Kenya.

“That’s really powerful,” Cunningham said about the personal connection between the Slater and Kenyan children.

“We literally see their little faces, learn their names. They get to see our kids and have conversations with them through videos.”

Brown said this is the first time the project had a major fundraiser outside Washington state. Slater is also the first school to be involved, she added.

“This is the first time we’re reaching people we don’t know personally,” Brown said. “This is huge for us.”

The students had raised nearly $2,400 as of Monday, Martin said. That’s five times more than their counterparts in the Seattle area.

Schultz said the students want to reach the $5,000 goal by the end of the week. Classmates will be bringing children’s books to donate, as well as creating their own.

“It’s really heartwarming,” Schultz said about the project. “It actually makes you feel like you’re making a difference.”