PHOTO COURTESY OF KIDS FOR KENYA CLUB

Endeavour Intermediate School’s Kids for Kenya Club: Front row (left to right): Riley Burks, Savannah Way, Julia Cook, Olivia Treece, Tyler Petty. Middle row (left to right): Mikaela Branch, John Temple, Emily Shinn, Austen Griffin. Back row: Wendy Merdian, Cooper Brown, Julyn Cook.

Kids for Kenya Club plans ‘African Experience Night’

New club also launches fund drive for primary school in Africa

By Matt Nagle

Wendy Merdian has a passion, and she is working hard to instill the same in her students at Endeavour Intermediate School and by extension the local community. Together, she, parent helper Julyn Cook, and 10 of her students have formed the Kids for Kenya Club and they are committed to reaching out across the miles all the way to Africa with open hearts and helping hands for the children who live there.

The club is spearheading a brand new event called “African Experience Night” to coincide with Global Youth Services Day April 25. Club members have already lined up a slate of impressive speakers and entertainers for the evening to be held in the cafeteria and gym at Surprise Lake Middle School. It includes Melannie Cunningham, associate director of admissions at Pacific Lutheran University and organizer with the International Kenya Overseas Communities Association, and Nigerian author Kunle Oguneye, whose new children’s book “Sikulu & Harambe by the Zambezi River” will be published this summer.

The Alice V. Hedden Elementary School Drum Ensemble will perform, as will Tara Lee Allen, a teacher at Hedden and a dancer. More local participants have been invited as well. Plans are now for the evening to launch with a formal program for about an hour, then lead into activities for the students and parents to participate in with the invited visitors.

Merdian said she and club members are excited to make this event a big success for the students here and all the way over in Africa. “African Experience Night” is part of a fundraising effort Kids for Kenya has kicked off to collect $15,000 for a primary school in Machakos, Kenya. Donations will be accepted at “African Experience Night” and will go a long way to supplement the club members’ ongoing recycled can drive and sales of their handmade bracelets. The club is planning for a very fun and educational evening through displays of cultural artifacts, African crafts and goods for sale, foods and even storytellers.

“I am really passionate about this,” Merdian said. So is Julyn Cook, club advisor and mom to Kids for Kenya Club President Julia Cook, who is in fifth grade at Endeavour.

“They’re our future leaders,” said Julyn Cook about why students should take an interest in developing countries. “If they learn that now, as adults they’ll have a much deeper understanding and impact on helping globally. We’re all connected.”

Cook said she is particularly gratified to be building partnerships with local Kenyan and Nigerian communities.

Merdian’s passion for Kenya started about 25 years ago when the teacher-in-training experienced a personal epiphany while she was living in Kenya as a college student working on an independent project towards her degree. She traveled to a little village all by herself in the middle of nowhere. She lived with a family that was poor but worked hard to survive in the semi-arid region. “Seeing the struggles they had getting water and looking for food and growing their own food, I thought, what could I do?” Merdian remembered thinking. She got the idea to build fuel-efficient cooking stoves and thus she started a pilot project in the community.

Graduation and paths leading to the next phases of her life drew Merdian away from Kenya for a while, but she visited there last year and came back home with a renewed fire to be an ambassador of sorts for the warm and “so very generous” people of Kenya, as Merdian describes them, who with smiling faces accepted her so graciously.

“Something just really clicked in me. When I went back I saw I needed to be involved with this. I just felt like this is it. I loved it there.

“I’m trying to pass on some of that knowledge I have, some of that interest and concern,” she said – the lessons of compassion and social responsibility that can yield high-quality character traits she hopes the youngsters will hold with them throughout their lives.

“Part of my goal is trying to get the students to think more globally and try to think of themselves as global citizens,” she said. “It’s not that you want to ignore your own community and your own issues in your own country, but in relation to the things so many people are dealing with in Africa and other

developing countries...I don’t know.” To Merdian, people are people no matter where they live.

Kids for Kenya Club’s ultimate goal is to build a presentation members can take to other schools in the Fife School District and perhaps to other districts as well to teach other students about Africa and developing countries.

For more information on “African Experience Night” e-mail Merdian at fwmerdian@msn.com.

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