Our Mission
Don Stoll and Marianne Kent-Stoll, who teach at Georgiana Bruce Kirby Preparatory School in Santa Cruz, California, visited East Africa. Their travel adviser in Tanzania, a retired coffee merchant named Joas Kahembe, sent them to the remote village of Bacho. There, after watching students at the Ufani Primary School try to learn in classrooms with dirt floors, glassless windows, and empty doorframes, Don and Marianne asked if they could help. The villagers invited them to return with volunteers the following summer.
After going home to California, Don and Marianne established the nonprofit Karimu International Help Foundation. Then, with the help of the Kirby School community, the Karimu Foundation raised the $17,000 needed to renovate four classrooms and a shared teachers’ office for the Ufani School. Don, Marianne, and twenty-five other volunteers helped the villagers complete those renovations in June 2008 and immediately started raising money for more building.
At the end of last year they wired $21,000 to the villagers for construction of modest but modern living quarters for two teachers, since rural villages struggle to retain teachers who do not wish to live in mud huts. Earlier this year Karimu sent another $18,000 in order to build two more classrooms and a principal’s office from the ground up. The villagers finished these recent building projects in June of this year, assisted by Don, Marianne, and twenty-nine more volunteers.
Karimu does not plan to stop, since the villagers are determined to improve their lives. Next year Don and Marianne, along with volunteers and villagers, hope to build two teachers’ apartments at Ufani and two more at nearby Ayalagaya Secondary School. They also want to begin renovating some of Ayalagaya’s classrooms, fund the special educational needs of the village’s developmentally disabled children, and establish a healthcare outpost on the Ufani grounds.
Karimu is hopeful that all goals will be met because a Santa Cruz firm, Quantaphy, has just matched our donations that total $10,000. With the $20,000 raised the villagers will be able to start construction before the rainy season begins in March.
We will need to continue raising funds to ensure that all the needs of the Ufani School are met, and that we can help the Ayalagaya School, the secondary school where the graduates of Ufani will attend.
We greatly appreciate your support.
If you would like more information about our projects, please check out our 2009 Newsletter.
