The Samburu Project

Our goal this #GivingTuesday is to build a classroom for Ntepes Primary School in Wamba. With 100 wells and counting drilled in Samburu County by The Samburu Project, we are circling back to those well communities to offer further support. The good news is that due to access to clean water, school enrollment is rapidly growing, especially among girls. The bad news is that schools are experiencing severe overcrowding. Ntepes School is known as a sanctuary school, receiving with open arms, any girl who shows up seeking an education to escape early marriage. The 910 students comprises 453 boys and 457 girls – Go Girls!

This #GivingTuesday we will be fundraising to build a new classroom at Ntepes Primary School in Wamba. With the generosity of a TSP board member, your donations will be matched dollar for dollar, up to $6,000. This #GivingTuesday please join us in supporting education for girls in Samburu. 


A personal account of Ntepes Primary School from Jacky Falkenberg:

Twelve years ago, around the time of my 11th birthday, our family visited Kenya for the first time. Though we fell in love with the stretching gold landscapes, the captivating wildlife, and the welcoming rural communities, we went home with heavy hearts. How could we visit such a beautiful place full of such kind people and still feel something was missing as we traveled home to the Silicon Valley? Many of the people we encountered were living difficult lives.  Despite their cheerful nature, women and girls seemed particularly disadvantaged, walking all day to collect dirty surface water. Many young girls did not attend school, and water-borne disease health issues were evident in most villages, particularly among young children and babies. The lack of clean, accessible water was the root of all of these problems.

We all wanted to return to Kenya so we decided to research how we might get involved in addressing accessible clean water.  Good fortune and a lot of internet searching brought us to The Samburu Project, at that time having just completed their first eight water wells.  Planning began immediately and we returned to the Samburu region in 2008, excited with our new mission to assist TSP in the planning process for new wells and with energetic spirits to paint, play, and even teach in their local schools. Every morning, my dad would head out with the hydrologist to determine the best location for the water wells in communities that had applied for help, while my mom, younger sister and I would visit nearby schools to engage in the community, painting school rooms and assisting with English language teaching.   (English is the official language of Kenya but most families in rural areas speak Swahili or their Samburu tribal language.) It was during these days that we noticed the overcrowding in the classrooms. It was not uncommon to see up to five children wedged together on thin wooden benches to learn, with over 60 children per classroom. At schools not yet benefitting from a water well, there was a heavy outweighing of boys, as girls were often kept home to help with chores or walk with their mothers, often 12 to 15 miles daily, to fetch water. Over those three weeks spent working in Wamba at the well sites and schools, we gained a huge appreciation for the people of the Samburu region, knowing that our relationship with these communities would last a lifetime.  Yet we also learned that providing fresh water would be a beginning of our mission, not the end.

Today, my family continues to work passionately with The Samburu Project, which has brought over 100 fresh water wells to the Samburu District.  Fortunately, having fresh water nearby means more mothers can stay at home, while their daughters have the freedom to attend school. Proving this out, in our water well communities, three times (3x) more girls attend school than prior to receiving their water well.   But with this empowering improvement comes further overcrowding of classrooms. This is not an unconquerable problem in that the Kenyan government will provide teachers, books and other classroom materials to communities that have available school rooms. If there is more classroom space, more females will be encouraged to attend and the learning environments will be more effective.  A new classroom entirely would mean all these things plus the permanent influx of more classroom materials subsidized by the Kenyan government. Having brought water to the community, we can’t help but feel it is our responsibility to help these communities expand their classroom capacity, and we ask for your help in our expanded mission to build another classroom at Ntepes Primary School in Wamba.  Working with a local contractor and school officials, we have mapped out plans for a large 920 ft sq classroom addition. $15,000 won’t buy you much of a building in the US, but in rural Kenya we can build a free-standing classroom with desks and chalkboards that will enable education for hundreds and hundreds of children over decades. So often we see a striking documentary or a photo in the news and ask how we can help. Today, we have a ready-to-go school building project and are asking you to donate what you can so that we may empower more children, and especially young girls, with education.  Our family will match all gifts one-for-one, with a goal of starting construction in January 2019. Thank you for your support!