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Kids for Kenya

Weekly Updates

 

April 25, 2008

Our Global Youth Service Day event the African Experience Night was a great success.  More information and photos from this will be posted soon.

April 14, 2008

Today the club took a once-in-a-lifetime field trip to Seattle to attend the Seeds of Compassion Children's Day event with the Dalai Lama.  We were inspired by his message and the messages of the other presenters at this huge event.  About 14,000 students and teachers from around the state of Washington were in attendance.

 

April 10, 2008

Here is the April 10th article that was published in the local papers.

Kids for Kenya Club to host African Experience Night

By Matt Nagle

Fife Free Press
mattnagle@tacomaweekly.com
Published on: April 10, 2008

The Kids for Kenya Club at Endeavour Intermediate School has been busy getting ready for the big event they are planning called African Experience Night on April 25, as part of Global Youth Services Day which is being recognized in schools across the country. Numerous speakers, presenters and even an African daily living experience exhibit will be featured at this first-time event to be held in the gymnasium and multi-purpose room at Surprise Lake Middle School (SLMS).

Thanks to a State Farm Good Neighbor Service Learning Grant and a grant from the Summit Uniserve Council Community Outreach Program, the students have been able to include a lot into African Experience Night, which is also a fundraiser for Shammah Academy, a primary school in Machakos, Kenya.

Endeavour teacher Wendy Merdian, who was just chosen by the district as an employee of the year, has been advisor to the Kids for Kenya Club and virtual tour guide through Africa for her students, as they have been learning about the continent (Kenya in particular) since the start of the school year. While in college, Merdian traveled to a remote Kenyan village and spent time working and living with the villagers there. She was quickly made to feel as welcome as a family member and she wants her young students to understand how important such connections are between people who know very little about one another.“To me, it seems like there’s been so little education on Africa for kids,” Merdian said. “There’s so many people working to help the African people and African people working to help themselves, and I think Americans need to see that. It’s time U.S. children really start to learn about Africa.”

The evening begins at 6 p.m. in the SLMS gymnasium with a formal program. Julia Cook, a sixth-grader and president of the Kids for Kenya Club, will be emcee.The Hedden Drum Ensemble from Alice V. Hedden Elementary School will start the festivities by showing off African dance moves they learned especially for African Experience Night. Featured speakers will be Peter Gishuru, president of the African Chamber of Commerce, and Melannie Cunningham, associate director of admissions and coordinator of multicultural recruitment at Pacific Lutheran University. Naomi Kimani, voted best new teen talent in Kenya last year, will perform and a Kenyan children’s group will sing the Kenyan national anthem in Swahili and English followed by an African flag parade.

From 7-9 p.m. there will be many activities for attendees to participate in,

presentations to listen to and Kenyan foods to sample. Scheduled presentations will be given by Eva Abrams from Seattle Storytellers Guild, Nigerian children’s book author Kunle Oguneye and the Kenyan Malaikaz dance group.There will be ongoing presentations as well by Sister Baptista Kaoma from Zambia; Caryl Bittenbender, a first-grade teacher at Discovery Primary School who lived for 14 years in Africa; and Endeavour fourth-grader Riley Burks and her dad will talk about their travels in Kenya. Traditional clothing and costumes from around Africa will be on display and hands-on activities will be offered in mask designing, bead making and weaving traditional Kenyan “kikuyu” baskets led by a group of Kenyan women. 

The large African daily living experience exhibit will be set up in the gymnasium where those in attendance can get a clearer sense of how Kenyans live their daily lives: carrying water and wood, cooking over an open fire and tending to vegetable gardens and livestock. Enlarged photographs will serve as visual lessons on how Kenyans live. There will be an area illustrating sports and games and a classroom setting like those in Kenya, where students will be able to write letters and draw pictures to send to Shammah Academy in Kenya, which Kids for Kenya Club has “adopted.”

Merdian said the club members are very excited about their big night. “It should be really neat. My hope is that the cultures can connect, that Americans can see and learn something about Africa; not that it’s just a poor continent but that it’s full of life and wonderful people.”

Read more about Endeavour’s Kids for Kenya Club by going to the school’s website at www.fifeschools.com.

 

April 8, 2008

Spring Break?  Not Us . . .  The Kids for Kenya Club is busy preparing for the African Experience Night.  Here you see some of our members painting murals. 

 

 

March 25, 2008

Today the Kids for Kenya club joined the students from the Hedden Drum Ensemble for a fun dance workshop presented by members of the Gansango Dance Company of Seattle. Our very special presenters today included: Etienne Cakpo, professional dancer and choreographer from Benin and the director of the Gansango Dance Company, Won Ldy Paye, a professional storyteller from Liberia, and Siya Manyakanyaka, a singer and dancer from South Africa. The students had a great time learning the dance moves.

  

     Won Ldy Paye and Siya                          Students warming up

 

  

Etienne instructing                        Etienne and Siya demonstrating

 

          Having fun!                                 Putting it all together

 

Ending with a story by Won Ldy Paye

       

March 6, 2008

It has been confirmed that the Gansango Dance Company will be coming to run a African Dance Workshop for the club on Tuesday, March 25th. This has been made possible by a grant they wrote through The Allied Arts Foundation.  Etienne Cakpo from Benin will teach African dance moves and Siya Manyakanyaka from South Africa will drum for him. What a wonderful opportunity for our students to learn about African culture!

Our club is going on a fieldtrip to the Seeds of Compassion Children's Day event with the Dalai Lama at Key Arena in Seattle on April 14th. There wil be 16,000 young people and adults at this event and we will be joined by thousands more from around the world via the Internet.  The Dalai Lama - recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and the Congressional Gold Medal - and other world leaders and dignitaries will hear from children and youth through a dialogue on kindness, empathy and compassion.   The globes that our students have been working on will be submitted to the website for the the Seeds of Compassion "What Does Compassion Look Like" - art campaign.

 

March 5, 2008

Today five members our club handed out fliers inviting presenters for our African Experience Night at Pierce College in Puyallup.  They did this just prior to a special reading by renowned Kenyan author, Ngugi wa Thiong'o from his latest book, "The Wizard of the Crow".  This was a great way to highlight our club and meet others interested in African affairs. 

Kids for Kenya Club members with Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Club members sharing information with others prior to Ngugi's presentation

 

February 28, 2008

Our club was highlighted in the Fife Free Press Newspaper today.

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.

February 6, 2008

We are very please to announce we were awarded the State Farm Good Neighbor Service Learning grant to help fund our African Experience Night program.  We look forward to putting this money to good use as we continue to prepare for this educational event for our community.

February 5, 2008

At our meeting today students worked on making paper mache globes.  Next week we will be painting them with designs to represent positive actions taking place in developing countries and different ways people in developed countries can help.

January 26, 2008 

We are happy to announce Mrs. Cook has agreed to serve along with Mrs. Merdian as an advisor to our club.  She is very interested in our club goals and has many resources that will be valuable.  She has already been instrumental in getting our club shirts made. 

The club agreed that this Friday should be the last day of the classroom wristband competition.  The winning classrom will be announced on Monday.

Mrs. Merdian shared her old slides and new digital pictures from her experiences in Kenya at today's meeting.

 

January 21, 2008

Many things have been happening with Kids for Kenya since our last update.  Here are some highlights:

We have been busy with the selling of the Kids for Kenya wristbands.  The sales have been going well during our lunchtime recesses, and we hope to be selling the wristbands at upcoming evening programs in the district. Whichever classroom sells the most wristbands will receive a pizza party. So far Mrs. Sawer's class is in the lead.  On the Kids for Kenya bulletin board we have a graph of the progress of all the classrooms plus a Wristband-o-meter that shows how many wristbands we have sold in all.

Surveys/questionniaires went out to the community and we now have feedback on what people would like to learn about Africa.  We will be using this to help develop our African Experience Night program.

We are also beginnning to make initial contacts with individuals and groups who may be interested in presenting at our African Experience Night.  The African Experience Night will be held on Global Youth Service Day, Friday, April 25th.  Our goal is to help educate other about African culture, challenges Africans face and development success stories from Africa.

This coming Friday, Kids for Kenya will present a PowerPoint entitled "Standing up for Equality, Yesterday and Today" at the 2nd/3rd and 4th/5th awards assemblies.  This PowerPoint reflects back to the struggle for black civil rights and also briefly presents the current inequalities between developed and developing countries - with a message that we all can and should do something to help create more equality between countries.

Lastly, we are excited to be getting club T-shirts in the near future.  Thanks to the generous support by Gig Harbor's Sound Marketing Solutions, we are getting the T-shirts at cost.  It will be wonderful to have these t-shirts for our club members, especially when they are out in the community making presentations. 

 

December 11, 2007

At our club meeting today, members discussed many issues pertaining to the bracelet sales including what other locations we could be selling our bracelets.  We decided to sell them at the band concert being held at Columbia Jr. High tomorrow night.  Ms. Hess offered to assist with this as she was planning on attending the concert. Several members offered to man the table at this event.

Also at the meeting Mrs. Merdian read a short story called the Doggy Dung Disaster.  This is a true story of a 12 year old girl in Japan that came up with an environmentally sound method of collecting dog poop using a special milk carton container.  She went on, with her father's help, to set up an eco-business selling these containers.  She was also invited to represent Japan at the U.N. sponsored Children's Conference for the Environment in Africa.

The last portion of our meeting was spent continuing to make bracelets.

 

 

December 5, 2007

Club members have been very busy creating bracelets during our after-school bracelet workshops, and selling them during our lunch hour.  We have been pleased with our sales on these first three days. We will continue to make and sell bracelets through December 18th. The bracelets are attractive and very reasonably priced, so please stop by and support Kids for Kenya!

      

 

Mrs. Merdian was very excited to learn today that she will be getting a student from Kenya on Monday.  The student's Kenyan family is very happy to hear about our Kids for Kenya Club, and they will no doubt help us learn much more about their country.

November 27, 2007

We all greatly enjoyed meeting and hearing from our guest visitor, Sandra, a Fife High School student from Kenya.  Sandra spoke to us about life in Kenya and also reminded students to value their education. 

Also at our meeting today, students put their creativity to work making beaded bracelets.  These bracelets will go on sale next week.  Club member will be selling the bracelets in the Endeavour office from 11:45 - 1:00 PM.  There will be both children and adult bracelets for sale. There will be something for everyones' tastes, so please stop by and take a look.  The prices are reasonable and all proceeds will benefit Shammah Academy in Kenya.  

November 20th, 2007

Congratulations to our club officers!

Julia - President

Savanna - Vice-President

Olivia - Secretary

Ben -Treasurer

Mikeala -Phligihigahimer (Our special club name for the person who helps Mrs. Merdian clean up after our meetings)

November 11, 2007

Just a reminder - our next can collection day will be this coming Friday, November 16th.

November 6, 2007

At today's Kids for Kenya meeting students discussed what other types of fund raising activities they would like to do this year.  A list was compiled and students then voted for their top five choices.  The top five were: bake sale, make and sell T-shirts, solicit donations outside stores such as Safeway, encourage more participation in the can drive by offering more and/or better prizes, and make and sell bracelets.  At our meeting today students also decided they wanted to have club officers. Interested students signed up for six different positions.  Next week we will vote.

"Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." ~Margaret Mead

October 23, 2007

Today was the first official meeting of the Kids for Kenya club. Fifteen students attended our meeting.  Our discussion focused on the world population and developed, developing, and underdeveloped countries.  Students worked on creating large world maps showing where these various countries are located.  We hope to create a hallway bulletin board to share what we learn with all Endeavour students and staff.

October 22, 2007

Mrs. Merdian and her husband finished the model African hut this weekend, and it was brought to Mrs. Merdian's classroom and set up for all to enjoy.

Other good news -   Mrs. Merdian shipped her old digital camera to Patrick Mutunga, the Shammah Academy school manager. and he has recently sent digital photos of the the Shammah students.  These photos will be shared with Endeavour students.  We are working on setting up penpals with some of these students.

October 16, 2007

Today was the information meeting for the Kids for Kenya club.  The date coincided with the Oct 16th and 17th worldwide Stand Up and Speak Out (against poverty) event - thus Mrs. Merdian registered the club to be participants in the event.  A short video about standing up against global poverty was shown and the Stand Up and Speak Out pledge was read.  Then the students stood up and their photo was taken.  42.7 million people across the world participated in this event, breaking their previous Guiness World Record for the number of people standing up against poverty.  The people participating in this event came from 127 countries with a majority coming from developing countries.At our meeting today, a general overview of the club's goals and activities was presented.

October 12, 2007

Endeavour students did a great job bringing in aluminum cans today - with a grand total of 135.5 pounds.  Congratulations to Mrs. Irons-Bayliss' class for bringing in the most cans. 

October 4, 2007

On Wednesday, Oct. 10th students who have expressed an interested in joining the Kids for Kenya club will be receiving an invitation/permission slip to attend an informational meeting.  The meeting will be held on Tuesday, Oct. 16th from 3:30-4:30 in Mrs. Merdian's room. Mrs. Merdian is very excited to be meeting students who are especially interested in being part of Kids for Kenya. Remember, next Friday, Oct. 12th, is our next can collection day.A big thank you to Mr. and Mrs. Olson for their financial donation this week to our fund raising efforts.

September 28, 2007

Today at our 2nd/3rd grade and 4th/5th grade awards assemblies, third graders Lexus, John, and Daveena spoke to the student body about Kids for Kenya - inviting students to join in an after-school club that will be starting soon.  Also at these assemblies, students in Mrs. Merdian's class sang a special song, "K.E.N.Y.A." to the tune of B.I.N.G.O.

"I know a country far away and Kenya is its name-o"

 

2006-2007 School Year Entries

Week One  (May 28th-1st 2007)  We collected a total of 17 pounds of cans.  Mrs. Ward's class and Mrs. Merdian's class tied for first place with each classroom bringing in exactly 6 pounds. 

Week Two (June 4th-8th 2007) This week we surpassed our challenge of trying to double last week's pounds by collecting a total of 103.5 pounds from the classrooms and additional pounds from other sources such as Hedden Elem. and individuals not directly connected to classrooms. Mr. Reardon's class had the highest weight at 22.5 pounds. This week Mrs. Merdian's students began visiting other classrooms at Endeavour and giving presentations about life in Kenya and the purpose of this fund raising activity.  Also we welcomed the news that Mr. and Mrs. Bejarano, the grandparents of one of Mrs. Merdian's students, offered to pick up all the cans and take them to the recycling company!  We are expecting to get .76 cents/pound.  Can we double the amount of cans collected again next week???

Week Three (June 11th-15th 2007) This week we collected 85 pounds of cans.  We did not exactly meet the challenge put out last week - but on the bright side we had 17 out of 20 classroom participate this week - up from 13 classrooms last week. This week we finished our classroom presentations.  The students did a great job sharing what they have learned about Kenya - and encouraging others to help. 

On Monday, June 18th the students in Mrs. Miller and Mrs. Steinkraus' classes performed their famous play - The True Story of the Three Little Pigs.  Lexus, Daveena and John, from Mrs. Merdian's class, did a great job explaining our program to the audience and collecting donations. A total of $76.33 was collected.   A big thank you to those who made a donation!

 

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