NAIROBI, KENYA – Kenya was never remotely on my bucket list. It was a place that in in my wildest imaginings I never expected to be. The odds of my flying to Nairobi seemed about as likely as those of boarding a shuttle to Pluto.
Boisean Vincent Kituku, however, has a way of making the unlikely happen. He beat long odds by turning a dream of helping poor children in his native country into a life-changing high school. So it was nothing for him to get me and my wife on a plane to go there. He wanted us to teach the high school’s students from an American perspective. She had the advantage of actually having been a teacher, and he figured I might be able to teach the kids a little about writing, or at least not get in the way of people who knew what they were doing. He is an optimistic man.
So what was Kenya like? It was a country that never stopped surprising us.
“Look at all the signboards in English!” I said as we drove from the airport to the hotel on our first night there.
“Tim!” Kituku said in a tone of voice normally reserved for small children. “Kenya is an English speaking country!”
Actually, I knew that. But for some reason I was expecting more Swahili, Kenya’s second official language. Members of all 42 of its tribes are required to learn it. But every single sign was in English.
Some, from our perspective as Americans, were funny; others had us scratching our heads: Good Luck Hardware, Jazzy Hardware, Semi Divine Hardware, God’s Favor Butchery, Next Level Pub, Ready Meat Hotel, Overboard Investments (and haven’t we all had a few of those?).
It’s true that Kenya is an English speaking country, but “translation” is frequently required. A University of Wyoming graduate, Kituku jokes that he has a Wyoming accent. Well, everyone in Kenya has a Wyoming accent as thick as pine tar. Add to that the fact that many of the girls and women are taught to speak just above a whisper and we were continually asking people to repeat themselves.
We expected Nairobi to seem more exotic, more foreign, but American influence was everywhere: KFC, McDonald’s, Subway, Heinz Catsup, Tabasco Sauce, American movies, Budweiser beer, Hershey’s chocolate …
It was winter there – cool nights, warm days. The temperature most afternoons was in the 70s. Pleasant for us, but not for Kenyans acclimated to their steaming hot summers. Comfortable in shirtsleeves, we were continually surprised to see people bundled up in sweaters, parkas and stocking caps.
We drove to the schools Kituku wanted us to visit through countryside that was constantly changing. We’d be in lush green hills dotted with tea and coffee plantations, and an hour later in desert reminiscent of the drive from Boise to Mountain Home.
Miles from anything resembling a settlement, you’d see a dapper man in a suit and tie standing by the roadside waiting for who-knew-what? A woman in an elegant gown walking a red dirt pathway to who-knew-where? Who were these people, and what were they doing in the middle of nowhere?
We went to places that made the middle of nowhere seem like Times Square, on roads that defied belief. Take the worst road in Idaho, throw in shards of granite protruding from the dust every few feet and an occasional stream masquerading as a mud hole and you have Kenyan wilderness roads. Negotiating them requires extra heavy duty tires and suspension, special transmissions and full-time four-wheel drive. Even with all of that, reaching your destination can seem like a small miracle.
In cities, including Nairobi with a population of over 3 million, you see very few traffic lights. Traffic is controlled mainly with roundabouts and speed bumps. Most of the time, it works. But in rush hour, L.A. has nothing on Nairobi’s gridlock – or its smog. Emission controls aren’t required. Life would be healthier and more pleasant for its citizens if they were.
It’s an understatement to say that Nairobi has experienced dramatic growth. We were driving through one of its suburbs one morning when we passed a sign that said simply, “Karen Blixen House.”
Karen Blixen? Pen name Isak Dinesen, author of “Out of Africa” and some other perfectly wonderful books? When she lived there, it was a pastoral coffee plantation. Now it’s completely surrounded by a teeming city.
“Can we go inside?” I asked Sam, our driver.
“No, it’s a private residence.”
Talk about missing a bet. A foundation could buy it, charge admission and make a fortune for a charity. Dinesen was one of the 20th Century’s great writers. I’d happily pay to see the place where she lived and worked.
This was on one of the days off that Kituku gave us from working with the students, and the day’s itinerary included an African dance exhibit. I was more interested in seeing real life than tourist attractions, but the end of the performance was unexpectedly moving.
To the surprise of everyone but the performers, giggling audience members were dragged onstage to try to dance with them: Africans, Americans, Europeans, Asians, Hispanics … Their smiles and laughter and genuine good will left me misty eyed. This was at a time when terrorist attacks and racial tension were dominating the news back home. And here, for a few moments at least, people of every creed and color were simply having fun and enjoying life together. How sad, for all of us, that it can’t be that way more of the time.
Visits to the schools could be emotional as well. The students were beyond grateful for small things we take for granted – pencils, pens, shoes, underwear. Some of them live in homes smaller than many Americans’ closets. And those are the ones lucky enough to have homes. We met a girl at Kituku’s school who came from a home made of sticks and slept on a bed of sticks. Some Kenyans have virtually nothing but the clothes they wear.
Weeks earlier, Kituku told us that going to Kenya was a transforming experience, that we would return as different people.
Did we? Yes and no. We’re the same people, but our gratitude for what we have increased exponentially. We Americans don’t always appreciate how truly lucky we are. What cosmic force allowed us to be born into relative luxury while so much of the rest of the world barely has enough to eat?
My wife and I volunteer at a shelter in Boise and thought we knew what poverty was before we went to Kenya. We had no idea. Seeing it made us more grateful for what we have and more committed to sharing. We can’t afford to add a wing to a school or a hospital, but we can help more students go to a school that means the difference between a good life and one of destitution. We can afford $400 for eye surgery that will prevent a child from going blind. I’ve spent more than that on guitars.
Did Kenya change us? No, not dramatically.
Did it change our commitment to helping those less fortunate than we are? Absolutely.

Next: Misadventures in Europe by rail. Tim’s column appears in The Idaho Statesman on Sundays for the next two weeks and every other Sunday after that. It’s posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

Tim Woodward recently returned from Kenya, where he spent time at Caring Hearts High School and several primary schools. Donations from Boise support or help support all of the schools. This is the second of two stories from the trip.

YATTA, KENYA – Kikeneani Primary School is a series of block buildings with rusting, corrugated metal roofs and dimly lit, overcrowded classrooms. Some of its students are from families so poor they pay their children’s tuition in goats.
The school is one of those that supply students to Caring Hearts High School, where tuition, board and room are paid by donations from Boise. Caring Hearts students have adequate living quarters, regular meals, dressy uniforms. Many Kikeneani students don’t have shoes.
The government gives the school $13 per year per student.
“It’s enough for chalk and some repairs,” Principal Joshua Ngumbo said.
The school’s singers and dancers were good enough to qualify for a national competition, but couldn’t go because there was no money for matching costumes.
“Parents support us with what little they can,” Ngumbo said. “They don’t have much.”
Parents with enough food provide their children with a modest lunch to take to school. Students whose families don’t have enough food go hungry at school.
Christopher Mumo, who went to school at Yatta and now teaches math and physics at Caring Hearts High School, worries about the overcrowding at Kikeneani Primary.
“It’s difficult for the teachers,” he said. “They are very good, but the classes are so large (11 teachers for 380 students). There is a desperate need for more teachers .”
Yatta is in an arid part of Kenya. During a recent drought, many of the plants and animals died. Boise’s Caring Hearts and Hands of Hope sent the school $2,000, enough to feed the students for three months.
Boisean Vincent Kituku, CHHH’s president and the founder of Caring Hearts High School, has no trouble relating to the Kikeneani students. He grew up not far away, in similar circumstances.
“I was the firstborn of 12 children,” he told the students, their teachers and a small contingent of parents standing or seated on portable chairs outside the school for an assembly. “I grew up in a house of mud. My mother taught me to write with a stick in the dirt. When I was 13, my mother brought me something all wrapped up. Can you guess what it was? It was underwear. I was 13 when I got my first underwear, 17 when I wore my first pair of shoes. I was nine before I saw a watch. It was noon when I couldn’t see my shadow. It was three when I cried for water.”
His point, that he once was as poor as the Kikeneani students but through years of hard study rose above poverty, found its mark. Where music, dancing and cheers had punctuated the hot afternoon moments before, the only sound was the breeze rustling the leaves of the trees.
“As long as you have a dream, you are not poor,” Kituku told his audience. “A little dream can make a big difference in your life and the lives of those you love.”
Dedan Mutua’s dream is to attend Caring Hearts High School when he’s old enough. Seven but small for his age because of malnutrition, he lives near Kikeneani Primary School but isn’t a student there. Dedan is the son of a single mother who died of AIDS. He took her death so hard that for a long time he wouldn’t sleep anywhere but on her grave. His grandmother took him in, and CHHH built her a home and pays for him to live at private boarding school where he has enough to eat. His grandmother walks two kilometers to visit him there.
Kituku delivered 100 new school uniforms to the Kikeneani students on a July day when he visited with a group of Caring Hearts sponsors. The clothes’ recipients immediately ran inside and changed out of the frayed, faded uniforms they’d been wearing. The only things brighter than the vibrant blue of their new sweaters were the smiles on their faces. You’d have thought it was Christmas morning.
The uniforms cost $15 each.
Before they left, Kituku and the sponsors were invited to sit at outdoor tables with lavender tablecloths and treated to a display of the school’s award-winning dancing and singing and a feast of bananas, oranges, chicken livers, bread, bottled water and tea. It was more than the students had to eat all day. Visitors who had grumped about the heat, dust and bumpy roads during the drive to the school were reduced to silence by the realization that their visit was a highlight of the school year.
“We have no words to thank you,” Ngumbo told them. “We hope that you will come to visit us again and that someday one of us can go to America.”
When school ended for the day and it was time for the visitors to leave, every student walking the road that led to their homes waved, smiled and shouted “bye bye.”
Every single one of them.
Another of the schools CHHH helps support is the primary school at Kangundo, Kenya. Families of 300 of its 1,100 students can’t afford the equivalent of $5 a month for school lunch, so the kids go hungry at school. Another 100 are orphans.
The school accepts blind children from several counties. Sixty of its 1,100 students are blind, virtually all of them penniless. A few have multiple disabilities. One blind boy has a condition that affects his equilibrium. To keep his balance, he constantly has to move his head.
Some of the blindness is caused by malaria, some from a type of cataracts that occur in children. Treatment that would prevent those with cataracts from losing their sight costs $200 per eye. Few families are able to afford it.
Patrick Mbauni lost his sight when he was 10. He dropped out of school because of it, but never lost his desire to learn. He is now a 24-year-old fourth grader at Kangundo Primary.
“Normally he would be far too old to be at this grade level,” Principal Bernard Kivava said. “But he works hard and gets along well with the others. He is like an older brother to the younger boys and girls.”
Mbauni’s developmental disabilities are severe enough that he’ll have almost no chance of academically qualifying for high school. Kituku hopes to enroll him in a vocational school where he’ll be trained for a job working with his hands.
The blind students use braille textbooks to pursue their studies. A braille textbook costs 1,200 to1,500 shillings ($12 to $15), Kivava said, compared with 270 shillings for normal textbooks. CHHH does what it can to help. Donations from Boise have paid for school supplies, walking canes for the blind, several computers and new mattresses.
“There needs to be uniformity for all of the students,” Kituku said. “Social discrimination, where kids whose families can afford it have expensive mattresses while the poor languish in rags, is not encouraged.”
Nine graduates of the school are now enrolled at Caring Hearts High School, where they are being educated for good jobs. Many of its students will go on to universities.
A jolting, six-hour drive from Kangundo, over roads that make travelers feel as if they’ve spent the day in a blender, is the Masai Mara (Masai Plains) Game Park. Safaris that draw wealthy tourists to Masai Mara cost more than the Masai people who live in a village there will see in their lifetimes.
The village’s ten families live in dwellings made of cow manure, housing an average of 11 people each. The structures are roughly 130 square feet. There are no windows and one, four-inch hole for ventilation. The heat and smoke from the fires used for cooking, and for warmth in the southern-hemisphere winters, are stifling.
The reality of contemporary life there is nothing like the romanticized version of the Masai seen in “Out of Africa” and other Hollywood films. The days when the tribe was self reliant and reigned proudly over a harsh environment are, if they ever existed, a fading memory. Today the Masai conduct tours of their village, carry visitors’ bags, sell blankets, jewelry and trinkets.
“A few of them would like to keep their traditional culture, but the Masai see the writing on the wall,” Kituku said. “They are surrounded by so much wealth. There are probably 5,000 people a year from all over the world who come here for safaris. A lot of the tourists would like the Masai to stay traditional, but the Masai can see how the rest of the world is. They are ashamed of their poverty.”
Poor as it is – its students are thrilled with gifts as basic as pencils and pens – the village’s school may be its inhabitants’ best hope for a better future. Entrance requirements at Caring Hearts High School are less stringent for Masai children. Three are now students there.
“They struggled at first,” Kituku said. “They were at the bottom of their class. Now they are catching up and have passed a few of the other students. Being poor doesn’t mean that they are not bright.”
Few of the Idahoans and others who donate to CHHH will ever see those students, or those at Yatta or Kangundo or Caring Hearts High School. They’ll never see their radiant smiles or hear their heartfelt expressions of gratitude. If they could, they would know that their generosity is making a difference.

Tim Woodward’s regular columns, beginning with a column on his personal experiences in Kenya, will return next Sunday. HIs columns are posted on woodwardblog.com on Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

Tim Woodward recently returned from Kenya, where he spent time with students, their sponsors and teachers at Caring Hearts High School. The school was founded by a Boisean and is largely supported by donations from Boise people. This is the first of two stories from his time there.

NGLUMI, K enya – Brenda Muinde wakes up every weekday to the ring of her dorm matron’s bell at 4 a.m. She has half an hour to bathe, dress and get to a study hall. Of the the next 17 hours, all but three will be devoted to study and classes.
She’s grateful for every one of them.
At home, the first sound she heard would have been her grandmother telling her to get up and gather firewood. She’d have had no daily bath, no medical supplies or modern sanitation, not enough to eat.
“I don’t know what I would do without Caring Hearts High School,” the 16-year-old sophomore said. “I would have no future. I would have to work as a maid or a prostitute.”
Most of the school’s 137 girls have similar stories. Details vary – some are orphans, some victims of abuse or other family tragedies – but the common denominator is poverty.
Juliet Mutua’s father is dead, her mother mentally ill. Prior to coming to Caring Hearts High School, where she lives in a dorm neat enough to satisfy a drill sergeant, she lived in a house made of sticks and slept on a bed of sticks. The Caring Hearts Foundation built a home for her and her mother so she’d have a place to study. Painfully shy but exceptionally bright, she passed her entrance exam the first time and has the highest grade point average in her junior class of 30 students. She wants to be a doctor.
The school year lasts 11 months. The newest student, Grace Kimeu, doesn’t want to go home between terms because there is virtually nothing there for her. An abusive father, not enough to eat, not enough of anything.
“Thank you with all my heart!” her mother, Caroline Kimeu, tearfully said to student sponsors visiting from Boise. “Thank you for saving my daughter.”
Winfred Nduku didn’t have enough to eat at home and suffered from malnutrition. She passed the public high school entrance exam three times, but her family couldn’t afford tuition. Now, with her tuition funded by donations from Boise, she’s a 19-year-old freshman at the high school.
“It breaks my heart to think of that,” Vincent Kituku, the school’s founder, said. “I have a son the same age who is a junior in college.”
One student was trying to care for her mother, who died of AIDS. Caring Hearts transferred her from another school following her mother’s death to give her a better chance to succeed. Such stories are common in rural Kenya, where few can afford medical care.
Public high schools are available, but they cost from $350 a year for the bottom tier to $3,000 a year for schools only wealthy families can afford. Most families can’t afford $350. Daughters of families too poor to send them to high school face bleak futures. The luckiest end up doing menial labor. Those not as fortunate can be sold at puberty to older husbands – polygamy is legal in Kenya – or become prostitutes. High school makes all the difference, leading to relatively good jobs or university educations and professional careers.
Caring Hearts is the only high school in the country where donations, virtually all from Boise, pay the fees of students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend high school.
Dollars go a long way in Kenya. Large donations – a $100,000 donation from the Morrison Foundation helped get the school up and running – but a $500 donation pays for a year of school, including room, board and school uniforms. (University tuition is about the same.) It’s the first time in many of the students’ lives that they’ve had nice clothes, a good bed, enough to eat and adequate medical care.
Kituku, a native Kenyan who has lived in Boise since 1992, started Caring Hearts High School two years ago. He remembers the night that led to its creation, and that changed his life:
“It was in 2010. I came to Kenya to visit my wife’s sister whose son had been kicked out of school for an $80 balance. Eighty dollars! His family couldn’t afford to pay it, and that was exactly what I was paying for a hotel. What I was paying for one night would have kept him in school. I left that hotel and never went back. From that time on, I have been working to help these kids go to school.”
A writer and public speaker, he raised enough money through donations and speaking engagements over four years to pay for 240 needy students’ tuition at public schools. But he was convinced that he could help more students more effectively by opening a school himself.
By 2014, Kituku had raised enough money to purchase a school with eight classrooms, a dormitory, athletic field, garden, kitchen, dining hall and a duplex on an eight-acre compound near Nglumi town – 90 bone-rattling minutes from the capital of Nairobi on roads more than generously supplied with potholes and speed bumps.
Boisean Carrie Barton became a major donor to the school because she “liked the fact that Vincent was so intimately involved and that there were almost no administrative costs. Virtually all of what you donate is used to help the kids. That, and I could be involved. I help with some of the administrative work, and I can go to Kenya to help at the school and interact with the students.”
Barton spent long days at a desk in the school parking lot last month, interviewing students about their younger siblings.
“All of the siblings who pass the entrance exam will go to school here,” she said. “I only asked the girls about their siblings, but they kept throwing in cousins, nieces, nephews … It was touching.”
When the Caring Hearts Foundation purchased the school in 2014, Kituku said, it “was run down and overgrown with weeds. The teachers weren’t qualified, there was no discipline and the dorm was dirty and messy. There was no library, no computer lab or science facilities. Seven students shared one book.”
Most of the students, he added, were from wealthy families and lacked motivation. Some were selling drugs. One tried to burn the dorm down because he wanted to quit school and go home.
The difference between then and now is night and day. All but one of Caring Heart’s nine teachers are college trained, and the ninth is working on his degree. No books are shared. Every student has textbooks and access to a library, a science lab and a computer lab with 40 computers. A new well supplies the school with safe drinking water.
Students are attentive in class, respectful to teachers. Infrequent disciplinary problems are referred to Principal Pamela Atieno Ndongo, a commanding figure who teaches math and business and nips unacceptable behavior in the bud by merely raising an eyebrow or changing her tone of voice. She lives in the campus duplex.
“It’s more than a full-time job,” she said. “I need to be here all the time for things that can come up after school hours.”
By American standards, the campus is modest. The classrooms are spartan; the study hall is a converted chicken coop. But the classrooms are airy and well lit, the grounds and buildings neat and tidy, the students hard working and unfailingly polite. They speak softly and tend to look away when addressing grownups. In their culture, loud voices or looking directly at a person while speaking are considered disrespectful.
In addition to studying physics, geography, biology, chemistry, math, reading, history, government, English and Swahili (plus electives), they do their own laundry and grow their own fruits and vegetables in the school’s garden.
A sign outside the classroom building encourages them to “think big; it doesn’t hurt.” Another cautions, “Silence! Learning taking place.” The girls study hard, but smile easily and often. They’re clearly happy to be here.
Though their backgrounds may be all the motivation they need, the administration isn’t shy about reinforcing their work ethic.
“Work twice as hard, three times as hard,” school treasurer Bernard Kivuva admonished them during an assembly. “The way you can repay your parents and your sponsors is to be successful. If you are, they will be happy. If you are not, they will cry.”
The school slogan, “Youth empowered to serve, lead and influence,” is meant to be taken literally. Graduates are expected to go on to universities and use their educations to improve lives in their communities and beyond. A majority of students interviewed hope to become doctors, engineers, scientists or teachers.
Improving the community doesn’t wait for graduation. On a hot day in July, the schedule included a rare break from classes to pick up litter in Nglumi, the nearest town. It was hard, dirty work, but there were no complaints. The girls sang, chatted and giggled like teenagers everywhere.
The contrast with their former lives couldn’t be greater, but for Kituku it’s just a beginning. He plans to add another floor to the dormitory, build another classroom building and add a Life Skills program and an improved kitchen and dining hall. A typical day’s fare: bread, porridge, corn, beans, fresh vegetables and tea.
He’s also negotiating for land to build a school for boys. Using education to alleviate poverty in his native country, with help from caring hearts in his adopted country, has become his mission in life.
It extends even to a Massai village inhabited by the poorest of the poor, where a lucky few students now have a chance to escape poverty that can reduce visitors to tears.
“Caring Hearts has introduced me to human suffering I never knew existed,” Kituku said. “And to caring people I never knew existed.”

Next Monday: The poorest of the poor. Schools that make Caring Hearts High School seem like an educational paradise.

Note: Sorry to be posting this one late. I just returned from almost three weeks in Kenya and Europe. This ran in The Statesman before I left, but my Statesman deadline is five days ahead of the publication dates and I can’t post columns on the blog until after they’ve run in the newspaper. Thanks for your patience. — Tim

 

Twenty-some years ago, at a party in the Owyhee Hotel, a man in a billowing, bright orange mumu approached me and struck up a conversation.

Mumu isn’t the right word, but it’s the the closest I can come to describing his attire, which was from his native Kenya. He’d recognized me from the photo that runs with my column and figured it was time we got to know each other. Little did I suspect that one day he’d be leading me on one of the great adventures of my life.
His name was Vincent Kituku. You may know him from the occasional Faith columns he writes for this newspaper, or as a motivational speaker. He’s traveled to towns and cities throughout the state giving motivational lectures. He’s given motivational lectures to, among others, the BSU football team. He’s a motivated fellow.
We’ve stayed in touch ever since that night — e-mails, coffee, the occasional lunch. I’ve interviewed him for a column or two; he interviewed me for a radio program. In recent years, most of our conversations have had to do with the high school he started in Kenya.
Think about that. Imagine trying to start a school – a high school, no less – in a poor country on the other side of the world, relying mainly on donations. Only someone as motivated – driven might be a better word – as Kituku could have pulled it off.
Caring Hearts High School, in the rural area of Kenya where he was raised – has 120 students, mainly girls. It’s made an enormous difference in their lives.
This is a place so poor that at ages when most American kids are taking junior high for granted, girls can be sold to much older husbands. Here, where that kind of poverty is all but unknown, we’d say that was unthinkable. There, it can mean survival.
Knowing a few of the things that motivated Kituku might help you understand: A promising college student, an orphan, who couldn’t attend college because he couldn’t afford the $200 tuition. A student who had to drop out of high school because he didn’t have $105 to pay for his senior year. A mother of six who hanged herself because she couldn’t afford her daughter’s high school tuition.
Caring Hearts High School’s students’ fees are paid by donations, mainly from people here in Boise. Saved from lives of drudgery, or worse, most of the students go on to good jobs or to college and even better jobs – teachers, accounts, engineers, doctors … The school has made all the difference for them.
That brings us to my great adventure. A few years ago, my wife and I started sponsoring a girl at the high school. Her name is Elizabeth. Her picture is on our refrigerator; we got a nice letter from her last year. Sponsoring a student there is, by U.S. standards, ridiculously cheap – $500 a year, including room and board.
We thought it would be nice to meet Elizabeth one day, but never thought it would happen. Kenya is over 9,000 miles from Boise. Other “long” trips we’ve taken – Mexico, Hawaii, the eastern U.S. – have been comparative joy rides. And Nairobi, where we’ll be landing, has never been on our bucket list.
But, we’re going. Kituku asked me to teach writing to the kids at Caring Hearts. My wife, who has the benefit of actually having been a teacher, will teach other subjects from an American perspective.
I cannot tell you how much this at once excites and intimidates me. Yes, it could be the trip of a lifetime. But what do I know about teaching? Zip, that’s what. And the thought of traveling all that way, especially with my history of travel mishaps, is, frankly, a bit daunting. It wouldn’t be out of character for me to misread or misunderstand something, get on the wrong plane and end up in, say, Dingo, Australia or Catbrain, England.
You don’t just get up one day and go to Kenya. We started getting ready in March, with vaccinations. The people at St. Luke’s Travel Clinic couldn’t have been nicer or more helpful. In addition to inoculating us for typhoid, yellow fever and hepatitis, they gave us prescriptions for malaria pills and antibiotics and sent us off with friendly advice and a sackful of useful travel information.
I won’t bog you down you with all of them, but a few of the things you need to do to go to Kenya are applying for visas, setting up international plans for your phones, getting adaptors and voltage changers to charge your phones, making sure your bank and credit card companies know where and when you’re going, making copies and backup copies of important documents, and – my favorite – spraying every garment you’ll be wearing with three ounces of insect repellent. Even socks. We went through an ocean of the stuff.
And those are just a few of the things.
Our flight home included a four-hour layover in Amsterdam that we were able to stretch into a week. Amsterdam is a short train ride from the city where I was stationed in Germany in the Navy, and returning to see old haunts there has been on my bucket list for years. We’ll also spend a couple of days in Prague, also on our bucket list, and a day in Munich before flying home.
You can read all about it, starting Aug. 14 and each Sunday thereafter for four weeks: two feature stories about the school and the students in Kenya, and three columns from the rest of the trip.
No one is more curious than I am about what they’re going to say. I’m told that Africa has a way of changing people, and that no one goes there just once. This, in fact, will be the fourth trip for one of the Boiseans who’s going with us.
Kituku calls a first visit to Kenya “a transforming experience.”
I can’t wait to tell you more about that.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on wooddwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.