Children at a Maldon school have been donating their outgrown shoes to children thousands of miles away in Kenya - and establishing friendships at the same time.
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Posted: 11 Jan 2010
A Catholic primary school in Maldon has set up an imaginative scheme to help children thousands of miles away in Kenya. Children from St Francis Catholic Primary School have been donating their outgrown shoes to disadvantaged youngsters in Kenya through the Shoe Rafiki project. So far around 100 pairs have been donated. The project is the brainchild of St Francis parent Annabel Brown, who has established a link with Il Masin School, south of Nairobi in Kenya, through a friend living in the area.
“The principle is children helping children,” she says. “‘Rafiki’ means friend in Kiswahili. The children donate their outgrown shoes along with photographs and messages. After the shoes have been distributed, our representative in Kenya sends back photos and details of the lives of the children who receive them. St Francis’ pupils love reading the messages from their friends in Kenya and seeing their shoes on someone else’s feet.”
Headteacher Susanne Breen agrees. “Our One World work focused on Kenya and this is such a good idea. Our children are so captivated when they get a letter and a picture from the recipient of their shoes. The fact that they know a child there makes it all the more real.”
Louise Leakey, who lives on the edge of the Rift Valley close to Il Masin school, is at the Kenyan end of the project. “Over the years I have worked closely with the school and we have managed to support them in various ways. Annabel wrote to me one day saying that her daughter was growing out of beautiful, barely used shoes. She suggested sending the shoes to a little girl at the school and that way her daughter could have a friend and learn a little bit about the other girl’s life. So we came up with the idea of Shoe Rafiki.”
Leakey thinks it would be wonderful to get more schools involved and children from such different backgrounds talking to each other. “The big problem is finding a way to get the shoes out to Kenya from the UK. That’s the big challenge,” she adds. At the moment, the shoes are carried by friends travelling to Kenya but Brown hopes to persuade Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines to help with some hold space. She is also hoping to get some local companies to sponsor the project.
Following the recent drought in Kenya and subsequent food shortages there, St Francis' pupils also undertook a 5km sponsored walk around Maldon at the end of November. Says headteacher Breen: “The Mayor of Maldon started the walk, which drew a good crowd of children, parents, dogs and onlookers. When you empower children, they rise to the occasion.” The walkers each carried a bottle of water and a piece of wood, she added, in imitation of the Kenyan children who walk to school each day with water to drink and a piece of firewood for the kitchen.
More than £1,100 was raised altogether. Some will go towards a new computer room at Il Masin school and some will be used to provide a feast for the children. “Our pupils want to buy some goats for them,” says Breen. “Goat is a delicacy for the Kenyan children.”
Il Masin is a government-run primary school and has eight classes and a nursery school. There are over 400 children in the school.
All pictures courtesy of Shoe Rafiki. For more information go to www.shoerafiki.org.uk
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