A Long Island high school senior learns life lessons from a summer in Kenya  volunteer work

On a bright July day in Nangili, Kenya, the kids from the village gather at Blessed Children’s Home, a refuge for 11 orphans, to kick around a soccer ball made from discarded plastic bags tied tightly together with rope. Dan, a volunteer in his 30s, divides the kids into teams for a lively game that lasts all afternoon.

“The biggest challenge for me,” Dan says, “is keeping the kids busy on days when they don’t have school.” 

Blessed Children’s Home has no running water, television or social media, and an outhouse filled with sewage. The living conditions were tough for my 15-year-old brother Caleb and I to get used to, but we quickly came to understand that these kids in Nangili have something many American kids lack. They have friendships stemming from the sufferings they have experienced together, and they have learned to enjoy the simple things in life.

Caleb and I are runners on the Farmingdale High School cross-country track team, and we went to Kenya to train at the High Altitude Training Centre in Iten. My dad was in Kenya for work, and he enrolled us in the Centre for 10 days of training. Founded by former world champion Lornah Kiplagat, the Centre is located in the Rift Valley, 8,000 feet above sea level. The training we received from Kenya’s world-class runners was excellent, but our richest and most memorable experiences in Kenya were with the orphans we met in Nangili. 

Bishop Gideon Mudenyo and his wife, Evelyn, who hosted us in Kenya, have opened three children's homes that together house over 200 orphans. They started the homes because people kept leaving at their doorstep children who had lost their parents and grandparents. Police officers would also drop off orphans who were being abused by relatives. Kenya has three to four million orphans because the nation was hit hard by both the AIDS and COVID-19 epidemics.

When we arrived at Blessed Children’s Home, the children welcomed us warmly. They live on a diet mostly consisting of rice and vegetables. For drinking water, they use captured rainwater and water drawn from a hand-dug unfiltered well. The home's managers, Rose Nanjala Maraka and her husband, Pastor Peter Misiko Juma, have built a coop to house 200 chickens and they plan to dig a deeper well to supply clean drinking water.   

Nangili is a very poor village with few resources. But its children find joy in playing card games and soccer. We spent many hours a day with them, laughing, running, competing, and playing.

Being back in Farmingdale is very different now. The kids in Kenya had barely any material possessions or resources. They didn't have Instagram, Snapchat, or even basic necessities we take for granted. Yet in forging a community, they were happy, perhaps happier in some ways than us kids in the United States. They seemed less self-conscious than American kids because they weren’t constantly comparing themselves to images online.

Although I missed Farmingdale when I was in Kenya, I gained a new appreciation for all the things we have here. Now I will try to live a life that is more thankful and more focused on people than on things. I want to study business in college so I can help open social enterprises in Africa that would give opportunities to kids like the orphans I met. They taught me more than I ever imagined. I realize now that I can learn the deepest life lessons from people with whom I might have thought I had little in common. 

I look forward to returning to Nangili to play with them again.

This guest essay reflects the views of Zachary Carle, a rising senior at Farmingdale High School. He spent a month this summer in Kenya.