The Report Card Is In

Nope, not for me. When I was tromping through the bush on a praticularly muddy day last June, I met a young man named David. He was newly orphaned and part of the orphan program. We were doing home visits.

What we found at this home was a 16-year-old tending his own farm, going to school, and caring for his preteen sister. His English was better than mine. His corn was growing better than all the neighbors'. When he invited us into his two-room mud home, it was spotless. He explained that it was a school holiday and that was the only reason we had found him at home.

We were offered the one chair that he had at the little table that took up almost every inch of space in the larger of the two rooms. He told us that his little sister slept at the home of a neighbor, but he was still responsible for feeding her. That meant that neither of them ate much of the time.

David did not know how he was going to survive in the future. Only primary school is free in Kenya. He is a high schooler who needs school fees, a uniform, and books, all out of his own pockets. His current school year had been paid for. After that there was no money coming in. He would have to quit, though he really did not want to.

I asked him what he wanted to be. A doctor, he told me.

As I hiked away from David's mud home after leaving him with a bag of powdered vitamin supplements to add to his porridge (when he had any) I thought to myself that if this kid wanted to be a doctor, then a doctor he should be.

He lives on his own, caring for and feeding his younger sister and farms to bring in their only food, all while going to school when most others would have given up long ago. He was obviously as smart as a whip, but beyond that he had that intangible something that great people are made of.

I had realized a ways into my East Africa trip that the needs there were great, and the best I could do with my meager funds was find one situation where I could make a large impact.

After I got home, I wrote the check to get David through the next year of high school. My sister did the same for David's sister, Rose. This means they have all of the books, school supplies, and school fees that they need, and no longer go barefoot.

My friend Davis who is living at the seminary until March is helping to organize all this. He went to David's school to find him the first time to tell him about the funding. Davis said that kid was so overwhelmed he was shaking and coudn't speak. It was during that visit Davis saw the deplorable conditions of David's school and yanked him out of there. Four kids to a desk, sixty to a classroom.

He now attends a much nicer school that is geared toward the sciences (perfect for someone wanting to go into medicine) that even has a chemistry lab and keeps very close tabs on the progress of the students. They moved David back down a grade level because they felt there were a lot of holes in his knowledge base from the sub-par schools he had been attending to that point despite being such a good student.

The report card for his first semester in the new school arrived in the mail two days ago. He is ready to move up to the next grade level after Christmas! He got very good grades in all his science classes, a C in English (the kid is probably bored to death - I told you his English is better than mine) and his best grade of all was in agriculture. Little wonder - the kid runs his own subsistence farm!

I have to admit, receiving somone else's report card was a little strange for me. It felt pretty darn adult to be looking over someone else's grades to give them my stamp of approval.

Enclosed with David's grades was a letter from his little sister Rose to my sister and her family who are paying for her schooling. She mostly thanked them for the money and detailed what it had been spent on. But there was one line in particular that to me said it all.

"Thank you for helping me to be proud of myself."

Their mother died in 2005. I find myself thinking about her often, that hopefully she has some peace, wherever she is, that her children are being looked after.