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Kindaruma, Kenya
Kivaa School
A relationship sprouted between a Plan International
sponsored child in Kenya and students
in Los Angeles during the 1990s. The exchange
evolved into an ongoing collaborative learning
relationship with students from the Kivaa School
in the rural outskirts of Nairobi. Teachers at the
school send and receive learning challenges that
expand students' awareness of what each country
has to offer the other in artistic and cultural
information while cultivating the students'
academic and artistic skills to address real-world
global and local community challenges. Students
at both ends have come to feel connected in their
striving for common personal character goals and
group goals as well. For related stories, see the
Planet Art story and the Solar Cooker story in our
Projects section.
Students of the Kivaa School took to to heart the challenge
from American partners, Beauty is What You Do.
They learned the song by the same name and learned to
show beautiful acts of kindness. Next, they cleaned up
their community's drinking source, where they fetch
water every day. They composted donkey manure, terraced
hillsides for gardening and planted new cassava
trees and taught the community about eco-friendly
agriculture. They prepared artwork depicting what
they find precious in their environment, to send to the
museum in the US and to be published in the book of
global art. They prepared the song for performance.
 Donor Deanne LaRue, of the Meridian Health Foundation,
helped transport the students to the ceremony
for the outgoing environmental director of the United
Nations Environmental Programme. They were the
only children invited, of 12,000 guests. Working in
collaboration with Plan International, the children were
well prepared for this once-in-a-lifetime privilege.
The students were invited to sing inside an art installation
for the crowd. The messages of their songs reached
not only the many guests but impressed the honoree
as well as the Nobel prize winner Wathari Methange.
The students discussed their projects with these guests
and then returned to try to design a challenge for their
American partners.
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