There are about 80 beautiful young souls that live at the Sikizana Rescue Center in a village near Mtito Andei, Kenya. These children and teenagers face poverty, drought, pandemic, and gender-based violence, but remain resilient because they know they can make change.
This summer, I was invited by the Greater Project, a Cincinnati-based non-profit, to document their first in-person visit to the rescue center in two years. Greater Project helped grow the Sikizana Rescue Center up from the ground as an early supporter, when the center's two directors, Cosmas and Rachel, only hosted a handful of orphaned children in their Nairobi home. The non-profit has expanded hugely since then, and even with the hardships and physical disconnection caused by the pandemic, children have continued to thrive. Through a constant flow of resources and funding to allow each child a path to education through a sponsorship program, an e-tutoring program allowing the children to practice their english outside of school hours, and the creation of a Girls Leadership Program to uplift individual and community strength in a self-sustaining way, an on-going collaboration built with love has made a real difference.
While some non-profits tend to parachute in to international communities, donate books or build schools, then never offer sustainable plans of development or even return, the Greater Project works to create continuous growth by investing monthly resources for the individual children and the rescue center to develop beyond annual visits. As the Matthew 4:19 verse goes, and the founders of the Greater Project paraphrased during the visit to Kenya in speaking about the non-profit's goal, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."