All Saints Episcopal Church

The aim of the Friends of Meisori School is to provide direct practical assistance to students at the Meisori Primary School. The school serves children aged 6-14 in the Meisori Administrative Region of the Great Rift Valley of Kenya. The people who live here, a t tribe called the Nyemps, scrape a living from the sun-baked land where little more than cactus grows, where rains are rare and when they do come, flooding is a constant hazard if the rain doesn't just disappear into the stony ground.  The school serves up to 300 children, many who walk up to 12 kilometres to school every day.

The effort began after a group of four friends had the unexpected opportunity to visit a local African primary school while on a safari holiday in Kenya.  On arrival at the school, they were greeted by welcoming children in classrooms that were bare.  On that visit, the four visited each of the eight classes and as they spoke with the children, they would ask the children what they wanted more than anything and the response was the same. “We want education. We need help to pay our way through secondary school.” Moved by these encounters, the friends did further investigation and discovered that these children had free primary education, but their families could not afford to send them to secondary school, so they passed their national primary exams and then stopped their education.  They decided that they would try to find a way to provide help that would result in a big difference to a small number of children (children who they had met and knew).  Thus Friends of Meisori School was born. We became connected to the ministry because two of the founding four were close friends of Paul and Sheelagh Higginson, active members of our parish. 

In the five years that the organization has operated, the Friends have been able to provide new desks (almost 100 in total) and other improvements to the school, while also launching a sponsorship program in which the fees for secondary school are paid for a total of 35 students each year.  When the Friends begin sponsoring a student, they continue the sponsorship through the student’s completion of his/her high school schooling.   Read more about how a small group is making a big difference on the website!

The Lwala Community Alliance is a non-profit health and development agency founded by Drs. Milton and Fred Ochieng’, who are natives of Lwala, a rural village in the Nyanza Province of western Kenya. Milton and Fred lost their parents to HIV while in college in the U.S. and took this as a call to action to provide access to primary care in their community. During medical school at Vanderbilt, the brothers did all they could to raise the funds to start a clinic back at home. Their story is the subject of the documentary “Sons of Lwala” and has been featured on ABC World News and CNN.  In April 2007, after 3 years of fundraising, the Lwala Community Health Center finally opened. Over time the program has become more multi-dimensional to include small scale micro-enterprise, public health outreach, water and sanitation, and education programming. In April 2011, construction on a new maternity and integrative care wing was completed, thereby tripling the space of the original clinic. As a result, the facility is now designated as the Lwala Community Hospital. Our clinical staff at the hospital provide more than 15,000 patient visits each year, and we have over 1000 people enrolled in HIV care. Our education program reaches out to 15 schools and we employ dozens of Kenyans through our various programs.  Read more about this incredible ministry at the alliance’s website.

In Mali, 1 in 5 children dies before his or her fifth birthday and 1 in 22 women dies from maternal health complications. The rise of “slums,” characterized by poverty and the lack of social services, poses a new challenge to global health– and new opportunities for social change.  Mali Health works in one of these “slums” – the urban community of Sikoro – and uses a community based approach which revolves around three strategies: 1) Fostering the agency of residents and community structures to mobilize to address community health needs; 2) Promoting health education, prevention, and early care seeking; and 3) Enhancing access to health care for the poor.  Read more about this creative and effective ministry at the project’s website.