Breaking the Cycle of Poverty

By: Andrea Schiarizzi
Posted In: News

While a student at Salve, Leila de Bruyne spent four summers volunteering at By Grace Disabled and Orphans Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. Each year, she returned with more friends and more money, but she knew it wasn’t enough. Thus, in 2007, Flying Kites was born.

Based on a three-tiered model of exemplary care, community strengthening and childcare forum, Flying Kites isn’t your typical nonprofit. Rather than provide the bare-bones minimum of food, education and healthcare to hundreds of orphans, Flying Kites aims to break the cycle of poverty by giving the best care possible to a handful of children.

De Bruyne said the push for her to begin Flying Kites came with the realization that she no longer believed that By Grace was the best she could do for the orphaned children she had worked with for so many years. In order to get the kids somewhere better, she needed to start her own nonprofit.

“They don’t deserve outdated textbooks and secondhand clothes,” de Bruyne said. “These are children. They deserve healthcare and education, just like any of us do.”

The Flying Kites philosophy is at once simple and revolutionary; get the basics right and everything else will follow suit. These basics are good nutrition, clean water, fresh air and plenty of open space.

De Bruyne and fellow volunteers Toby Storie-Pugh and Justine Axelsson teamed with homeless-children advocate Rahab Mithithi to search for the perfect piece of land on which to build the childcare center they envisioned. In the course of their pursuit the group was introduced to Benson Nderitu, a local Kenyan businessman. Nderitu had a home and five acres of land in the countryside of Kinangop, an hour away from the disease and danger of the slums. Nderitu donated the land and the house to Flying Kites. The organization bought more acres of land flanking Nderitu’s property, and the 12 acres and country house became Flying Kites Kinangop Children’s Center (FKKCC). The idea was that in the Aberdares Mountains, the children would have space to run, play and just be kids.

Fast forward two years, and FKKCC is now home to 16 children, only one of whom is from By Grace. The other 15 are local youths who simply have nowhere else to go.

So, who are these children? Are they future government leaders, schoolteachers, firefighters or police officers? De Bruyne believes that this is the wrong question because now that these children have futures, their possibilities and potential are endless.

“Our goal is to help them figure out what their goals are,” de Bruyne said. “We want to give them the same kind of childhood and education and opportunities that we have, and every opportunity to be active citizens.”

Bridget Sheerin, a friend of de Bruyne’s from college, first volunteered with the group at By Grace in 2006 after her junior year. During her one month stay in Kenya, Sheerin either walked or rode a bus to the orphanage every day, where she would teach, draw or play sports.

“It sounds typical, but imagine it in the slums,” de Bruyne said. “it’s dirty, overcrowded, the buildings are dilapidated. There were too many kids and we couldn’t give all of them attention.”

“The conditions were dreadful,” de Bruyne said. “Kids were falling asleep in class. They had scabies. There was a lack of learning materials and a lack of space.”

FKKCC is a far cry from these slums, which is exactly what its founders knew the children needed in order to have any chance at all in life.

Sheerin is now actively involved with Flying Kites, and for her, the question isn’t whether she will go back to Kenya. It’s when.

Sheerin and de Bruyne remember one day they spent at By Grace as both remarkable and heartrending.

The day the volunteers took 300 children to the zoo, they rented two enormous buses and drove 30 minutes to a Safari walk. The purpose of the excursion was to get the kids, who had spent their whole lives in Africa, to experience animals, trees and nature.

While the day was theoretically a success, de Bruyne refuses to rest on triumphs like this. “It’s pathetic that their favorite day is the one day a year they get to see anything natural,” de Bruyne said. “It’s awful that they are deprived of this. It’s not good enough. It’s actually violent to let them live like this. We, as donors and volunteers, have to change that.”

And change things they are.

“What’s really exciting for me is that we have programs starting that are so much more structured than what we did on our own,” Sheerin said. “You begin to realize that there are problems, but they can be fixed with the right resources.”

Reflecting on the zoo trip, de Bruyne is proud of how far Flying Kites has come, and proud of the fact that now, these kids who grew up in the slums get to live smack in the middle of the best nature has to offer: mountains, fresh air, open space, the works.

As for the future of FKKCC, de Bruyne and Sheerin are hopeful and expectant. The organization has come a long way in a short amount of time, but its founders aren’t even close to content yet.

“I feel really lucky, but at the same time, we’ve got a long way to go,” de Bruyne said.