One Year Later - Program Growth and Vision
March snuck up on us and we soon realized that summer is upon us. Familiar is the weather, the spring smell emanating from the thawing ground and bloom flora. Here is in Colorado, the snow has finally given way to sunshine and constant warming periods. College lacrosse games have popped up in the news feed, and we’ve been talking to our college partners and student athletes about their experiences. Things started to feel and seem, almost normal.
Missing was the traditional excitement I saw in the community that accompanied March, and rolled into April. There’s still time, there is still hope for this lacrosse season to blossom into a full fledged experience for youth and college athletes alike. As a sports community, huge strides have been made at every level and safety protocols have put students athletes in a position to succeed and stay in school. In a way, what we’ve accomplished here in the United States is a model that may serve as inspiration for other countries and communities.
At KLTW, we laid down our plans for 2020, and loosened expectation. Our focus shifted to buttressing our schools and communities to face and endure the worse of the pandemic. It’s with cautious candor I look ahead from here, and begin to think more about lacrosse activities at our Kenya and Malaysian Borneo program locations. At this point, we feel we’ve come far enough with the help of public health guidance, international guidelines, and safety protocols to begin the easement process and move our students into a space with lacrosse again. We continue to develop these plans with our school and local leaders.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t touch on a few of the projects we have been involved with since the start of 2020. Our passion pushed us at a furious pace to provide the tools and resources our schools needed over the past 12 months. This includes direct-injection funding to school and personnel, campus projects, and cleanliness initiatives. Our main focus lived with the Busia Lacrosse Club at the Butula Hekima Academy, Kenya. With students sent away last April to their homes, the break in daily school activities allowed us to identify and invest in improvement projects.
One of these finished projects was a non-essential water purification system which was installed and running by September 22nd. The system collects rain water and the filter produces water not meant for drinking, but sanitary enough for cooking, cleaning dishes, washing hands, class projects, classroom sanitation purposes. This provided a bank of clean water to utilize during Covid-19 times to protect the students and allow for more cleaning than traditionally demanded in the school. Below, Bob walks us through the system and it’s impact.
Another project which is on-going in the creation of light resources within the school buildings. Currently, none of the classrooms house any running electric. Our students were invited back to the school campus per Kenya Ministry of Education Guidelines in January and are spending extra hours at the school and even participating in night class to catch up on 8 months of lost education. At most, the students rely on small phone lights which are unreliable, and at best, are further limiting in their ability to utilize the textbooks and writing tools in the dark. We’ve partnered with MPowered to bring 24 solar charged utility lights, 40 lumens each to the school classroom to provide a temporary, sustainable energy alternative for evening classroom learning. Our hope is that this lighting solution will power this generation of students and aid in the education catch-up for the school.
Lastly, Bob, the Butula Hekima Academy school director has pioneered the school’s first sustainable food development program, spearheading the terraformation of the back lot of the school’s grassy grounds to a full fledged garden. The students have been preparing and growing seedlings for planting this month in anticipation of higher level food resources for the school this summer. We’ll be continuing to work with Bob and the students on furthering their education of horticulture and its practices.
KLTW will levy its resources in the United States and globally to ensure our goals moving forward are aligned with the health and wellness of our students, while staying true to our mission of growing the game of lacrosse at a grassroots level. This summer, we are examining the possibilities to further help our student athletes stay safe, and succeed in and our of the classroom. We’re reviewing policies, and considerations of in-country work as we adhere to safety guidelines and monitor the situation here and in our respective program countries.
It is my hope by late 2021, early 2022 we can visit our student athletes again and resume in-country operations with our volunteer coaches, collegiate level college lacrosse student athlete volunteers, and other personnel. This could only be performed with the safety of our staff, partners, and student athletes in mind. Until then we’ll direct our energy on honing our specific goals program goals, planning, fundraising, and raising awareness about the state of our student athletes and the communities in the world today.