New beginnings: Service trip to Kenya to continue with community support
Schoolchildren in Kikwasuni, a small village in Kenya a team of Northport/East Northport volunteers plan on visiting next summer as part of a larger service project. An anonymous Northport Village resident already donated the funds to bring clean water to the community via a new borehole. Photo courtesy Tim Gibson.
In early 2024, a group of student volunteers from Northport High School, alongside their adult chaperones, broke bread with community members in Iviani, a small village in the Mtito Andei region of Kenya. The trip marked the third time members of the school’s Students for 60,000 (SF60K) service club traveled to Iviani; February of 2024 marked the first time they shared a meal together.
Prior to that joint meal, the communities would eat separately for multiple reasons, ranging from hygiene and health security to dietary and logistical needs and local etiquette.
While breaking bread is a key part of cultural exchange, it is not commonplace on trips of this nature – which made the meal shared by these two communities, who formed bonds and built trust over two prior visits, that much more special.
“Food is like music, it’s one of those universal things,” said East Northport resident Jim Munson, a chaperone on the 2023 and 2024 trips. “You get together for a meal, you are a family. When Iviani invited us to have that meal together, it raised the relationship to a whole different level.”
“It was a sacred meal,” fellow chaperone and then SF60K advisor Karen Paquet added.
A volunteer for all three trips to Iviani, Paquet was aware that some changes to district clubs were in the works, and believed the 2024 trip might be the group’s last together. “It felt like it could potentially be a goodbye,” she told the Journal in an interview with Munson earlier this month. “There are natural breaks and there are reasons why there are endings.”
In the case of the people who went to Iviani and served the community there, there are also new beginnings.
When an ember is enough…
Upon the group’s return, changes in how some school clubs operated were officially announced, and Paquet stepped down from her role with the club – though the bond she formed with the Iviani community remained.
“A relationship happened and it became such an intertwined love, them for us, us for them, that saying that goodbye still didn’t feel right,” Paquet said. “They became family. Yes, it ended in one sense of the word but the relationship stayed. The ties were there, emotionally and spiritually.”
“I always knew that there was more work to be done,” Munson added. “I wanted to go back and see my Kenyan family again, I did not want it to end there.” He believed too that while some students, seniors at the time, were able to find closure in their final trip, the underclassmen anticipated returning to Kenya.
Simultaneously renewed and heartbroken after the 2024 trip, Paquet reserved a tiny space within herself to store some hope. At first, she could only see the loss. “I forget that I always need to keep hope alive,” she said. “That’s a life lesson I have learned many different times.”
The hope she kept alive for Africa, it was just an ember, she said. But then stars aligned and set into motion a chain of events that has resulted in an independent group of Northport and East Northport residents returning to Kenya next summer, as part of Building Legacies International (BLI), a new nonprofit that helps individuals and organizations “build and pass forward their legacies to make a difference in the world.”
It’s as if it were meant to be.
A new wave of community relationships
At the same time that Paquet stepped down from SF60K, Tim Gibson, then president emeritus of World Servants (the nonprofit organization which facilitated SF60K trips to Kenya) retired from his position. But Gibson, who has over 30 years of experience in 33 countries working on related projects, wasn’t fully leaving the service community. He told Paquet and Munson that he’d follow up with a 501c3 of his own, but needed some time.
More than a year passed. Then Munson, outside last spring doing yard work, received a phone call that turned Paquet’s ember of hope into a full-on fire, communicated via a barrage of text messages involving multiple exclamation points. BLI was going to help the community of people who went to Iviani return to Kenya, Gibson confirmed in that phone call. It wasn’t over.
Gibson, through a contact in Kenya who sits with a tribal board composed of local elders, created a path to help a sister community in a way similar to what SF60K did in Iviani. During their time in the small village of Mtito Andei, a much-needed schoolhouse was built for the community’s children. When those volunteers return to Kenya next summer, they’ll travel to Kikwasuni, a neighboring school and community also in Mtito Andei.
A return trip to Iviani is already on the itinerary; but that visit won’t be to work, Paquet said. “We don’t have a job in Iviani. We will just have fun in Iviani. It’ll be a family reunion.”
A head start and hope for the future
The trip to Kikwasuni is currently open to the 54 Northport High School alumni who made the journey to Kenya in years past. A maximum of 40 people can attend the trip and, while priority is being given to former students who have attended the trip before, a waiting list for passionate and dedicated community members is currently forming.
Kikwasuni is already reaping the benefits of a generous Northport/East Northport community. Late last year, a Northport resident who wishes to remain anonymous was so touched by the group’s work in Kenya that they donated $35,000 to fund a borehole/well in the area, bringing much needed water to the community. The drilling has been completed, and the fresh water is flowing. Iviani was also recently the recipient of a borehole drilled from money raised by World Servants, Munson added.
“They saw the importance of water being the life source of everything else,” he said.
Donations for other project goals to be completed in Kikwasuni are currently being accepted; the group’s goal is to raise $50,000 to $75,000 from the local community and larger organizations, as well as from the private fundraising efforts of trip participants.
This type of giving, both in person and from afar, provides a sense of pride in not just the generosity of the anonymous donors and others who have contributed monetarily over the years, Paquet said, but in being involved firsthand, boots on the ground, fulfilling items from a wishlist that – for Kikwasuni – includes building latrines, a covered kitchen and open-air dining area, installing a perimeter fence, and hiring security. A separate BLI team will construct two schoolhouses in Kikwasuni prior to the Northport team’s arrival.
The projects and this kind of service, Munson said, relate back to the idea of hope, and sowing it where you can. The relationships formed, the presence of volunteers, and the work being done because of the generosity of others, all instill hope in the community and “let them know that things can get better, that life can improve,” he said. “It doesn’t replace gratitude for what they do have, but it offers hope; something as simple as putting in a new latrine or an outdoor kitchen can offer hope.”
A deep level of service
Spearheading the efforts for the upcoming trip to Kikwasuni are community youth leaders Sam Rosenfeld-McMahon and Matthew Munson, Northport High School graduates who have been to Kenya twice. In June, they will meet with interested past participants to think of ideas of how to fundraise, as they share excitement for what’s ahead. It’s a continuity of service Paquet is thrilled the youth leaders, and all who return, will be able to experience.
“These students, these young people, have a heart to serve that is not rooted in anything else but pure love for humanity and the ability to be open-minded and see something differently than the way they’ve been taught it can be,” Paquet said. “I am so proud of them and am amazed by them; watching them gives me hope. It shows that there are people who are always going to put somebody else’s well-being above their own.”
Cross-cultural training will also be provided, as all volunteers are expected to understand both the work’s mission and how to serve respectfully while in another country. Participants are responsible to pay/fundraise for their travel, lodging and food expenses.
“Because if it isn’t a little bit painful then you don't really have your full intent in it. You sacrifice for something that is meaningful to you,” Paquet said. “We are into a deep level of service to a community listening to their desires, doing the work according to their understanding. We are there for them. We come with willing hearts, willing hands and open minds.”
Be a part of it…
The Northport-East Northport Kikwasuni trip is tentatively scheduled for Friday, July 23 to Sunday, August 1, 2027. Those interested in filling out an application to be placed on the waiting list should email mikacanoliv@gmail.com or tjmunson@optonline.net. Donations to help fund the Northport team’s building project goals can be made here (write “Northport team/Kikwasuni” in the note). For more information on the trip, click here.
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