When Jane Wanjiru was growing up outside Nairobi, Kenya, the seventh of eight children, she often went to school hungry but knew she had it better than her older brothers had it at the same age.
She had shoes.
She came a long way, literally and figuratively, to tell her story to some of the Pittsburghers who have helped her these past 10 years. At 25, she is a graduate of Mt. Kenya University with a degree in business and information technology, having finished second in her male-dominated class of 45. She’ll return home Sunday to look for a job.
Ms. Wanjiru’s success is due to her own drive and intelligence but none of it would be possible were it not for a Pittsburgher she met in Kenya a decade ago.
“They told me there was this American lady who was starting a girls’ home in Kenya, and they could link me up,” she recalled, adding that she didn’t need to be asked twice.
That lady is Kate Fletcher, 77, now something of a cult hero on two continents. Mrs. Fletcher spent time in a Catholic orphanage as a child, then three decades as a nun teaching in the Mon Valley, then 17 years in a wonderful Pittsburgh marriage and then, in her widowhood and in her 60s, she moved to Nairobi to work with orphaned and abandoned children who had been infected with HIV.
Even all that doesn’t summarize “Mum Kate,’’ as the African girls call her. Because her mission, Hekima Place — “Hekima’’ being Swahili for “wisdom’’— goes far beyond keeping children alive and happy. The mission: “to provide a loving faith-based home for orphaned or vulnerable Kenyan girls while supporting excellence in education and empowerment for their future.’’
A handful of churches in the South Hills have sparked the funding drives that have provided roughly $5.5 million in the past 11 years. Having met Mrs. Fletcher five years ago as she bounced through the burbs raising money, I could speak to her casual charisma, but I’d never met any of the Kenyans of Hekima Place until Ms. Wanjiru walked into the PG office.
In Kenya, schooling through eighth grade is technically free but associated fees are difficult for poor families. Ms. Wanjiru said her mother’s inability to sign her own name pained her, and so she paid what was needed to keep her children in school even if that meant her children missed meals.
“Education,’’ she told her children. “No one can take that away from you.’’
It’s hard to concentrate when your stomach’s growling and impossible to study at night when your home has no electricity. Her teachers sometimes hit her hand with a switch when she didn’t produce the homework.
When she finished eighth grade, Ms. Wanjiru had neither the money nor the grades to go farther. Money for high school was beyond asking “because even affording a meal is hard.’’
She spent her time after primary school at a community center in her village, but she soon found herself the only teenager at the center as the families of her peers scraped together the money for high school. She spent her days reading magazines and about every book in the cupboard.
Then she got word about this American woman and soon was one of the first 10 girls at Hekima Place at its founding in August 2005 in rented property in Karen, Kenya. Getting three square meals a day and proper health care, she re-enrolled in the eighth grade. She then retook the Kenyan test that determines academic standing and got a much better score.
She was on her way, as was Hekima Place, which is now a 10-acre compound an hour outside Nairobi, with girls formerly in desperate circumstances living in small cottages, each with a full-time Kenyan housemother.
Macrina Lelei, a native Kenyan who directs the University of Pittsburgh’s African Studies program, said she was impressed by Ms. Wanjiru. The generosity of South Hills residents (largely from St. Thomas More, St. Louise de Marillac, Bower Hill Community Church and St. Benedict the Abbott) should allow this young woman to have an impact in her native land, she said.
“It’s a very moving story,’’ she said. “There are so many needy children out there.”
A reception for Ms. Wanjiru will be held at 6:15 p.m. Saturday at the St. Thomas More Family Life Center in Bethel Park.
“The picture without Hekima Place?” Ms. Wanjiru asked, rephrasing my question. “It’s hard to imagine where I would be.
“It has brought me up to the lady I am: confident, brave, and with much wisdom.’’ Speaking of all the young women at Hekima Place, she said, “We’re good to go to face the world.”
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or on Twitter @brotheroneill.
First Published: November 2, 2016, 4:00 a.m.