Augustine’s School is located on the outskirts of Wamba, Kenya within the Blacksmithing Clan’s District. The school daily serves 40 students ranging in age from 3 to 8. Carol Fabert, a retired American special needs teacher is the Headmaster. Augustine is the local director. He is assisted by four teaching staff, plus a cook. The school incudes a meals program that daily provides fruits and vegetables in addition to beans and ugali to the school’s students, plus up to 60 additional children, depending on circumstances.

The curriculum is innovative. Instruction takes place in three languages, Northern Maa, English, and Swahili. Students learn to read, do basic math, and participate in age appropriate activities — lots of singing, Samburu dance, and arts and crafts projects. The integration of academics with play is unusual for Kenya, and does not exist elsewhere in Samburu East.

The school is providing children from the poorest section of Samburu culture, children of blacksmiths, charcoal sellers, and children of the bee keeping clan, with an intensive head start on their path to education, and a way out of the structural poverty of the Samburu pastoralist territory. The salaries paid to the teachers and cook, and the food provided to the between 40 and 100 children being fed at Augustine’s school, stabilizes multiple families who are going through exceedingly hard times within the context of the collapse of pastoralism locally due to the cumulative impacts of climate change intersecting with over grazing, and now with the inflation that followed Covid and the War in Ukraine.

Longiro and Joyce joyfully teaching in three languages.

If you might be interested in contributing to the support of Augustine’s School, please use the contact form to get in touch. Even small donations make a difference. This is a project that changes lives.

Students in line for food. Augustine’s School makes a big effort to include fruit and vegetable along with starches. Fruits and vegetables are not a part of the standard Samburu diet.

Books shipped from the USA arriving at Augustine’s School. Donations of books always welcome!

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Published by William Rubel

I am an author who writes about traditional food and foodways. My book, The Magic of Fire (2002) is about hearth cooking. I have written an introductory history of bread, Bread, a global history (2011) and am currently writing a history of bread for the University of California Press. Other areas of interest include wild mushrooms, and specifically the treatment of Amanita muscaria in the historic record. I also write about Early Modern British Gardens, and for a more general audience, I write for Mother Earth News on bread, gardening, and more. I have an ongoing research project into the smoke-cured fermented milk of the Kenyan Samburu tribe. I am a co-director of the Samburu Lowlands Research Station, Lengusaka. I am the founding editor (1972) of Stone Soup, the magazine of writing and art by young people.

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