On Monday, the Hinsdale-Clarendon Hills chapter of the National Charity League collected several hundred essential items to send to The O’Brien School for the Maasai in Tanzania, located just a few miles away from the Kilimanjaro International Airport, halfway between the cities of Arusha and Moshi in East Africa.
The school’s unlikely founder is a local Hinsdale woman, who spent nine years creating an education center from scratch after a volunteer trip to Africa with her daughter in 2006.
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“The whole thing was God ordained from the beginning,” Kellie O’Brien said over the phone, shortly after her crew came by to load up the 40-foot “humanitarian relief container” with 450 boxes of Quaker Oats, 23,427 pounds of food formula, 450 pairs of shoes, 30 crates of school supplies, desks, tables and chairs, and 12 crates of jackets among thousands of other items all either donated from community members or collected from various organizations.
The container shipped off on Tuesday, and O’Brien said she plans to fly out to Tanzania in January to receive it. She tries to organize a drive annually and typically stays in Africa for a couple of months to distribute the items.
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For O’Brien, each visit is a little like a homecoming to a community she helped find its spark more than a decade ago.
Sixteen years ago, O’Brien’s daughter, Heather, then in her thirties, came home for Thanksgiving after encountering a series of setbacks. “She said, ‘mom I just need to think about somebody else — would you come to Africa with me and do some volunteer work?’” O’Brien said.
O’Brien, who is a horticulturist, said she mentioned to one of her landscaping clients that she was heading to Africa and wouldn’t be available for services during the winter. It turned out, O’Brien said, that her client had a church contact that formerly worked with the Franciscan Sisters, a missionary group in Tanzania, that often serves the tribal community known as Maasai.
Equipped with a landing spot, O’Brien and her daughter traveled to the convent, located in the Sanya Juu region of Tanzania, and helped out in the gardens and kitchens, and anywhere they could.
“At the end of the day we didn’t really change anybody’s life,” O’Brien said. They asked the Mother Superior, Sister Dona, what could change someone’s life. What more can they do?
O’Brien said Sister Dona smiled and took them to meet a Maasai elder named Gabriel, who had been asking the convent for years to help start a school in his village.
Gabriel lived in a traditional Maasai hut made of branch arches covered with several layers of soil, urine, and cow dung, O’Brien said, adding that the village had no electricity.
He greeted O’Brien and her daughter with 150 people from the tribe, and told them how he spent his life behind the tail of cows and goats, and wanted to give his kids a better life, O’Brien remembered.
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O’Brien said she looked around at all the school-aged children who were at home instead of school. “I turned to my daughter and said “this is the reason God sent us here,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien said while she was overcome with the determination to build a school for the Maasai children, she had never actually built a school before.
“I didn’t grow up thinking someday I would do this,” she said. “I don’t even know what a school is supposed to look like!”
Gabriel told her that even three classrooms and an office would be enough, O’Brien explained. She said she took out an envelope from her purse and on the backside, freehand sketched an L-shaped building as an idea of what it could look like.
About 10 days later, before they were set to head back to the U.S., O’Brien and her daughter visited Gabriel to talk next steps. To their surprise, Gabriel showed them a sectioned-off spot in the land where they had already dug the entire foundation for the school based on the envelope drawing.
“Our lives changed forever that day,” O’Brien said.
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Once home, O’Brien raised $43,000 in her backyard after sharing her big idea with friends and family.
After sending the money to Sister Dona, O’Brien went back to Tanzania a year later.
“And in the middle of nowhere, there’s the school — our school,” she said. “I knew nothing, but I knew then that we had a long way to go.”
A couple of years later, after several local fundraising efforts, one L-shaped building became four and evolved into a courtyard equipped with a vocational center for girls and a library, for which O’Brien’s neighbor built bookcases.
It took nine years for the whole master plan to come to fruition, O’Brien said, but the first set of students was invited as O’Brien School of Maasai students in 2007 after desks and school supplies were set up in that first L-shaped building.
Throughout the process, O’Brien approached schools in Hinsdale about sourcing from their basements full of unused supplies and old desks. Rotary Club of Hinsdale then helped her sponsor a 40-pound container several years ago to ship the blackboards, desks, tables and chairs to Tanzania.
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The O’Brien School for the Maasai now has 420 students with a low student-to-teacher ratio and educational models adapted from high-achieving elementary and middle schools in Chicagoland, O’Brien said, noting that her community is the unsung hero of it all.
“On weekends my driveway would be filled with piles of shoes — I would say to the volunteers if you had to walk from here to Oak Brook Center, which pair of shoes would you choose? And I would tell them stories of how our kids (in Maasai) walk two miles to school,” O’Brien said. “I would have little children say, “Ms. O’Brien can I give you this oatmeal to help my brothers and sisters in Africa?’
O’Brien said the container evolved into a yearly project, where pooling together resources from the community is key to its success.
Sandy Bonino, who runs philanthropy for National Charity League, said she supported O’Brien’s work on a personal basis before becoming the liaison between her nonprofit and The O’Brien School for the Maasai.
National Charity League’s Hinsdale-Clarendon Hills Chapter, which supports about 20 philanthropies including The O’Brien School, got off the ground seven years ago as a mother-daughter service organization to contribute to charitable causes.
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The organization is limited to two collection drives a year, and this year they supported O’Brien’s collection efforts for The O’Brien School for the Maasai.
The group’s youngest female members put together 50 feminine hygiene kits for the seventh-grade girl’s in Maasai using some of the donations they received for the container, Bonino said.
“We are girls that can help girls. We get our periods every month just like they do, and our girls just take it for granted. We can just run to Walgreens and get them some Advil and pads — those girls don’t have that,” Bonino said.
Bonino said she found an online company that donated 50 pairs of period underwear, while the community collections tallied 170 pairs of socks, 396 toothbrushes, 137 tubes of toothpaste, 383 bars of soap, 57 manicure sets, 113 notebooks, and handwritten notes from some young girls in Hinsdale to their counterparts in Tanzania.
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“The value of this container is more than the things we fill it with — it’s the connections that are made,” O’Brien said. She noted that the Mike Wiggons Soccer Camp donated 50 soccer balls to send to the school, and the kids who live next door to O’Brien spent Monday afternoon deflating them to fit in the container.
O’Brien, having visited the tribe a number of times over the years, has seen firsthand how far removed the Maasai are from modernization.
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“The men have multiple wives, boys are raised to be shepherds and the girls are raised to be wives,” she said. “When we ask the women [of the tribe], what can we do to help, they say, ‘no one has ever asked us this question before.’”
On Monday, O’Brien made sure the container was fully loaded with a fresh batch of items for the school. In January, she’ll help the crew unload at the O’Brien School for the Maasai, across Mount Killamanjaro, visible far ahead from the school grounds.
“I thank the people that God surrounded me with,” O’Brien said. “And everyone who believed in the massage I came home with.”
