Pre-K Students’ Paths to Peace! Blake School Students Serve Up Breakfast and Raise Funds for Kenya Girls’ School

Submitted by Joanne Esser via Nan Peterson, both of the Blake School

The Pre-Kindergarten children at Blake School in Hopkins, Minnesota had been learning about the girls at Light of Hope School this year from one of their teachers, Joanne Esser, who visited the school last summer. The Pre-K classes invited Sandy and Boni Karanja, founders of Light of Hope, to visit, show photos from Light of Hope and tell them more about the school.

After Sandy and Boni’s visit, the children were eager to do something to help the girls. They heard about the need for more chickens and chicken feed to produce more eggs, so all the girls could have eggs for breakfast. Their teachers asked the children, “What do you know how to do that could raise money to buy chickens?” Very quickly, someone suggested, “We know how to cook!” (The children have done cooking projects in school all year.) With very little further discussion, the idea was born to make a “restaurant” in their classroom. They named it “The Pre-K Cafe.”

The children worked for several weeks to decide what foods they would prepare, to make menus, to advertise the restaurant’s opening, to make chef’s hats, to create centerpieces for the tables and to make “welcome” banners. The day before the Cafe opened, the children worked all day cutting up fruit for fruit salad, mixing pancake batter, cracking eggs for scrambled eggs, and grating and frying potatoes for hash browns.

On the morning of May 9, the children each had a job: to take donations at the door, dish up and serve food on trays, seat customers, clear tables and dry dishes. In two hours they served breakfast to about 100 customers, including most of the children’s families and many Blake School employees. They raised over $1,500 for Light of Hope School!

Light of Hope provides refuge, restoration, and redirection for lost and homeless girls in Kenya by offering shelter, education, and counseling in a supportive family environment.