In the earliest light of the African dawn, the dirt roads of Taru are dotted with miniature bodies in colorful uniforms.

They walk quietly and deliberately in pairs or small clusters, wearing backpacks too big for their small backs. The tinier children are holding the hands of their taller siblings or following closely beside them.

Some primary-aged students have trekked in from compounds as far as 3 or 4 miles away. Those children had to leave their dirt huts in the pitch dark to trudge through brush shared by snakes and elephants and an occasional pride of lions.

More fortunate students arrive at the dirt-road intersection closest to their school on a boda-boda - a hired motorcycle that carries as many as five or six small children at a time. As they unload and disperse, you can hardly believe your eyes as another and then another and yet another body peels off the human mass scrunched around the driver.

Kenyan kids wear their school uniforms proudly.

Whether it happens to fit or it’s the tattered remnant of a hand-me-down three sizes too big, it signals that this child is not spending the day tending goats or fetching water from a far-off hole. This little person is going to school, and that is clearly important to them. It doesn’t matter that there are rarely enough benches and tables and that some students will have to sit on dirt floors. And it doesn’t occur to them to complain about sharing one text book amongst a handful of kids clustered tightly around it. If they have even a one-inch stub of a pencil to use, they consider themselves lucky that day.

There is no such thing as discipline issues in these open-air classrooms. Respect for teachers is absolute and respect for fellow students is taught at the earliest age. In one preschool class of 3 and 4 year olds, whenever a student delivers a correct answer, the rest of the class recites together, “You are the better, better; you are the BEST!”

Children in impoverished Kenya consider school a valued privilege.

They proudly wear whatever adapted version of their school’s uniform they can piece together. They pay earnest attention to their teachers, even on empty stomachs and at crowded tables. They sit on the edge of their benches with hands shooting in the air, yearning to be called on. They have no expectations in terms of supplies and take nothing for granted when scarce resources are provided.

Kenya Keys enables education in rural Taru in many significant ways:

Sponsorships, libraries, dorms, desks, books, incidental supplies for students, mentoring, even food and sometimes medicine.

The people of Taru get it, and they deeply appreciate the proven fact that Kenya Keys is literally unlocking their children’s potential by empowering their education.