Students across the country return to school next week. Dalkey priest Fr Paul Healy hopes to provide his young parishioners with that same opportunity.
Fr Healy, who works in Kenya's famine-wracked Kitui province, argues that the only chance of a future for the region's children is education. He wants to build a school in the area and has started raising the €200,000 needed.
"Education is the one chance these kids have of breaking the cycle of poverty," says Fr Healy, who is administrator of the province. "But education is a fickle opportunity here."
At secondary level, schools are fee-paying which rules out most of those in need. And while primary education in Kenya is free, poverty and the long distances people often have to travel to school means children are often withdrawn from school as soon as famine strikes and the need to source food becomes the priority.
Famine is not unusual in Kitui, east of the Kenyan capital Nairobi. Harvests have failed in each of the last six seasons.
While Irish aid organisations have been involved in the region for almost 50 years, the prolonged famine means their efforts are directed towards emergency food and water programmes. Around 260,000 people, almost a quarter of those living in the diocese, currently relies on these programmes.
Fr Healy is also expanding a sponsorship programme that sponsors Aids orphans in existing schools at a cost of between €400 and €600 per head a year, money that helps keeps them sufficiently well fed to tolerate the life-saving anti-retroviral drugs.
Fr Healy, who went to Africa as a voluntary missionary eight years ago after teaching in Dublin for 15 years, has already sourced a plot for the new school through friends in Ireland.
That follows a long-standing tradition that has seen the Irish heavily involved in education in the area - which is roughly half the size of Ireland - through fund-raising, missionaries and volunteers. Fr Healy hopes that tradition will enable him to raise in Ireland, the €200,000 he needs to complete the schoolbuilding project with donations being channelled through the St Patrick's Missionary Society (the Kiltegan Fathers) in Co Wicklow.
