IN 2005, WHEN Kellie O’Brien, then 62,
arrived in the middle of the Tanzanian desert,
surrounded by dust storms, dung huts and
herds of cattle, she met her future: a community of Masai who wanted nothing more than
for their children to be educated.
Touched by the Masai’s love and compassion
for life, O’Brien, who runs a landscaping business, returned home to Chicago, ready to fulfill
her promise to build the village a proper school.
Since 2005, with the help of family and
friends, $350,000 in donations and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of donated goods,
O’Brien (
www.obrienschool.org) has constructed
six classrooms for nearly 300 students, as well as
a clinic, a library and a women’s center.
Two semitrailers of goods have been sent
to the village, including a year’s worth of
Lessons in love
Quaker oatmeal from Costco that was donated
so the children would have a healthy breakfast
each morning. In 2009, electricity was turned
on for the first time, and water was brought up
from a well O’Brien
helped build, allowing the school to
have hygiene stations
and water for irrigating its garden.
“The smallest
donation, the simplest act, can begin
to make a difference,”
she says. “Generosity
given in the right
spirit multiplies.”
—Alexa Jenner Donation efforts have brought education and medicine to nearly 300 Masai children.
A percentage of
Jeff Keenan’s Our Day
to End Poverty is
donated to charities.
A day to end
poverty
VOLUNTEERING EVERYWHERE from ani-
mal shelters to food banks, Jeff Keenan found a
passion for helping those affected by poverty.
What he didn’t find was a solid resource
about how one could start to make a differ-
ence. So, he and co-writer Shannon Daley-
Harris wrote one: Our Day to End
Poverty ( www.ourdaytoendpoverty.
com), a how-to guide on easy ways
to get involved and help with not
only global, but also domestic, pov-
erty. Asked for advice on making a
difference, Keenan, who recently lost
his own job, suggests integrating help-
ing others into your day-to-day life. He
says, “Make it part of who you are.”
—Krista Fisher
Out of Africa
“GETTING INVOLVED is what my family does,” says Natalie Pope, whose brother Austin, 17, was diagnosed with autism in 1994. Pope developed a Web site (
www.kyautism awareness.com) and teamed up with a graphic designer to create a license plate that features bold, colorful puzzle pieces, the national sym- bol for autism. To date, 1,500 autism plates have been sold and $6,000 has been raised.—SM Licensed to care
SINCE 1956, civil wars in Sudan have
claimed more than 500,000 lives and displaced huge numbers of people, many of
them children separated from their families. Mostly boys between 7 and 17 years
old, they have wandered the unforgiving
terrain of their country. Close to 3,800 of
these “Lost Boys” arrived in the United
States in 2001.
Around 400 of them settled in the
Phoenix–Scottsdale area, and Costco
member and real estate agent Reita
Hutson wanted to help. A chance encounter with one of them, Gabriel Kuany, provided the opportunity.
They formed a friendship, first by
e-mail. Soon, Kuany, 23, started calling
Hutson “Mom.” Hutson accepted that,
saying, “I believe he is my son in my
heart.”
Six of Kuany’s teeth were missing due
to a tribal ritual in his homeland; the
remaining ones protruded. Healthy teeth
were the first thing the Lost Boys noticed
upon arrival in America, and their self-es-
teem suffered. Hutson helped find dental
care for Kuany. When others saw the
results, they wanted to call his “mom.”
Hutson started Gabriel’s
Dream (
www.gabrielsdream.
org) out of her church in 2003
to help the Lost Boys in
Arizona, and obtained 501(c)
nonprofit status in 2005. To
date, the organization has
procured more than $1 million
in dental care and close to
$80,000 in scholarships. “We
just had a number of boys
graduate from Arizona State
[University],” Hutson says.
As to why education is so
important for the young men,
Hutson says, “They believe education is
their mother and father, because they
have no mothers and fathers to speak to
them.”—Steve Fisher
ALEXA JENNER
REITA HUTSON
BEN KOLDER
NOVEMBER 2009 ;e Costco Connection 89
Gabriel Chol Kuany, left, with
an unidentified federal judge,
center, and Reita Hutson,
right, getting his United
States citizenship.
