At Bonney Lake High School, the senior culminating project is intended to be accomplished in a minimum of 15 hours. Amanda Bohl estimated that she accomplished hers in 215.
Bohl went to individuals, schools, families and companies to solicit what would become 650 pounds of school supplies, shoes, clothing, hygiene products and athletic equipment to be donated to students in Kenya. She additionally established a pen pal program, by speaking to local fifth-grade classrooms about the lifestyle and culture of Kenyan students.
“I did not realize how big it was going to be at first,” Bohl said. “It was going to be a donation of some school supplies and it expanded into what it was now.”
The project started with a gift from her mother, Christine Bohl, a Boeing employee who gives each of her children the means to travel anywhere they would like in the world, once they enter their senior year of high school.
Bohl, who had already travelled extensively to more than 30 countries and lived in the United Kingdom for six years, chose Kenya.
“I knew I wanted to go to Africa, because I love the African lifestyle and their way of life,” she said. “I knew I didn’t want to go to South Africa, because that’s a pretty common choice for people traveling to (the continent). I was thinking Ethiopia or Kenya. I picked Kenya, and I’m extremely happy I wound up picking it, too.”
In Kenya, some schools consist of nothing more than a teacher, a chalkboard nailed to a tree and a chair for students to place their school supplies. Students wear uniforms by law to hide the varying social classes of students. But while American students might commonly bemoan an average day at high school, students in Kenya are ecstatic to receive an education, Bohl said.
“The average kid (in Kenya) goes to school for just six years, because they might have to leave to take care of responsibilities at home,” she said. “There was a boy there the same age as me named Johanna. He was getting ready to leave school, because he was taking care of six siblings. His mother passed away and his father was never really there, so he was getting ready to spend his time farming and taking care of young children. And it amazed me because he was so happy. I don’t think one kid there didn’t have a smile on their face.”
Bohl worked with several mentors on her project: Sue Albrook of Boeing, and Bullo and Monsuk Patel, independently wealthy brothers from India with an interest in the Kenyan education system.
Bohl established a criteria for the schools to which she wanted donations to go. The schools had to be impoverished, remote from major cities, and to have struggled in the past. The Patels helped Bohl select the secondary schools Arutani and Kisanana.
Bohl started a school supply drive she called “Extend a Hand to a Kenyan,” from which she was able to collect some large donations from families and teachers. Teachers were often able to donate surplus school supplies from classrooms, such as blank notebooks—one teacher from Victor Falls Elementary School donated 200 packs of long-life twistable color crayons.
From there, Bohl went directly to businesses and organizations for philanthropy. Parks and Recreation donated t-shirts from past summer programs. The Washington Premier Football Club and the Seattle Sounders donated soccer balls and cleats.
British Airways agreed to donate 500 pounds of free air shipping to the project; a big deal, Bohl said, because of the stringent weight requirements for flights. The remaining donations were squeezed into three check-in bags barely under the 50 pound weight limit.
Then Bohl was off to the country for 10 days, a journey that required about three days of flight and driving to the location of the schools. She visited Arutani, an all-girls school run by Catholic nuns from Mexico, first. The entire school had an assembly, in which a student sang the song “Us Against the World,” dedicated to Bohl. Afterward, Bohl was taught a tribal dance.
From there, she distributed more donations to Kisanana, where one boy was so excited to receive a hat, he almost left before Bohl could give him the other supplies she had brought.
For the 48 soccer balls, Bohl decided to expand the donations outside of the school to make sure they helped the maximum number of people.
“We drove out into the country and stopped randomly when we found kids with homemade soccer balls, and exchanged the balls,” she said. “One boy we stopped for had a ball made out of a garbage bag, a potato bag, twine and shoelaces. So we stopped and I traded balls. You could see he was excited, but he never broke eye contact with me.
“The driver told me that he (the boy) had never seen a white person before.”
After Bohl graduates, she will attend the University of Mississippi in the fall, where she plans to pursue an undergraduate degree in psychology or another medical field, something she can use to help people, the way she did this year.
