Aug. 19, 2024

This paid piece is sponsored by POET.

The smiles are electric, the joy is contagious, and the hope is palpable.

Tammi Crooks wasn’t prepared for such intense emotions as she visited Kenya for the first time with Seeds of Change this spring.

The POET team member who works as talent acquisition coordinator in the Wichita, Kansas, office said the tears started to flow when the group pulled up to the Kakuswi School for the Deaf in Tawa, where Seeds of Change has been sponsoring students and improving buildings since 2012.

“The level of gratefulness they have and how they expressed it — it was beautiful,” Crooks said.

A group of 13 POET team members, family and corporate sponsors spent three days at the school pitching in on construction projects and getting to know the children. The May 27-June 2 mission trip was the group’s first visit to Kenya in five years. COVID put a halt to travel for a few years, and last year’s trip was the first to Uganda. Visits to Kenya and Uganda will now alternate years.

POET founder and CEO Jeff Broin and his family started Seeds of Change. Its programs focus on improving educational opportunities, farming techniques, air and water quality, health care access and more in African nations and elsewhere around the world.

Kakuswi School has been part of the Seeds of Change mission since the beginning. The POET team saw how far the facilities had come when they visited the primary school next door. It’s where the deaf school got its start, but not much has changed at that site over the past decade since it moved. Furniture is made from crates, the alphabet letters pasted on the walls are written on old cement bags, and kids in tattered clothes write in notebooks stitched together with squares of cardboard.

Across the fence at Kakuswi School, the school uniforms are sharp, and the bunkbeds are neatly made. There are new classrooms, refurbished dormitories and new staff housing.

The mission group helped local masons build a perimeter wall and prepared classrooms for solar power. The projects are on track for summer completion, head teacher Timothy Mukilya said.

“The group was so friendly, loving, understanding, curious to know, active and devoted to work,” he said.

Mukilya and the staff appreciate the work, but it’s the time volunteers take to get to know the kids that is really special. If the welcome brought tears, the goodbye brought double.

“We bid them farewell, and they painfully left with wells of tears filling their eyes due to love. It was awesome!” Mukilya said.

“Timothy’s vision is really coming to fruition,” said Jan Eliason, who made her first mission trip in 2017 with her husband, James, who is the materials manager at POET’s Shelbyville, Indiana plant. They make it a point to return each year, but this was their first mission trip since COVID, and they were impressed with the progress.

Eliason’s background is in special needs education, so the school for deaf children is dear to her. Likewise, the kids are drawn to her and the blonde hair that makes her stand out in a room of African children.

Eliason formed an especially close bond with a student at a mission-supported secondary girls school on her first trip. Rael is now 22, and the Eliasons have watched her balance boarding school with her family’s needs and navigate university. She’s about to graduate and aims for a career in data entry.

The Eliasons chat with her a couple of times a week through WhatsApp and help her family financially. The family lived under a tin roof without power or running water in a Mombasa slum on the Kenyan coast, Eliason said, eight hours from Rael’s school.

“Ten dollars over there is like having $100 in the U.S.,” Eliason said.

Once when a church group was organizing donations of solar-powered lamps, the Eliasons bought one for Rael’s family. They could use it at home, but Rael’s mom sent it to school so Rael and the others could study at night.

Eliason is heartened by the priority Kenyans place on education.

“We asked the girls what they wanted to do on weekends, and all they wanted to do was study,” she said.

“It’s the simple things,” said Jerry Tegels, who works as biofuels business development manager for H20 Innovation in Iowa. The company oversees several POET plant water systems and has long been a major corporate donor for Seeds of Change.

At Kakuswi School, Tegels worked beside a man who hoisted loads of bricks with his bare hands. Eventually, he wrapped his blistered palms with burlap sacks. The American gave the man his gloves and wished he’d had enough for everyone.

Tegels finds himself looking through the photographs he took in Kenya and wondering what the kids and adults are doing now. Seeing Seeds of Change’s work firsthand makes the impact sink in.

“You don’t see them as a country or just a large population,” he said. “You see them as individuals.”

That’s the value of making face-to-face connections. On his first Seeds of Change mission trip, Levi Rustand, an accounting analyst at POET’s Sioux Falls headquarters, came away with a new perspective on giving. Some may question why to use resources to send 13 people across the ocean when organizations could send just money.

“We learned how much our friends in Kenya cherish building relations with people,” he said.

POET rail logistics specialist Lacey Campbell calls those relationships the most impactful part of the trip.

“Just building relationships with people is so important,” she said. “It’s letting people know that we are physically here for them. We’re willing to travel to speak with them and hear their stories and share our stories.”

Sharing the experience with daily journals on Facebook drew a lot of interest from friends and family, said Shawn Eastman, regional account manager with H20 Innovation in Champlin, Minnesota. He’s eager to share more. He and Tegels plan to put together a presentation for H2O Innovation partners across the U.S. and internationally.

With water being his business niche, Eastman would like to do more in the future to improve drinking water in Africa.

“If we could clean that water up for them, I know we could avoid a lot of sickness and disease,” he said.

Rustand is inspired to do more too. He’s ready to sign up as mission trip volunteer No. 1 on next year’s trip, he said, and he encourages anyone to take the opportunity to go.

“I always have been a giver, but after the experience and seeing the work we’re doing, I’m fully invested in this,” he said.

“I knew we were doing a lot, but I didn’t realize the magnitude,” said Crooks, the POET team member from Wichita.

Crooks saw it in feeding programs that are bringing Maasi kids to school in record numbers, and she also quite literally could measure the growth in Kenyan farm fields.

Seeds of Change partners with the nonprofit Farm Input Promotions Africa to train Kenyan farmers to plant, till and fertilize more efficiently. Trained farmers serve as advisers in their villages and teach others ways to boost yields.

Stalks of maize reached higher than Crooks’ raised hand in a field planted with FIPS guidance, while plants were barely thigh-high for a neighboring farmer who wasn’t using FIPS methods.

“Everything we experienced that Seeds of Change has their hands in, you see growth, you see joy, and you see hope,” Crooks said.