School for 100 Kakuma kids
One hundred extra children will be able to attend pre-school at Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya for a year, thanks to a marathon run thousands of kilometres away in Queensland.
After seven months of training, Pastor Mark Vainikka from St Andrew’s Lutheran Church, Brisbane City, ran his first competitive 42km race in the Gold Coast Marathon on 3 July, in a time of 3 hours 35 minutes.
His aim was to raise enough money to send one Kakuma child to pre-school for a year for every kilometre he ran, through Australian Lutheran World Service and the Lutheran World Federation. But the money raised far exceeded Pastor Vainikka’s goal of supporting 42 children.
‘We ended up raising support for 100 children to attend pre-school at Kakuma, which is quite amazing’, he said. ‘The fact that we were raising funds for the kids at Kakuma, was a huge motivating factor, not only during my long hours of training, but during the hard kilometres of the marathon itself.’
It costs $29 to send a child to pre-school for a year at Kakuma. A part of this amount also goes towards the training of pre-school teachers.
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