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The Stuemer family set sail from Ottawa and changed the course of lives in Kenya
The Stuemer family planned to sail around the world, not change it. But they did, by helping hundreds of Kenyans escape poverty and by linking the lives and futures of Canadian and Kenyan kids.
After beating skin cancer when she was 35, Diane Stuemer, her husband, Herbert, and their three young sons, Michael, Jonathan, and Christopher, left Ottawa in September1997 on a voyage of discovery aboard their sailboat, Northern Magic. Diane saw her recovery as a message: live, share, and explore. What she didn’t know was how her second chance at life would enrich and improve the lives of so many in faraway Kenya.
Diane wrote about the family’s high-seas adventures in a weekly column published in the Ottawa Citizen. Her description of the people they met captivated thousands of Canadians, and in turn, the Stuemers were overwhelmed by the love and generosity they encountered, especially from those who lived in appalling conditions with little hope.
“We felt that if we, as Canadians, couldn’t help the people we met, it would be a failure of our basic humanity,” wrote Diane.
The situation was especially desperate in Kenya, where the Stuemers were struck by the plight of young people struggling to stay in school. Education is no small achievement when monthly tuition is $50 and entire families survive on $1a day. For Diane, “Helping children stay in school is not charity, it’s empowerment.”
After their return to Canada in 2001, the Stuemers established the Northern Magic Foundation to manage the flood of donations received from readers of Diane’s articles. The foundation now covers four years of tuition for 60children in Kenya, supports small businesses that create income and opportunity in rural villages, and twins Canadian and Kenyan schools. Hadley Junior High in Gatineau, Quebec, and Blessed Kateri School in Calgary, Alberta, have already raised $25,000 to renovate Majaoni School in Kilifi, Kenya.
In early 2003, Diane was again diagnosed with cancer. She worked on the Kenya project with undiminished optimism and passion until her death in March of that year.
For Herbert, the journey continues: “We must make education available to everyone. Impossible? I don’t think so. It’s like sailing around the world: one small step at a time.”
Raegan Wheler, an engineering student from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, helped bring safe drinking water to the people of Kionyo, in eastern Kenya
Without transportation for almost two months, Raegan Wheler walked to work along a red-dirt road in the foothills of Mount Kenya—a 24-km round trip, six days a week. But she maintains her daily trek was nothing compared to the efforts made by the villagers themselves to get clean water.
The third-year engineering student, a volunteer with Engineers Without Borders, spent eight months in Kionyo, in eastern Kenya, working in the trenches with work crews laying down 17 km of gravity-fed water pipes that will bring safe drinking water to the area.
“The work was very slow: they do everything there by hand—I mean everything,” she says. “They make gravel with a chisel and a hammer; they make the handles for the hammers and the shovels by cutting down branches in the forest. They have to carry everything into the job site on their backs for two kilometres from the road. And it’s going to take a long time to get seventeen kilometres of one-metre-deep trenches dug by hand.”
Raegan’s job included surveying two of the three pipeline routes, checking the pipe levels as construction got underway, dealing with the difficulties of getting the appropriate government permits, and working with the volunteer crews—sometimes numbering as many as 70 individuals— to get the job done. “The community decided on the basics: where the water intake should be in the forest and where the pipeline should take the water,” she says. “My job was to connect the dots and make sure it was possible.”
In Kenya, less than half the population has access to safe drinking water. Cholera and diarrhea, which can be deadly, are transmitted by unsafe water. And the time it takes to find clean water is also an issue: in many countries, women and young girls can spend up to eight hours a day walking to a clean water source. When the pipelines in Kionyo are finished, more than 23,000 Kenyans will be able to drink water near their homes without worrying about whether it could kill them.