On the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, a group of volunteers provided help to Kenyan citizens.

Junior Royce Harrison travelled with Kenyan Educational Service Trips along with three other girls and group leader Jennifer Geilings. The goal of the organization is to educate American teenagers and adults to be responsible and effective global citizens, and to show that one person can make a difference only by taking action.

“It is enormously satisfying to help people,” Harrison said.

Harrison left July 12 and returned Aug. 13. Group members focused on volunteering, not engaging in any sort of tourism while they were there. They created camps for Kenyan school children and helped out doing farm work.

The volunteer program in Kenya was called Nyumbani, and it contained three parts. The first was an orphanage in Karen called the Nyumbani Children’s Home. The orphanage is home to more than 100 HIV positive children who were either abandoned or had lost their parents. Harrison and his group were at the orphanage for one week.

“Not all of the younger kids were used to seeing white people,” Harrison said. “A kid rubbed one of the girls arms and then checked his hand to see if the white would come off her skin.”

The second part of the Nyumbani program took the volunteers to Kitui, a village of about 700 people plagued by the AIDS epidemic. In the village, about 10 children are grouped with grandparents to form families. The goal is to have 1,000 people living in the village. Harrison spent the majority of his trip there, a total of 3 weeks.

The third part is called Lea Toto, which means “to raise the child” in Swahili. Lea Toto is a slums outreach program where the volunteers helped provide medical assistance and counseling. Harrison was only in Lea Toto for one day of his trip.

In order to prepare for the trip, Harrison had to take Doxycycline, an anti-malarial drug. He had to take this medicine every day months in advance of going to Kenya, and has to continue taking the drug even after he has returned. Harrison said the drug has unpleasant side effects, such as stomach pains and vivid, intense dreams.

The flight to Kenya took 21 hours, plus around 10 hours of layovers. Once they landed, Harrison recalled seeing a random pile of burning tires along the tarmac. A typical meal consisted of beans and rice, “plus the occasional rock mixed in,” Harrison said. Everything was relatively cheap, too. An avocado cost Harrison a mere 15 cents, and “it was the size of my face,” Harrison said.

The volunteers also visited a Masai village, where Harrison went goat herding with one of the Masai warriors. “That was probably the coolest part of my trip,” Harrison said. They had to watch out for snakes and be on the lookout for unexploded ordinance such as land mines, artillery shells, and other explosives.

For Harrison, finding the words that best describe the experience is difficult, but he left Kenya inspired to volunteer again in the future. He hopes to return to Kenya. “It is really difficult to describe because it was such an amazing experience.”

Harrison was forever impacted by the people he met and the friends he made.

“It’s definitely something I’m never going to forget,” Harrison said.