OLMOTI STUDENTS GET A PLAYGROUND OF THEIR OWN
Children racing around a playground—swinging, sliding, jumping. What could be more natural? The kids at Olmoti School are experiencing that reality—for the very first time on a playground of their own. They also have a new soccer field, and have already formed a team to play against local villages.
Physical exercise is part of Olmoti Clinic’s healthy commitment to our Maasai school children.
When Olmoti Clinic/Our One Community built the school in 2015, starting with just two classrooms, the village families were elated to have a school close enough to allow their young children to attend. We’ve expanded to four grades, with the addition of four classrooms. But the more than 400 students who come to learn every day have never had a place to play except the dusty, rough terrain of this isolated Tanzanian region. Until now.
The kids’ play world is a whole new landscape of fun, thanks to the wonderful assistance of the nonprofit One Dollar for Life, ODFL. ODFL promotes and practices altruism by building small-scale, high impact projects in the developing world, improving life for some of the globe’s poorest populations. Knowing the developmental importance of play, both organized and free-form, for young children, the organization offered Olmoti School its expertise to build and help fund our first playground. Matching funds with those contributed by OlmotiClinic donors, ODFL installed eight swings, four slides, four seesaws, climbing structures and a regulation-sized soccer field that now gets a workout from the school’s fledgling but fierce soccer team.
ODFL’s founder, Robert Freeman, visited Olmoti to view the playground, and was received with heartfelt gratitude by the local families. We are so grateful to ODFL for their support for this and other invaluable projects.
And no one is more thrilled than the kids themselves.