Kipping for Kenya – Where WOD stands for “Winning Over Diversity”

Kipping for Kenya

Where WOD stands for “Winning Over Diversity”

By Bonnie Lynch

CrossFit has changed lives, one by one, box by box, and WOD by WOD. No one can dispute that it builds muscle, endurance, confidence, and even friendships. But how important is it in the big scheme of life? I mean, it’s not like CrossFit can change the world, right? And yet, that’s exactly what it’s doing. In rural Kenya, CrossFit is helping to bring education, food, clean drinking water, and a good measure of hope, village by village.

CrossFit founder Greg “Coach” Glassman threw the company’s support behind what’s now known as the Hope for Kenya initiative after hearing about CrossFit trainer and Kenya devotee Dallin Frampton’s (CrossFit SpearHead, Utah) involvement and passion for the cause. Through a charity called Koins for Kenya, Frampton joined a mission to provide educational opportunities to Africans in the country’s vast and underserved rural areas. In most cases, this means not only building schools in places where existing facilities are substandard or even nonexistent, but also working to ensure that the basics of life (shelter and safe and reliable sources of food and water) are in place so that students can be healthy enough to go to school.

Twenty-two-year-old Frampton says he’s always had an inexplicable affinity for Kenya, even before setting foot in the country. In 2009, one year after graduating from high school, he had a chance meeting with someone involved in Koins for Kenya and made a real connection. Less than 12 hours later, he sat in the executive director’s office asking how he could help. The answer was simple, if not easy: identify a project, and raise the money to accomplish it. “He challenged me to raise about $10,000 to build a school in the village of Dzivani [near Mombasa, Kenya].” Between the time of this meeting in September 2009 and January 2010, he had raised about $13,000. In March he was on his way to Kenya for a six-month stint that would become a life-changing, village-changing, and even CrossFit-changing experience.

Frampton returned from Africa excited to share his passion for the work he was doing. In February 2011, he met Coach Glassman at a Sports Series Q & A in Park City, Utah, and approached him, hoping to snag a donation. What he got was much more. “I had no idea he would want to grab onto this the way that he did,” marvels Frampton. The young man’s passion was apparently contagious, because after funding a two-room school project, Coach and a team of CrossFit HQ staffers flew to Africa to see the work and meet the people. Glassman even led an impromptu workout for the village kids. Jimi Letchford, head of CF branding, recalls the spark that ignited when Glassman saw what was possible if CrossFit really invested itself in Kenya. “He knew that his community would rally behind it.” A short time later, Glassman not only gave the green light for CrossFit to fund a second school project, with four schoolrooms and a water collection system, but he started dreaming up creative ways to up the ante in a CrossFit-Kenya partnership.

In a country where the life expectancy of a newborn is less than 60 years and 20% of the population lives below the international poverty line of $1.25 per day, there’s no shortage of worthy projects to tackle. Only about half of high-school-aged kids are actually enrolled in a school, and without adequate resources to send all of their children to a high school that may be many miles away, families and entire villages often pool their funds to send only the most promising students for education beyond Grade 8. Only these students will have a chance at the lifetime of opportunities (including a shot at college) that this level of education may provide. CrossFit, through its involvement in building schools and other basic infrastructure in Kenya, hopes to help more kids have access to this opportunity. Letchford estimates that by the time this issue goes to print, the initiative will probably have raised enough money for five or six schools.

First things first

When you visit one of the villages served by the project, you won’t see kids doing Wall Ball Shots or Muscle-Ups, but you will see a definite CrossFit presence. “The CrossFit part is just getting off the ground,” notes Frampton. In the village of Dzendereni, the newly-built school has been branded (literally) as the “CrossFit School.” A large CrossFit logo is emblazoned on an exterior wall and the desks are each stamped with the same logo. But incorporating CrossFit and CrossFit Kids into the curriculum can wait a while. “We’re in the very, very first baby steps of getting this thing off the ground,” says Frampton. “We can’t introduce CrossFit at its [typical] intensity before we give them the right fuel to fuel themselves. So we’re at Level 0, rather than at Level 1, where we can just go in and start teaching CrossFit. There are a couple prerequisites we’re focusing on right now.”

It’s not a “build-a-school-and-scram” model, Letchford notes. Job one is to set up the conditions where kids can show up feeling strong and healthy enough to participate in the mental and physical challenges of the school day. The projects always include buy-in from villagers, and there is much emphasis on helping families become self-reliant in nutrition and livelihood. CrossFit works with a couple of other non-profits to bring clean water and resources for sustainable crop cultivation to rural families in Kenya. They work with individual families to map out the crops that can be grown on their land, thereby moving villages away from the corn monoculture that has helped keep them in nutritional poverty. They teach a model called self-rotational gardening, in which calculations are first done to determine how much and what type of food a family will need to grow on the land they have available. The land is divided into sections, each large enough to produce food for the family for a two-week period. The first section is planted, say, with carrots, cabbage, and watermelon. That section is tended, and two weeks later the second section is planted either with the same foods or something different. When four sections have been planted, the first section is ready to harvest. The planting/harvesting cycle continues in this way, so there is always fresh food available. “Through these gardens, [villagers] can plant on one-tenth of the land they usually use for corn,” says Frampton, adding that unlike corn, the foods they are growing are rich in vitamins and minerals.

What’s a better accompaniment to fresh fruits and vegetables than a glass of clean, clear water? Water cisterns connected to simple gutter systems can collect fresh rainwater as part of a village’s improvement project. (The recently built CrossFit School in Dzerenderi has a 35,000-litre cistern.) And when there’s insufficient water from above, the “village drill” can help villagers access it from below. The drill, a human-powered marvel that works with the combined effort of several people, was created by an outfit called WHOLives (where WHO stands for water, health, and opportunity). Drillers assemble around a large metal wheel that looks a little like the merry-go-rounds at suburban playgrounds. Each grabs a handle and they begin to spin the wheel, which is connected to a section of drill bit. Once the bit is drilled in, the top of the drill is removed, a new section of bit is installed, and the wheel is spun again. The process continues until the (no doubt thirsty) drillers strike the wet stuff or the drill reaches its maximum depth of 250 feet.

Stepping up made easy

There’s a certain synergy that develops when people see others ‘doing good.’ Letchford and Frampton have certainly noticed this trend with CrossFit’s Hope for Kenya initiative, which has garnered about $130,000 in donations so far. “We’ve raised about $65,000 in the last two weeks,” says Letchford, and he adds that CF New England alone has raised more than $10,000. “We have people hitting Dallin up every day,” Letchford says. “Doctors, nurses, engineers . . . they just want to be part of it.” He adds that reigning Fittest Man on Earth Rich Froning and his wife have expressed a lifelong dream of going to Kenya and helping out.

So what can CrossFitters do to help? Frampton’s answer will sound familiar. “It’s all about raising money for a project,” says Frampton. “There are so many different things to do in Kenya, and I’m trying to link up the affiliates that want to get involved with a specific village.” There is also now quarterly Hope for Kenya WODs that CrossFitters can do to support the cause. Affiliates can host any kind of fundraising event, and CrossFit HQ is ready to support them. “We don’t care if you’re selling hot dogs or doing the workout, or whatever,” Letchford says. The important thing is for affiliates and individuals to get involved at whatever level they can.

CrossFit is also continually enhancing the initiative’s website (www.kenya.crossfit.com), which serves as a resource for affiliates to identify projects, raise funds, and share success stories. Letchford quips that one of the features now being developed for the website will be “like a Farmville project, but real.” Donors can select from a menu of items to see what their donations will buy—for example, a chicken coop, 100 desks, or a garden start-up for a family. And would-be supporters can rest assured that not all projects are in the five-figure price range. A fully- equipped garden goes for about $3,000. For a much more modest $30 (about the cost of a month’s worth of Gatorade), you can provide a desk for two or three students. Who knows, those desks might someday double as handy pieces of workout equipment when it’s time to try the new WOD called Kenya.

Note: Stats on Kenyan life expectancy, income, and school enrollment from UNICEF website.