Send a Christmas Greeting to Kuria!

No matter where you go in Kuria you’ll be surrounded by kids. They seem to have a built in mzungu radar (mzungu is the term for a white person in Kiswahili) and come running to greet you. Greetings here are a big deal. If there is a small group of 10 kids standing in a circle around you, each will greet you and expect a greeting in return.

Over the past two months we’ve come to know many of the children by name, and we’ve told our pint-sized friends about our wonderful friends back home. The children always ask us to greet you all on their behalf (right after they ask us to greet Barack Obama). Of course we always agree to do so, but this Christmas we have a better idea: to kick off our Christmas for Kuria fundraising campaign we asked the children to greet you themselves. We had dozens of kids draw Nuru supporters a picture depicting their homes, families, animals, and in so doing greeting you and wishing you a Merry Christmas.

Now it’s your turn. Take a few seconds to type in a Christmas Greeting to the children of Kuria below. We’d love it if your kids would participate in this as well, and if they do so, please include their age. We’ll distribute your greetings to the children at the Nyametaburo Primary School in January.  Merry Christmas and thank you for greeting our friends in Kuria.

About Jake Harriman

Founder — Jake Harriman is a United States Naval Academy graduate and former Force Recon Marine combat veteran who became convinced that the “War on Terror” can’t be won on the battlefield alone; the contributing causes of violent extremism–specifically extreme poverty–must also be eradicated. After transitioning out of the Marine Corps, Jake enrolled in the Stanford Graduate School of Business to found Nuru International in 2007 with a mission to eradicate extreme poverty in some of the most fragile regions of the world in order to help stop the spread of groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS. Over the next twelve years, Jake and his team grew Nuru to become one of the premier organizations at the nexus of security and development - empowering over 130,000 people with lasting meaningful choices to permanently climb out of extreme poverty in some of the toughest places in the world.