Greatest Person: Margo McAuliffe Tackles Geometry in Kenya

Reentry has never been easy for Margo McAuliffe, and this one has been no different, after her seventh summer at the high school for girls in Africa that the retired teacher raised more than $1 million to build. 

Three days after arriving home in Menlo Park, McAuliffe is feeling the flood of happy memories about the eager students in her math classes at St. Francis Xavier Secondary School for Girls in Kenya’s Naivasha District, the festive wedding of the deputy principal and haggling at the colorful Maasai Market in Nairobi. That's mixed with sadness and exhaustion that’s set in after the long trip home. 

“My body is here... but my heart and head are still there,” said a tired McAuliffe. “I walked in the house... it was like I had never left... It's very strange. I feel the same way when I get to my little place at the orphanage. It is like I live parallel lives.”

Indeed she does.    

McAuliffe marvels still at how much the experience in Kenya has changed her since 2003 when she retired from her job as a math teacher at Menlo-Atherton High School and was looking for a way to put her time and talents to good work.

She had confided to friends that she hoped one day to teach math to girls in Africa; and not long after, one of them told her she knew a priest in Kenya who ran a school there and might need some help.

A quick email to Father Daniel Kiriti snagged her an invite to visit the town of Naivasha to teach in his Catholic parish co-ed high school. Soon she was on a flight to Africa.

During her stay, Father Kiriti mentioned that the girls would be phased out of the school, but he pointed out that the community had donated a plot of land to build a new high school for girls. All they needed, he said, was the money to construct the facility. It was a tall order by any stretch of the imagination. 

“I realized I needed to go home to raise money for this school,” the modest McAuliffe recalled during a Kenyan cooking class at in San Mateo.

Though she had never raised a cent before, the gray-haired teacher with a low-key personality and a winning smile set up a non-profit foundation called Kenya Help, and raised more than $1,000,000. McAuliffe did it one step at a time by  and holding lots of small fundraisers in and around Menlo Park, the Peninsula and Silicon Valley.  Some of them are chats, while others are a bit more creative like the cooking class.

“We would not have our school without Margo. She was our angel,” Father Kiriti said at the Draeger's fundraiser.

The first class of 17 girls graduated last November from the school, which has eight classrooms, two science labs, two dorms, a library, sports courts, computer lab. This November the second class of about 46 girls from St. Francis Xavier Secondary School for Girls will graduate.

Her generous nature and passion have not gone unnoticed. In March, McAuliffe was invited to speak at a TEDx conference in San Jose about her adventures as a volunteer in Kenya.

She also inspired Riley Murtagh, who visited the school last summer with his grandmother, Anita Dippery, to make a mini documentary that has already generated a few thousand dollars in donations.

"It was awesome," said Murtagh, who is a senior at Foothill High School in Pleasanton.

"It gave me helpful insights. I took away that I - we - need to appreciate the education that we have here."  

For her many local friends and followers, McAuliffe sent a blog-style note regularly often while sitting on her bed under a mosquito net, which you can read on Menlo Park Patch. She chronicles her packed days and nights at the school, and shares  to Nairobi’s raucous markets. 

“Despite famine in the north, continued reports of graft and corruption (though the government is slowly addressing those issues), poverty, unemployment, alcohol and drug addiction, drought in some areas, flooding in others, power outages, sugar shortage (a big problem here---Kenyans love their sugar), bad roads and on and on, I see so much progress, so much life, hope, courage and love,” she wrote in her last summer blog post before departing Nairobi for California. “This country is making great strides and I am so privileged to be part of it.”

McAuliffe rattled off a host of good work being done by other good people in Kenya, people who have become her friends over the years. There’s St. Therese Development Center, a safe house for abused children; Life Beads of Kenya, a workshop run by her friend Minalyn Nicklin, who trains and employs HIV positive people; Helping Hands, a nursery school that welcomes children with disabilities; St. Cecilia’s school and the district hospital for maternity and other women’s needs managed by Cindy Berkland, an American nurse, in conjunction with Panda Flowers in Naivasha, among many others. The needs are endless.

McAuliffe always plays down her role in this world of helpful hands, pointing instead to the good deeds of others who are making a difference in big ways and small in a troubled African country.

But her friends make sure to give the modest McAuliffe credit where credit is due.

“I started out with one little step… and all of a sudden… it moved like a wave," said Anita Dippery, a friend of McAuliffe and a fellow teacher who has become a big supporter over the years. She is a member of the board of , and has been instrumental in raising at least $40,000 for the organization. This year the Menlo Park resident enlisted friends she calls her “knitting elves,” to make a suitcase full of knit scarves for the school’s students, teachers and staff, which were delivered.

Donations have come in the form of local money and muscle. The Kenya Help website was designed by Gail Blumberg, a professional designer in Menlo Park. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a leading Silicon Valley law firm with offices in Palo Alto, did the foundation’s 501(c)(3) application, pro bono. A group of middle school basketball players in Menlo Park coached by Menlo Park resident Rebecca Bloom decided to do . 

McAuliffe herself schlepped an overhead projector, 32 graphing calculators and an overhead presentation pad to Kenya after Texas Instruments donated them. She plans to offer the first ever graphing calculator workshop at the school at the end of July. 

McAuliffe has returned to Kenya each summer for the past seven years to teach math at both Ndingi and St. Francis Girls schools.
“It is transformational," she said, "Our girls want to be engineers and doctors."

All of the first class of graduates passed the national exams and 14 of them scored at a level that qualifies them for entrance to public and private universities. 

“The performance of these young women heralds a remarkable achievement for this brand new secondary school,” McAuliffe wrote in one blog. 

While they are hopeful about their graduates, McAuliffe and Father Kiriti acknowledged that the girls’ options are still limited. Because university slots are few and coveted, some of the girls will have limited choices after high school. 

A jovial man with a hearty laugh who was born in Kenya, Father Kiriti also has ties to the Peninsula and Silicon Valley. He received a master's degree in pastoral ministry from Santa Clara University. Over the years he has returned most years to the Bay Area to help McAuliffe raise money. Father Kiriti worked in youth ministry and as a missionary in Malawi before he was assigned to parish work in the Naivasha District, where St. Francis Xavier school is located.

“I dreamed of a school for the poor and bright girls to build their self-confidence and instill a sense of owning their destiny,” Father Kiriti said.

The summer is a busy time at the school. McAuliffe stays at the Mji Wa Neemai orphanage, sometimes tutoring the students who are preparing for national exams. This year she also took some of the kids and bought them shoes to replace the last pair they received two years ago, supporting the work done by her friend of 60 years, Judy Murphy, of Portland, OR, who has taken to helping the orphanage the way McAuliffe has adopted the girls school. Much of McAuliffe's  time is spent teaching math, including 3-D geometry, and working side by side with Jecinta, the principal of SFG. She also checks up on Jecinta’s adopted daughter, who is also named Jecinta, and looks for other orphans the group can support.

In the evening, there are study hours and weekly math contests. Some days there are picnics on the school grounds when they’ll feast on fried chicken, spaghetti and greens.

The volunteer work clearly fuels McAuliffe’s spirit; she takes on more ambitious projects each year, which she seeks help for from her eager friends and colleagues.

After construction of the school was completed, McAuliffe focused on raising funds to obtain a solar/wind system to generate electricity, so the school can be self-sustaining. A year or so later, the power is flowing through the school, enabling them to save the money that they would have used to pay for electricity.

Now that she's back, McAuliffe will see her son and grandchildren in Palo Alto and visit her daughter and grandkids in San Diego, and then turn to organizing a whirlwind schedule of masses, fundraisers and talks for Fr. Kiriti's annual visit to the Bay Area. He’ll be here in November. In between she tutors lots of students in math.

Then the unassuming powerhouse will be back on the coffee circuit, sharing compelling stories of a faraway school and the promising young Kenyan girls it serves. No doubt, she'll follow her chat with a simple request for help.

Building the scholarship fund is the foundation’s key objective now, so more girls can attend the school and go on to university studies. It costs about $5000 a year for each one. They also want to drill a borehole so they won’t have to buy water anymore. “I think it could cost $10,000-$15,000,” McAuliffe said.

There are also scholarships for the girls whose parents can’t afford the $650 year for high school tuition, and for boys to attend the

It’s been challenging to raise awareness about the little Kenyan school, said Dippery, but they’ve attracted many unsung heroes who have helped along the way.

“It’s been one of those moments of grace in my life," she said, “and Margo inspired us to come and get on board.”