Thanks to a dedicated staff, life on campus runs smoothly each day. With sometimes over 200 mouths to feed, a farm to tend to, and the security of the campus to ensure, Daraja employs a large local staff in order to keep things up and running. Many of these staff members have been working on campus since the “pre-Daraja” days, where the campus was home to the Baraka School, a small educational program that aimed to transform at-risk boys from Baltimore into successful students with a future.

IMG_5886Aloise, however, was not one of those staff members. He serves as the head of the kitchen department and he can tell you the exact date for when he began working with Daraja.

“It was 2009,” he explains with a shy smile, “26th of July, 2009, I was very excited and very nervous.”

Before joining the Daraja Academy community, Aloise worked as a chef atop nearby Mount Kenya, where he cooked hot meals for hungry and tired trekkers. In 2009, Aloise worked in our kitchen as a general staff member, before becoming the head of the department in late 2011.

Because he started in 2009, he has watched the student body grow from just one first-year class, to where it is now at full capacity with about 26 girls in each of the four classes. He reports that it has been a lot of fun to watch the campus grow and explains that “now, the campus is more lively. It is more exciting with so many girls.”

The girls love having Aloise around, too, and most pass up using his name in order to refer to him as “Uncle” or “Bush Baby.” In addition to preparing meals and overseeing operations in the kitchen, Aloise can be found helping out on campus with anything from harvesting kale and greens in the farm to addressing technical difficulties during the weekly movie on Saturday nights.

When asked about his favorite part of his job, Aloise explains, “I love to bake. Daraja has an oven and we bake bread almost every day, and sometimes we bake cinnamon rolls too.” The wide smile across his face shows how much passion lies behind his words. “I have never gotten to bake so often before,” he finishes.

From the girls cheers when Aloise fixes broken wires during Saturday movies to their excited interaction with him as he prepares and serves up meals, it is clear that the students are glad to have Aloise as part of the Daraja family as well.