She was 15, sitting in the back of a conference room in her soccer uniform, impatiently waiting for her mom to drive her to practice, when Molly Hunter’s attention was suddenly captivated by a CEO who began sharing about his son’s mission work in Africa.
From that moment, she was hooked.
“I got in the car on the way to the soccer game and I was like, ‘Mom, that is what I want to do,’” Hunter said.
Her mom told her she was not surprised given Hunter’s lifelong dream to help underserved communities. She told her if she could find a safe place to serve and a way to do so, she could go.
“I was curious about what a different culture looks like, what it looked like to teach in a different place, what it looked like to teach people who speak a different language, who look different from me,“ Hunter said. “I just really wanted to learn what it looks like to serve other communities — to learn from them in return.“
Immediately, Hunter emailed every contact she could think of who may have some connection with mission work abroad. Through a series of serendipitous events, she was connected with the Comet House School located in a small town called Kikuyu outside of Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi. The school provides education for two very different populations—paying students hailing from the nearby city and scholarship students from the local Kikuyu community who would not otherwise have access to education.
A high school sophomore at the time, Hunter boarded a plane alone to Africa and was placed to live with a local woman as she worked at the school. For a month, Hunter immersed herself completely in the community as she helped teach preschool at Comet. She focused on learning Swahili, understanding the community’s needs and absorbing classroom knowledge from the school’s teachers.
“It was great seeing the students every day who were just so excited to see somebody return and care about what they care about,” Hunter said.
By the end of her trip, Hunter had a mission to learn as much as she could about education and improving educational access so she could return someday and make a difference.
Fast forward a few years, Hunter still carried her memories of Comet and her dreams to one day return. During her sophomore year at UT, that dream became a reality. As a Youth and Communities Studies major and the recipient of the Stamps Forty Acres Scholarship supported by the Wood Family, Hunter had the opportunity to return to Africa on a fully funded study abroad trip.
“For the first time, people were like ‘you are an education major, and you are passionate about this, and I care about this too and want you to have that passion, so here you go,’” said Hunter after receiving her scholarship.
Last summer, Hunter boarded a plane back to the little town of Kikuyu, where Comet is based. This time, she took her mom with her to show her the community she had fallen in love with. There, she again observed the local educators, but this time, she also shared the knowledge and classroom techniques she gained from her COE experience.
She noticed that her experience began to shape her view of life, from finding joy in simplicities to running on Kenya time—a concept used in the region that refers to slowing down.
“It is really hard not to fall in love with this community,” Hunter said. “I think America gets caught up in this hustle culture and a drive for success. These are people who live in the moment and that was something I learned so much from.”
Upon her return home, Hunter worked on a plan to help the children she had once taught in preschool to break the poverty cycle and graduate high school. Along with her mom, the school’s founders and leaders, and others who shared in their goal, Hunter helped launch a capital campaign to renovate the primary school and build a middle and high school building for the school.
In their most recent letter to donors, the organizers shared that the primary school renovations were going well, the groundbreaking of the secondary school would happen by end-of-year and they had already raised over $1 million, nearly fulfilling their fundraising goal.
Looking ahead, Hunter already knows she will return to Africa one more time and she is already looking forward to sharing new conflict resolution and classroom techniques with the teachers at Comet.
“I am really excited to see the school and also meet teachers who have a passion for working in a special education classroom or a STEM classroom,” Hunter said. “I want to see where I can come in and help fill in gaps with what I learned at UT.”
Her main goal next summer is to help grow special education classrooms with affordable resources that can make a tangible impact and to implement new techniques she has learned from tutoring in low-income communities in Austin to help kids stay in and finish school.
Hunter said her time in Africa has inspired her to have two dreams—helping to meet the needs of children and families in her own community and returning to Africa to help expand educational access in communities abroad.
Someday Hunter hopes to aid children and families navigating the foster system locally or internationally. Meanwhile, she said she hopes to travel back to Comet many times in the coming years to maintain her relationship with the school, continue to work on meeting the needs of this and similar communities through international work and advance educational equity.
“I am excited to see what it looks like to be all in domestically while also having this passion and this love for a community that is halfway around the world,” Hunter said.
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