Grace Kimaro had been teaching primary school in Arusha for fifteen years. In April 2023, she took her class of 32 students on a nature walk along the lower slopes of Mount Meru. At 11:47 a.m., a 5.9-magnitude earthquake hit the region. The trail split open, rocks fell, and within seconds Grace was separated from her students by a landslide that blocked the path behind her.
Alone on the Wrong Side
Grace was on the upper side of the landslide with three students. The other 29 were somewhere below, on a trail that had partially collapsed. Her phone had no signal. She could hear children crying but could not reach them. For twenty minutes she tried to climb over the debris, cutting her hands on rocks, before realising she physically could not get through. She knelt on the broken trail and prayed the most desperate prayer of her life: "God, You are their teacher now. Keep them until I can find them."
The Older Students Who Became Shepherds
What Grace did not know was that her two oldest students — fourteen-year-old twins named Baraka and Bahati — had immediately taken charge below. They gathered the younger children into a group, counted heads, and moved everyone to a flat clearing away from the unstable slope. Baraka used a whistle from his school bag to signal their location to rescue teams. Bahati, who had attended a Red Cross youth training, checked each child for injuries. When a five-year-old named Neema began crying uncontrollably, another student named Joseph wrapped his jacket around her and sang hymns until she calmed down.
Every Single One
Rescue teams reached the lower group at 3:15 p.m. All 29 children were accounted for with only minor scrapes. Grace and her three students were reached thirty minutes later. When she saw the full class assembled at the base camp, she collapsed. The headmaster later said that in 40 years of running the school, he had never seen anything like it — 32 children, an earthquake, a landslide, and not a single serious injury. Grace told the parents at a special assembly: "I asked God to be their teacher while I couldn't be. He sent two fourteen-year-olds to do the job."
