Mary Akinyi had been a primary school teacher in Nairobi for fifteen years. She was good at it — patient, creative, and genuinely fond of children. But the children who haunted her weren't in her classroom. They were under the Uhuru Highway bridge.
The Children Under the Bridge
Every day, driving to work, Mary passed them — dozens of street children living in the concrete shadows beneath the highway. Sniffing glue, begging, fighting, surviving. Some were as young as five. Most had no names anyone remembered.
In 2011, Mary started bringing bread. Then books. Then chalk and a piece of cardboard. She sat under the bridge after school and taught whoever would sit still. Three children came the first day. Then seven. Then twenty.
Her husband, Joseph, thought she'd lost her mind. Her colleagues said it was pointless — these children were beyond help. The city government told her she needed permits she couldn't afford. Mary kept going.
The Bridge School
By 2013, Mary had quit her teaching job and was running a full-time school under the bridge. She taught in the morning, fed the children at noon with food from her church, and helped them find shelter in the evening. She funded it through donations, her husband's income, and money she earned selling mandazi at the roadside.
The school had no walls, no desks, no electricity. It had Mary, a blackboard painted on a pillar, and thirty-seven children who showed up because someone cared whether they lived or died.
Mary's church — a small Assembly of God congregation in Kibera — became the school's backbone. Members donated uniforms, books, and time. The pastor counselled traumatised children. The women's group cooked.
The Doctor
One of Mary's first students was a boy named Kevin — eight years old when he found the bridge school, orphaned at five, addicted to glue at six. He could barely write his name. Mary spent three years teaching him to read.
Kevin turned out to be brilliant. By secondary school — which Mary fundraised to send him to — he was top of his class. He received a scholarship to the University of Nairobi. In 2023, Kevin Odhiambo graduated as a medical doctor.
At his graduation, Kevin found Mary in the crowd, knelt in front of her, and said: "Everything I am started under a bridge."
Mary's school now has a permanent building — donated by an anonymous benefactor — and serves 150 children. Twelve of her original students have attended university.
"I didn't build a school," Mary says. "I just brought bread and chalk to children nobody wanted. God built the school."