In fact, he is all those things now. But he used to be just like them.

Plucked from the streets of Kenya as a young boy and educated by St. Patrick Catholic missionaries, Simaro MA ‘91 has put his USC experience to use educating and caring for the orphans of his native country.

But it wasn’t just the public administration degree that helped him establish his African Child Foundation. It was the lessons in perseverance.

Raised in a hut in a malaria-plagued village, Simaro was 6 years old when Irish priest Michael Brennan invited him to attend a grammar school eight miles away. As eager for the hot lunch as for the privilege of owning books, he ran all the way to school each day.

“We didn’t have desks,” recalls the soft-spoken Simaro. “We just sat on the floor.”

In addition to math and English lessons, the school provided a spiritual education. At age 17, Simaro was baptized. “Father Brennan kept saying, ‘The time will come when you guys will be responsible for your own people,’ “ says Simaro, who was inspired to enter the seminary. “I saw missionaries literally saving lives through medicine and clinics, and the nuns going out of their way to feed the hungry.”

After studying theology in Nairobi, he returned to his village to be ordained.

“The villagers came and looked,” Simaro says, chuckling. “They’d never seen that kind of Catholic ceremony. I remember my mom saying, ‘I never knew there were so many white people in Kenya!’ Gee, it was spectacular.”

Needing personnel to run its office, the diocese sent Simaro to study public administration at USC in 1989. He lived nearby at St. Vincent Catholic Church, and preached there on Sundays.

His favorite class was public finance. “There was a lot of emphasis on accountability and owning up to every little cent. That really touched me.”

After graduation, he returned to Africa and traveled throughout Kenya.

“That’s how I started running into the tragedies of AIDS, the faces of poverty, the lack of water,” he said. “It broke my heart.”

Uneducated teenage girls were undergoing genital mutilation and falling into the child sex trade. Simaro officiated at up to eight children’s funerals every week.

“But all I was doing was delivering the Mass,” he said. “I felt I wasn’t really touching people’s lives.”

He remembered the people he had met at USC, students and professors with remarkable optimism and determination.

“I think the American people are really hard-working,” he says, noting that even the Trojan football team embodied a can-do spirit. “It’s that urge to win.”

With that in mind, he established his foundation in 2003 with a modest goal: “just to stop the death.” But he could find no philanthropists in Kenya.

“I stopped tourists on the road,” he recalls. “Oh, my, I was so desperate.”

When a drought in 2004 caused devastating famine, Simaro sent letters of appeal to American dioceses. A church in Newport Beach, Our Lady Queen of Angels, invited him to speak, and its parishioners were so moved by his story that they sent him home with $80,000 – enough to start both his clinic and a school for orphans.

“We started washing them,” he says, smiling, “giving them clothes and food.”

The school is called Fanaka, which means “God’s prosperity” in Swahili. It now serves 400 children, and the clinic treats 300 patients a week. Next year Simaro hopes to build a high school for girls (to learn more, visit www.safariofhope.org).

“It’s really a blessing to me to have shared part of the American dream,” he says. “And now my kids are participating in that dream.”

 – Starshine Roshell