The classroom had one book and one plastic chair. The students were all orphans. A third of them were HIV-positive. They lived in that room and some of them died there.

“It was a school, it was instructional,” says Bill Molloy. “But they deal with death.”

Molloy spent 31 years as a teacher and administrator in the Fall River schools. He is now a teacher at the University of Rhode Island. And he is heading back to Kenya this summer because when he was there a year ago, he saw that school, he looked into the faces of dying children and he heard a Kenyan teacher ask whether he could help.

He is crossing into that international territory where more and more Americans are working because they have found issues and causes that make national borders meaningless. They are packing up their experience, and often bundles of supplies, and heading for places where they can do what they’re good at and know that it matters.

“It’s part of being an educator, to see people grow and develop,” says Molloy.

So he and other teachers will travel to Kenya as part of the Kenyan Teacher Project, to make small changes in those classrooms where the only thing in abundance is students. He plans to make it a regular summer extension of his job. The work he and the other teachers do, he thinks, will ripple all over the place.

Those heroic Kenyan teachers, says Molloy, have an immediate impact on their students, particularly the orphans who have no other support. So if they are given better tools to work with, it will mean generations of young Kenyans receiving better educations. It’s basic math, and probably a few other subjects.

Anyone who has taught as long as Molloy has makes a bunch of friends in education. Some of those friends have moved on to teach in foreign schools. Last summer, a group of them headed for Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and to catch up with each other’s lives.

He slept on the ground a few times while he was in Kenya. The locals assured him that the really dangerous snakes were elsewhere.

He also saw a school unlike what he was used to. One of his friends, the headmaster of a private school, asked Molloy whether he wanted to help with a “feeding” at a school in a Nairobi slum.

“We fed them the only meal of the day,” Molloy writes in a brief summary of the experience. “Many of the students were HIV/AIDS positive. The orphaned students lived in the school. We fed them rice and beans. The plates were plastic containers which had not been cleaned and looked as if they had been picked up on the street. There was an odor of waste and garbage which permeated the area. This was their school.”

And he can’t wait to get back to it, to work in a place that does wonders for a teacher’s perspective on the tools of the profession. He saw teachers, often untrained, working with virtually nothing, sitting on that lone chair and trying to impart something of value to the children sitting on the floor.

He will try to teach the teachers subjects such as learning theory and early literacy training. He sees rich returns down the road from the things good, caring American teachers bring with them.

He has already been back to the school in Fall River that he worked in for so many years, to see whether there are any odds and ends a former faculty member might pick up.

“I got seventy books at Durfee High School. They’re a little beat up.”

He plans to haul them personally to Kenya. He wants to make sure they get there.

It is such a good, direct, personal way of sending our best to people who desperately need it. And it’s a two-way street. Those Kenyan teachers are going to teach those American teachers a thing or two.

If you want to help, donations can be sent to the URI Foundation, 79 Upper College Rd., Kingston, RI 02881. Checks should be made out to URI Foundation – The Kenyan Teacher Project.