1961
A Life Well Spent
FAL L 2 0 1 7 • 1 5 0 TH AN NI VE R SA RY
When Bob Maxwell accepted the position to teach vocational agriculture for a project in Kenya in 1960, he had no idea it would become the first of several trips to East Africa.
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“When I married Bob, I thought I was marrying a farmer,” Betty Maxwell said. “We married when I finished school – this was in the 1950s – but farming was not good in the 1950s. Bob had taken over his 200-acre family farm, but it was really hard to make a decent living on 200 acres in Iowa.” After eight years of farming, Bob Maxwell learned that Earlham College, a liberal arts college in Indiana that he had attended prior to earning his bachelor’s in farm operations from Iowa State University, was initiating a project supported by the United States Agency for International Development. The goal was to establish the very first day-secondary school for African boys in Kenya. “Bob was intrigued by the project,” Maxwell continued. “He had a vocational agriculture teaching certificate and, though he wasn’t teaching in the classroom, he was involved in an ‘on-the-farm’ training program that was supported by the GI Bill that allowed veterans to receive training from a trained instructor. Bob contacted Earlham College and was immediately hired.” It was this experience that opened his eyes to the dire need for agricultural education in East Africa. “The school was up in very primitive bush country in west Kenya at a little place called Chavakali,” Betty Maxwell said. “Chavakali was a little market, which was just a wide spot in the road with a couple of open-front huts with a few things to buy. Every couple of days they would butcher a cow and lay it out on a plank, and that’s where we got our meat.” Maxwell said she would point to a section of meat, they would “hack some off” for her, wrap it in banana leaves and tie it with twine for her take home and cook in the pressure cooker for several hours, at which point it would be edible. “Bob could just immediately see the potential,” she continued. “He could see how much difference even a little agricultural education would do for these people.”
WRITTEN BY NIKKY LUNA
Over the next two years, Bob Maxwell worked very hard to help the Kenyans realize that potential. Parents were eager for their sons to get the kind of education that would allow them to become “suit-and-tie-wearing professionals” rather than workers who would just get their hands dirty on a farm. “The boys came in from miles every day,” Betty Maxwell recalled. “They would ride their bikes or walk, and Bob went home with individual students day after day to talk with their parents. He couldn’t even speak their language, but the sons knew English because they had come up through the primary school system, and some parents would know a few words of English. “Bob did a real missionary job trying to explain to the parents what agriculture could be. And it wasn’t what was in their front yard.” He met with successful British farmers in the Kenya highlands who were raising sisal and livestock and convinced them to allow the schoolboys to visit and observe their farms on school holidays. Additionally, he wanted to ensure that agricultural education would have standing in the British education system, as this would help to permanently establish it in Africa. So, he wrote the entire curriculum for agriculture education for secondary school, and, as he hoped would happen, it was approved by the Cambridge Syndicate in Britain. After two years of teaching and advocating for agriculture in Kenya, it was time for the Maxwells to return home to Iowa. Bob Maxwell reenrolled at Iowa State University, where he earned his master’s in agricultural education. As he was finishing up his degree, he received a call from the International Programs Office at West Virginia University. “WVU was applying for a USAID project contract that involved agricultural education in secondary schools,” Betty Maxwell said. “The Kenya government had requested Bob by name, hoping he would come back and head it up.”
