Staff Writer

Like most 14-year-olds, Ana Mendelson has faced those days "where I'm like, 'Ah! I don't want to wake up so early' " to go to school.

That early morning task, though, no longer appears so meddlesome to the teen since returning last week from a volunteer trip to the poverty-stricken African country of Kenya.

Working to aid elementary school students in a tiny rural village, the Fairfax resident says realized that "these kids are really just like me and deserve the same things as me, but how much less they've had compared to the schooling I've had" is jolting.

Mendelson's recent journey to Africa would not have come to be without a Jewish rite of passage.

As she was preparing to become a bat mitzvah at the Conservative Olam Tivkah in Fairax, Mendelson couldn't figure out a tzedakah project.

After her mother, Debra, the director of admissions at Gesher Jewish Day School in Fairfax, suggested that she speak to a neighbor who had volunteered in Kenya, Mendelson discovered her new raison d'etre: the Empopongi Primary School, located in a poor, bucolic section of Kenya's Maasai Mara region.

Now a rising sophomore at W.T. Woodson High School in Fairfax, Mendelson recalled being struck by her neighbor's photos of the school's sparse campus.

"I remember seeing a picture ... of the classroom being basically a stick hut, no covering or anything," Mendelson said, explaining that she eventually signed up to get e-mail alerts from the Maywood Rotary Kenya Project, a six-year-old New Jersey-based group that raises funds for and holds volunteer trips to the impoverished school.

Adopting the cause as her own, Mendelson, then an eighth-grader at Gesher, raised about $800 to subsidize scholarships for potential Empopongi students by holding a bowl-a-thon fund-raiser with her friends.

Her bat mitzvah project was completed, but her passion for the school continued.

"There was still so much to do," she said. "Seeing the progression of the project and how the school had been helped" motivated her to continue raising funds.

And in the back of her mind, she added, "I always pictured myself there."

One problem: Mom was not too keen on her teenage daughter traveling to Africa for a week on her own.

"She never let up," the elder Mendelson said with a laugh. "She had a keen interest in seeing the school."

That persistence paid off.

"I just kept with it É and every opportunity I had I was just like, 'Well, how about it today?" Ana Mendelson said, adding that her mom eventually gave in.

Following a year of preparation -- which included a gamut of immunizations and several fund-raising drives (the mother-daughter team raised more than $4,000 in donations from family and friends to bring to the school) -- the two were on their way to Nairobi, Kenya's capital city, along with 12 other Rotary Club volunteers.

Breaking far away from the bustle of city life, the group then took a second plane to their ultimate destination, a tourist camp located about a mile from the school.

Nearly 8,000 miles from their home turf, mother and daughter soon found out that they already had many gracious friends in Africa.

"When you go up to the school, it's a little hill and then about 300 kids are sprinting at you. They're just running, running, running, and all they want to say is 'Jambo!' [Swahilli for hello] and just shake your hand. It was one of the best experiences I had there," Mendelson recalled, adding that "all those lunches, all of those donations É they just see that when they see you."

In the course of the next week, the volunteers refurbished the living quarters for the school's teachers, a project that could potentially attract more qualified educators to the school. Until that point, Mendelson said, the instructors were living in "tiny" and "inhumane" conditions -- "you just can't even imagine someone living in it."

In addition, the group painted murals on the walls of the school's eight classrooms to enliven the atmosphere and make them appear more "like real classrooms," said Mendelson, who hopes to continue raising funds for the school and return one day.

Volunteers also waged a campaign to "cut back on disease," she said.

Pooling together to bring around 130 bars of soap with them from America, they launched a hand-washing campaign to promote cleanliness among the students.

"We taught them how to wash their hands with soap," said Debra Mendelson, noting that it was a "relatively new" endeavor for the children.

A philosophical realization soon hit the younger Mendelson as she interacted with the students.

"The level of happiness the kids had," despite living in poverty, was unexpected, she said. "That happiness in simplicity -- you don't see that a lot here. They had a lot to teach us."