Sam Chelanga, a two-time NCAA cross country champion and collegiate 10,000-meter record holder (27:08.49), hopes to provide water filters to his home village in Kenya via a yoga class in his training base of New Hampshire.
After college at Fairleigh Dickinson in New Jersey and Liberty University in Virginia, Chelanga was in Oregon at the outset of his professional runner before settling near Dartmouth, where he trains with Ben True, an alumnus of the college. But he’s originally from the remote village of Kabarsel in Kenya’s Saimo Hills, and as the Valley News reports, he’s teaming up with a local massage therapist for a yoga class that will fund water filters for Kabarsel.
Kabarsel is an hour’s drive from the nearest hospital, and its residents draw water from puddles in the woods or from storm runoff. Illness is a frequent result. “There are a lot of things that need to be done in my village, but the first thing that makes people healthy and happy is clean water,” Chelanga told the Valley News.
Chelanga has already raised $1,500 for the filters, which cost $100 apiece. The filters are a viable alternative to drilling a well, which Chelanga said could cost $130,000.
"Sam runs here," Anna Terry, who is Chelanga's massage therapist, told Runner's World Newswire from Hanover. "Everybody sees him flying by in his neon shoes."
On July 16, Chelanga will join with Terry, who is also a yoga teacher, for a 90-minute community yoga class at Game Set Mat, a tennis and yoga sportswear outlet in Hanover. Terry, in her words, will teach "mobility and muscular recovery using yoga-based postures and other such things to augment your training," a discipline intended for runners and other active athletes.
The class is free, but Game Set Match owner Susan Valence told Newswire she'll put out a bowl for donations. The cap for class is 30 participants, twice what she normally hosts, and she expects to raise a few hundred dollars on site.
Beyond that, said Terry, "already people are calling and asking, 'How do we get you money?'" for Chelanga's project.
After the July 16 event, Terry explained, "I would happily do a huge class at another venue. He started telling me a story about how one day he’ll win a big race and he can take his money and help [his village's residents] get clean water and maybe one day have this hospital there. In the meantime, I'll do what I can to help him."
