25th Anniversary of the 1999 ‘Oxford to Cambridge with a Camel’ walk

Raising funds for camel-based nomad Bubisa school in northern Kenya
8 mile charity walk from the village of Kingston to Selwyn College

photo (right) shows Dr Graham Kings (left) and Joseph Galgalo (far right) as a primary school teacher at Bubisa in April 1990.

Sunday 30 June 2024

9.30am gather at All Saints Church, Church Lane, Kingston CB23 3NG 
10.00am departure of the walk
1.00pm arrival at Selwyn College for brunch in Hall

To register for the walk and brunch, or just for the walk, please use the form below.

To donate towards food for schoolchildren at Bubisa primary school in northern Kenya, click here for the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide donation site, and in the message box write, ‘Bubisa School, Kenya’. 

To follow on X, @CambridgeCamel, click here 

Background

_{Dr Graham Kings (far left), Professor Joseph Galgalo (centre) and Sir David Harrison (right) with Cleo at Selwyn College in 1999}

In June 1999, Graham Kings (SE1979) and Joseph Galgalo (SE1997) walked from Oxford to Cambridge with Cleo the camel and raised £50,000 for camel-based nomad schools in northern Kenya, where Joseph grew up. ITV and BBC covered the event and a 6 minute film, edited by the Church Mission Society (CMS, founded in 1799), was broadcast on YouTube.

To read more about the 1999 event, please click here.

For the 25th anniversary of the camel walk, Graham and Joseph are arranging this celebratory walk, this time without a camel, along the same route as the last day. Sadly, Joseph will not be able to come but his 25-year-old daughter, Faith Galgalo, will represent him. Money raised by the walk, will be given to a fund of the Anglican Church of Kenya, which is administered by the Anglican Development Services, for the primary school at Bubisa where Joseph taught as a young man in 1990, seven years before coming to Selwyn to study for his PhD in theology, supervised by Selwyn Fellow, Professor David Ford. 

For four years up to 2023, there was a devastating drought in northern Kenya. Currently a group of families at Bubisa who had 95 camels now only have 2 camels. Your donation will go towards buying food to allow the children to remain in school.

In 2023, Damian Arnold, Register editor of The Times, who is coming on the walk, visited Joseph and wrote about him and the devastating famine, ’23 million are on the brink of starvation in Kenya’, in both The Times and the Church Times.

About the Organisers
Dr Graham Kings is Assistant Bishop, Diocese of Ely, and Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide, which he founded in 1996. Sunday 30 June is the opening day of the CCCW Summer Institute on ‘Poverty and the Church’ and some of the Global South scholars will be coming on the walk.
Professor Joseph Galgalo is Assistant Bishop, Diocese of All Saints, Nairobi, Kenya and Provincial Secretary of the Anglican Church of Kenya. Previously he was Professor of African and Systematic Theology, and Vice Chancellor of St Paul’s University, Limuru, Kenya. In 2019, he gave the Henry Martyn Lectures in the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge and in 2020 was awarded the Cross of St Augustine by the Archbishop of Canterbury for services to the Anglican Communion in 2020. 

How to join
The walk is free and the brunch at Selwyn College is £13. 

To book places for the walk and / or brunch, please use the form below.