When she arrives June 20 at the Cura Orphanage just outside Nairobi, Kenya, the visit will be a homecoming of sorts for Kenmore’s Hayden Nichols.

Nichols lived in Kenya for roughly three years in the late 1980s, spending some of that time attending the University of Nairobi.

Now, she and Greg Van Belle will leave the Kenmore home they share and try to help the Cura facility, in the words of Van Belle, “just about any way they can.”

Both professors of English at Edmonds Community College, the couple also will be attempting to set up future, short-term overseas learning experiences for their students and gathering materials for a class they plan on jointly teaching next fall.

“We want to provide students with a more personal experience of contemporary East Africa and help break down some of the stereotypes,” Van Belle said.

“It’s a nice compliment to our regular jobs,” Nichols added. “We are going to try and do a bunch of things at once.”

Even beyond the other reasons for the trip, Nichols has a personal connection to the orphanage. The Cura (pronounced “shor-a”) facility is a project of the Creative Visions Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports activists who use their creative talents to foster social change.

The Visions Foundation was founded to honor Reuters photojournalist Dan Eldon, who was killed at age 22 while covering Marine activity in Somalia along the Nairobi border.

Having first gone to Kenya at age 19, Nichols met Eldon and his sister, Amy. The three once went on a safari trip together, doing charity work at refugee camps in Malawi. Nichols is attempting to bring a traveling exhibit on Eldon to the Seattle area in time for the upcoming release of a movie on Eldon’s life, set to star Daniel Radcliffe.

Nichols added the Cura Orphanage was founded in 2006 by the former Amy Eldon, who, when it came time to get married, collected donations rather than gifts. For now, Nichols said the orphanage is home to 50 children, though there is room for three times that number.

According to Nichols, while the children, ages 5 to 11, are not infected themselves, each has lost at least one parent to AIDS. She said one goal of the orphanage is to keep the youngsters in the village and not have them leave for Nairobi where they likely will end up living in slums, where poverty and health problems — especially AIDS — are common.

Between the two of them, Van Belle said the pair have four children and, eventually, they would like to take those youngsters to visit Kenya. In the meantime, Nichols arranged for the fifth- and sixth-grade PACE (Parents Active in their Children’s Education) classes at Bothell’s Lockwood Elementary School, which her children attend, to put together collages that depict their lives here in the U.S. The artwork will make the trip to the Cura Orphanage. Nichols hopes to have the children there create their own collages to bring back for students at Lockwood.

If Nichols is excited about returning to Kenya, Van Belle said he is very much looking forward to the trip himself.

“I love the prospect of seeing someplace new,” he said but added the fact there is a purpose behind the journey makes it more worthwhile, as does the opportunity to directly interact with the native population. Like Nichols, he spent some time studying overseas.

“Instead of seeing the Great Wall of China, I actually got to know the people there,” Van Belle said.

While there is risk associated with the trip, Nichols said Kenya traditionally has been one of the most stable East African countries. Van Belle said the U.S. State Department has warnings about traveling there, but he’s not exactly worried.

“The things they list, you could list for Baltimore,” he said, adding the government cautions travelers to keep an eye on valuables and gives what Van Belle considers other somewhat mundane warnings.

At least on this first trip, Van Belle and Nichols don’t plan on taking a great deal of supplies as they don’t really know what the orphanage needs.

“It’s sort of folly to presume without actually having been there,” Van Belle said, adding the coming trip is largely a fact-finding effort. He and Nichols want to learn exactly what the local community looks like and find what is needed to push it in whatever proves to be the right direction.