About 14 years ago, Evert Jan van der Gun visited Kwale county in Kenya. Evert Jan is the restaurant owner of ‘Lof der Zotheid’ in the Hague. Together with his family he visited the primary school that was being reconstructed together with the Verkaart Development Team. The primary school children gave them a warm welcome with performances of dance and singing. However, Evert Jan realized that there was a lot of work still to do in order to make sure that these children could build up a brighter future.

In the years following, Evert Jan did a lot of financial donations to help the school and the students that were taken into the programme of Friends for Life in that time. A year later, Evert Jan went back to visit Kenya. During that visit, the  idea was born to set up a project called ‘Water for Kenya’ in the Netherlands. He started serving tap water in water jugs labeled with ‘Friends for Life’ and asked his customers to donate 1 euro per served jug as a donation for Friends for Life. More than 10 years, Evert Jan raised a lot of euros for the foundation by continuing with the project. He did not only serve a lot of waterjugs in his own restaurant, he also managed to mobilize 8 other restaurants to do the same for Friends for Life. The total money raised in ‘Lof der Zotheid’ alone, exceeds 55.000 euros in the meantime! This is thus a minimum of serving 55.000 waterjugs to hi guests for a good cause!

The success of this idea has lead to an expansion of the project over the years and many more restaurants are now participating. Lammert Braaksma, founder of the foundation, approached many more restaurants together with the employees working for the foundation at that moment. This has lead to another 25 restaurants still serving water in the now wellknown waterjug of Friends for Life.

Of course we are very thankful for developing this idea and all the efforts in the last years towards this project, together with his team. We hope that he would like to continue with this in the coming years as well in order to help many more students studying in Kenya. Additionally, we would like to invite everybody to enjoy a nice dinner at ‘Lof der Zotheid’ and order a waterjug with fresh Friends or Life water and contribute in this unique way as well.