10/16/2026
What if a school didn’t ask children to come to it, but went looking for them?
That question has lived at the heart of Montessori on Wheels from the beginning.
When we named our first bus Rungano, a Shona word meaning “storyteller” we imagined a learning
environment carrying stories from one community to another. Stories of children, families, resilience,
joy, and possibility. Now another African word has found its way into our story.
One morning, Tatenda (our chiefdreamer) was on a phone call with his thought partner and friend, Bryan Tanaka, when they found themselves dreaming and ideating about Montessori on Wheels. As they talked, Bryan helped Tatenda make a beautiful connection between our first bus and the story we wanted our second bus to carry. Then, almost instinctively, Bryan shouted, “Kwetu!” Our home. In Swahili, Kwetu carries the sense of “our home,” “our place,” or “where we belong.” And the more Tatenda sat with that word, the more it felt like Montessori on Wheels.
Growing up in Zimbabwe, Tatenda learned that home was never simply a building. Home was people. Home
was the auntie who corrected you as if you were her own child. Home was playing outside until
someone called you in. Home was eating together, learning together, and knowing that beyond the
walls of your own house, you belonged to something bigger than yourself. That understanding of home has followed him into his work as an educator.
Montessori taught Tatenda about the prepared environment, that we can intentionally create spaces that communicate dignity, independence, beauty, order, and trust to the child. Africa taught him something equally important, the environment is also relational. It is community. It is the people who surround the child and say, through their presence, “You belong to us, and we belong to you.”
That is Ubuntu and perhaps Kwetu is where Montessori and Ubuntu meet.
A classroom arrives on wheels. It parks in a neighborhood. The doors open. Materials come out.
Children gather. Families gather. And for those few hours, a new kind of learning home appears.
