Hi All,
Below is a recent essay I wrote. One of our board members, Leah Hasselback asked me to write something about myself for KPLU's Changemakers. I could write about Hamomi nonstop, but I'm uneasy co-opting the narrative, as I find it painful how much we need to make these stories about the outsiders involved, (see: Kony 2012, Three Cups of Tea, etc...) But, Leah gave me some prompting and encouraged me to do it, and I wound up writing something really candid and personal, and I'm happy to share it. Sorry for the lack of pictures and the length, but it feels important to share a story that isn't about being some unshakable altruist with the manifest destiny to 'help' - it's always much more haphazard than people assume, and I have a lot of respect for the randomness of it all. Here it is:
I go back and forth between cursing and praising whatever
powers that be for the naïve commitment I made in November, 2007. If I’d kept
my mouth shut, I would have left Kenya for Seattle in February, 2007 with a broken heart
that just needed to curl up on her parents’ couch for some mending and moving
forward – forward most likely in the direction of a ski resort in Chile. Instead,
unbeknownst to myself, I made a career move. I had absolutely no intention of
doing so. For starters, I never envisioned being the person in charge, I never
wanted much weight on my shoulders; I never wanted to be responsible for all of
it. I wanted to find something I felt aligned with my values and to throw all
my wits and energy behind. I wanted to be Han, not Luke. Actually I really
wanted to be Chewbacca. Sturdy, reliable, clutch. An opinion you wanted at your
table. Not the final opinion.
My junior year of college I had the opportunity to live, work
and do research in Kenya
from September 2005-August 2006, through Minnesota Studies in International
Development (MSID). In attending University of Wisconsin-Madison, I had looked
forward to participating in their esteemed history of activism, but I found
myself stuck in a half-hearted rhetoric bubble while I watched President Bush
get reelected and marriage equality measures get overturned. So my year abroad
was going to be different, I was going to hit the ground at last; leaving
behind the transience and resume-building of a college campus and state capitol
to go where I felt advocacy mattered.
I was not so wide-eyed that I thought all forms of ‘help’
were ‘good’, I just thought I could doubtless find a way to participate that
felt useful and productive. Maybe that would be through MSID, but maybe that
would be through my internship or research or host family. In preparation, I
spent sophomore year taking Swahili class very seriously – maybe the first
class I ever sincerely took seriously. For once it felt applicable and I took
the entire opportunity seriously, to the degree that at times I foresaw not returning
home to finish college in the end. By August 2006, however, I’d reached the
extreme opposite conclusion that my white, privileged, foreign presence alone
was detrimental to Kenyan society. One disillusionment after another and I felt
there was no practical conclusion other than that nobody should do this but
Kenyans themselves.
This was not a revelation per se, but it was a total
abandonment of the touted development concept of being a catalyst. If I had a
dime for every time I heard an organization or person claim they were acting as
a catalyst… In practice, I saw ‘catalyst’ played out in a variety of ways that
can only be summed up as irresponsible. Sometimes out of profound laziness by
the outsiders – let’s write checks to clear our consciences and hey, any help
is better than no help. Sometimes out of a crippling fear of the past – I know
of a feeding program for a school that was funded twice over by two separate
organizations who didn’t know about each other, and when this was exposed and
presented to the donors by American volunteers on the ground, the volunteers
were attacked by the duped funders for being neo-colonists.
The reverse can be worse. There are the pure neo-colonists
who believe nobody local could possibly know what they’re doing, but this archaic
mentality is increasingly rare. More typically I see a nuanced neo-colonization
arising as a backlash of this epidemic of irresponsibility. I see foreigners
come to Kenya,
experience the disillusionment, witness the corruption, feel a bit of
hopelessness, and come to the conclusion that foreign hire for programs and
operations management is the only solution. They may be opposed to it philosophically,
but it can feel like a necessary evil. There’s a truly great idea worth implementing,
and they’re dealing with donated money they have to account for, and hiring
local has proved time and time again to be wrought with problems – skimming off
the top, unethical hiring practices skewed by nepotism or tribalism, cultural norms
getting in the way of gender equality, etc. – and they come to the only answer
they can figure in this pinch: foreign directors. I can’t say they’re wrong,
necessarily, unless we go back to the moment when they created said pinch by starting
a program themselves without the local passion to drive it.
For the first time, I fully understood “The road to hell is
paved with good intention” and I could not find anywhere to hang my good
intentions without being overwhelmed by harmful elements. And so I went home
and wrapped up my generic degree in International Studies. College had deflated
my passion for reading and writing while studying abroad had systematically
erased my excitement about working in international development. I did know a
couple things: I spoke an obscure language proficiently and I missed my host
family in Nairobi.
They knew I was feeling lost and told me to come stay with them for a few
months. I had no money, my parents bought me a ticket to Kenya as a
graduation present, and I moved into my host sister’s room with her without any
plans except to not run out of money and to leave before my visa expired.
Then I went to Hamomi. Raphael and I had been emailing for a
couple months. He ran a school in Kangemi, a slum that’s home to an estimated
800,000 people, which Jen, an American friend, visited and loved. She had been
passing through Nairobi
on her way to film a documentary in Sudan earlier in the year and asked
a Kenyan friend of ours, Wilson, to show her his favorite community project. Wilson at the time acted
as mentor to 96 different local community projects – he showed her Hamomi.
When Raphael and I were introduced via email in September,
2007 as I was preparing to leave for Nairobi,
he was panicking because his students were in the midst of a chicken pox
outbreak. He had convinced a doctor to treat them based on his good reputation
with a promise to pay in installments. On the one hand his situation was
compelling and on the other hand I was wary. It felt like everybody had a sad story
and there was no way of deciphering authenticity. Jen gave me $200 to help with
the medical bill which I was to deliver when I got to Nairobi. Here’s what I knew: there were three
single parents, Raphael, Musumba and Beatrice, who gave up everything to run
this primary school of 100 kids, and it was founded by Raphael in 1999.
At the end of October, I met Musumba at a gas station by the
main road and we walked the mile down to Hamomi where I found myself in a lush oasis
smack in the middle of two slums – Kangemi and Kawangware. I was struck by the fact
that there was no way they put this school here to get applause or awards, if
for no other reason than nobody would be able to find it. First, it’s on a road
only traveled by people who live there and second, you can hardly tell you’re
at a school even when you’re standing right outside one of the classrooms.
I liked them immediately. They were eager, but soft-spoken.
They were earnest about their work and while their passion for Hamomi was in
everything they did and said, they clearly didn’t know much about schmoozing or
fleecing a visitor. I’d had enough of overly charming directors. It was
refreshing to meet these three people who it was like pulling teeth to get an
explanation for how they’d personally managed to run Hamomi all these years,
yet couldn’t stop talking when it came to what was needed for the school and
how they dreamed about its future.
My heart sank when they assumed I was there to volunteer. My
internship at Wema Centre, a children’s center just north of Mombasa had solidified my decision to not
become a teacher. I’d always envisioned teaching as creative and spontaneous, but
it felt stifling and redundant. Granted at Wema I was dealing with a classroom
of 100 kids and not teaching in my native tongue, but it was the Grand Year of
Disillusionment, so why not throw teaching in there too? Sitting there with
Raphael, Musumba and Beatrice, who were visibly elated by my presence, I
couldn’t bring myself to turn down teaching. Especially when I had no ready
excuse why I wasn’t available and I was looking in the eyes of three people who
were there day in and day out with 100 students - 7 grade levels between them. I
figured I’d teach for a few weeks, see what I could do, learn more about what they
do, maybe be able to contribute in some small, solid way and head to the coast
to visit the people I’d been close with at Wema.
They got a kick out of me admitting that I couldn’t teach
CRE (Christian Religious Education) but that I could teach Swahili. They put
together a schedule right then and there, handed me some curriculum books and I
was in the classroom within the hour. Today, those Swahili lessons I taught
have become ancient Hamomi lore among the students. I have some journal entries
from those three days all about trying to figure out how to break it to them
that I don’t want to teach, as I’m simultaneously becoming floored by their
work. For eight years they had stayed afloat by shear determination. They’re
there all day every day except Sundays functioning as teachers, principles,
social workers, custodians, advocates and parents.
On my fourth day I woke up to begin the two hour commute and
it hit me: here it is. Here is an autonomous, passionate local project that has
proven itself in real, concrete ways, has a wonderful reputation within its own
community, and simply cannot reach any higher level of development without some
outside assistance. If I don’t seize on this catalyst opportunity, I a) can
never complain about the state of development again and b) will never forgive
myself. I asked them to meet with me that morning and gave them some speech
about how I have the nationality, education, passport, skin color and access to
maybe help push Hamomi towards its next levels of development. Would they trust
me to take on some kind of development role? They said yes. I was 22.
We sat down right then and made a wish list so I could
understand their vision better. In my head it became almost simple. My
reluctance to teach was wrapped up in my aversion to the day-to-day things. I
wasn’t interested in this on-the-ground dream anymore. Was that beaten out of
me by my year with MSID and Wema? Partly. Was I just a bad teacher? Partly. Was
I too lazy for the four hour commute? Partly. Was it a grand, brilliant plan?
No. As I saw it, they ran this perfectly self-governing organization and if
they continued to deal with the short term, I would take on the long term. I
knew about the chicken pox bill lingering over their heads, I could see the
they were all far too skinny, I knew there was not enough education in their
classrooms about basic hygiene and health, I knew they needed more staff, but
if they’d done it for eight years already, what was an extra six months to hold
steady until I magically accomplished all the long term goals? Once the long
term goals were met, the short term solutions would be easier.
I knew we needed some basic things: a website, nonprofit
status, a logo, a mission statement, something called a board. I needed to
borrow a camera from my host sister’s boyfriend’s mom to get some pictures of
everybody. I needed to conduct some more thorough interviews with everybody
involved to figure out all the ins and outs. It was November and I had until
February to work from Nairobi,
and I figured I’d go home to Seattle
and continue working from there until I reached the inevitable solutions and
end to this brief project in my life. Then I’d move to Chile for a
stint.
Then came December 27 and it all came falling down as the
post-election violence began. I was already learning that this project was far
bigger than I’d thought, but was still a long way from accepting that. Short
explanation: the incumbent president rigged the election, both the ruling party
and the opposition manipulated the entire country to ensure that violence
ensued and a month and a half of atrocities engulfed the country. People have
tried to chalk it up to a result of tribalism, but that is a nauseating
over-simplification. It’s all worthy of much more dissection than I will
include here, but for the purposes of this story, know that on a personal level
I was distraught and traumatized, and it took a huge toll on Hamomi’s
community. Parents and guardians lost work, prominent community members left,
local support was all pulled out due to more pressing needs in their lives. One
minute I was a pleasant addition to a hurting yet functioning organization, the
next I was a depleted and desperate organization’s only hope.
Birthdays aren’t all that important in Kenya, and
often if you ask people, they’ll need a moment to think of when their birthdays
are or how old they are, but for so many more reasons, come January, my 23rd
birthday did not feel worth mentioning. I had never felt so young and under-qualified,
and I had never felt so old and defeated.
It’s been four years since the end of that trip when I came
back to Seattle
with a vague initiative and an impending sense of doom. It took the doctor from
the chicken pox outbreak threatening to sue us and a measles outbreak to jolt
me to the realization that this couldn’t only be about long term goals. We
needed to deal with the immediate before we could even discuss the future. It
took us two years to get on our feet financially where we had a sufficient
feeding program, reasonable salaries for the Kenyan staff and adequate medical
care, before we could write our strategic plan, budget tactically and conduct ambitious
workshops on what the future holds. It took another year before we were ready
to conduct our own internal audit and an additional year to launch an official
Board of Directors. In 2012, we will launch our first social business, through
which we will begin generating an income and finally move towards that vision
of sustainability.
I think I always had the right, general idea, but it took a
whole lot of being in over my head in a partnership with the right people to
realize any of it. I needed the team right there on-the-ground running the
school day in and day out, making demands on me, always refusing to be ‘yes men’,
pushing me and forcing me to push them. I needed the team that developed on the
Hamomi-USA side of it as well. An organization like Hamomi does not take one
person. It takes hundreds of people pushing for the right thing in many, many
small ways for many, many long years. Many of whom I know, many of whom I’ll
probably never hear about. You can call it grassroots, but I think it’s bigger
than that. We are in our simplest form a community of people committed to doing
the right thing; not the sexiest thing, not the quickest turn-around, not
placating supporters and not always placating each other. In every meeting, still
every single discussion comes down to one simple question: what decision advocates
for the children’s rights most? We have the least amount of ego at our table
I’ve ever seen – none of us need to be right, none of us wanted to be in charge
in the first place, but each made our own individual naïve commitment at some
point.
The more I try to understand it all, the more I’m convinced
that we’re not successful despite our lack of intentionality; we’re successful
because of it. If we had known what this project would take, if we’d had that
foresight, I don’t know that any of us would have been done it in the first
place. If Raphael had known that his wife would leave him alone with his two
children for quitting his paying job to work full time on Hamomi as it became
more demanding of his time, would he have reached out to those first seven
students? If Musumba had known that he would also become a single father of two
after his wife died of typhoid, a completely curable disease, because they wouldn’t
have the money to treat her, would he have abandoned searching for a paying job
after he joined Raphael in 2000? If I’d known I would work full time as a
volunteer through my 20’s, holding nanny jobs on the side, spending all my
extra money on traveling back and forth to Kenya, would I have returned to Kenya in the
first place? There are countless more examples. We couldn’t have known and we
shouldn’t have known, because every day continues to be focused on taking one
more step towards comprehensive care at Hamomi.
When I think back to my first form of volunteering in Kenya at Wema
Centre, I think of how close I was with those kids. I knew all their names, I
spent every waking hour with them, I considered adopting some of them, I
visited their homes or if they lived at the center, I stayed up until all hours
of the night talking with them and reading with them, but in the end, I did
nothing for them. In stark contrast, I can’t tell you every student at Hamomi’s
name, I can’t tell you each of their stories or why they wound up categorized
as orphaned or vulnerable children. My job is not to play, it’s not to be
liked, it’s not to teach in the classroom, it’s not to visit their homes, it’s
not to be the impressive white girl who speaks Swahili; my job is to modify and
increase the rate of reaction without being consumed in the process – my job is
to be a catalyst.
"Greetings.
I watched the Uconn Syracuse Big East Tourney game with friends and we all were thinking of where we were when watching that epic 6 over time matchup a few years ago. Even separated by so much distance, its kind of cool to see how common our lives are at times. And even though my internet has been super spotty lately, worked it out and filled out my March Madness bracket!
