Catalyst

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.