It Happened on the Way to War (17 page)

Holding the
kanga
in front of her, Tabitha said that it affirmed God's presence as her savior. God created the clouds that protected her, and Ronnie was a gift from heaven. She would do her best to care for him and anyone else who showed up at her clinic ill and in need.

As I sat in front of Tabitha drinking my day's sixth cup of chai, the shock slowly dissipated and I realized I wasn't dreaming. I thought about my mother. She was a nurse and an anthropologist. She had taught me how to listen. She had taught me to help people when I could. I was in Kibera because of her, and I imagined Mom there with me seeing Tabitha's clinic for the first time. It was Tabitha's clinic after all, not mine. I was honored by the clinic's name, but it made me uncomfortable as well. My mom would have felt the same way. All I had done was hand Tabitha $26 after she'd spent two days walking me around Kibera and shared part of her life story with me.

Ronnie crawled onto my lap, gripped my thumb with his little hand, and cooed. “He's a good one,” Tabitha said with a faint smile.

Swept up in the moment, a tear trickled down my cheek. Salim had reaffirmed my faith in youth leadership, and now Tabitha was proving that it was possible. It was possible to change Kibera.

CHAPTER TEN

Harambee

Kibera, Kenya

JULY 2001

“HARAMBEE!”
BEACH BUM STOOD AND STAMMERED the Kenyan national motto—“We all pull together!” It was the beginning of the first major fund-raiser for Tabitha's clinic. Beach Bum, a distant relative of Tabitha's, was tall with disproportionately large hands and a drooling problem. He showed up drunk in a purple T-shirt that bore his nickname. BEACH BUM the shirt's bubble letters read above a cartoon sketch with half-naked white kids and a clutter of toys.
“HARAMBEE!”
he shouted again and stared at Nate and me with a frothy mouth.

Though I didn't know Beach Bum, I had already passed judgment on him. I saw him as a large part of the problem in Kibera—one of many older men who spent their time in a perpetual drunken haze, leaving their wives to raise their children, take care of their house, and generate income by selling vegetables or by other hand-to-mouth jobs. Tabitha wasn't bothered by his presence. It was an important day for her and she knew how to handle him. Beach Bum was a relative, and for all his misgivings, he was there because he wanted to be supportive. When she gestured to him with a firm look, Beach Bum quietly took a seat on one of the short stools.

Tabitha looked sharp. Her hair was pulled back in a bun and she was dressed in her Sunday best. Nate called it her pilgrim outfit: white-collared shirt under a boxy black dress with a top that resembled overalls. She carried herself as if she were running a hospital. Meanwhile, reggae music echoed from the Mad Lion Base, the den of crime, drugs, and moonshine two plots behind us. Tabitha never knew when patients would arrive. Her doors were always open, even to the hardcores at the Mad Lion.

There weren't many of us, and Nate and I didn't know any of the other eight older men, each of whom was dressed in a suit. We felt out of place in our six-pocket pants and untucked collared shirts. “At least Beach Bum is here,” Nate quietly joked.

Tabitha had set the goal of the
harambee
at seventy thousand shillings, nearly $1,000. I didn't know what she was expecting from us. Regardless, it was a large step up from the $26 for vegetables the previous summer. Before the
harambee
, she showed me her books, which were meticulously kept in handwritten ledgers. Running a sustainable clinic was daunting. Medicine alone was expensive, and most residents couldn't afford to pay more than $2 per visit. Tabitha was searching for suppliers of low-cost, high-quality medicines. I thought we could help by tapping into our networks and using our American identity and affiliation with UNC to open doors otherwise closed to a nurse from Kibera. Nevertheless, Tabitha needed funds to expand the clinic, and she was counting on us to help. She had already located a building near Jane's house with seven rooms and a pit latrine. Tabitha thought she could get the rent down to as low as $150 per month for the entire building.

Nate and I had to make some hard decisions in advance of the
harambee
. CFK's focus was on preventing ethnic violence through youth development. Tabitha's clinic didn't quite fit with our plans. We were just getting started with what we hoped would become a youth-led soccer and community service program directed by Salim and modeled after MYSA. That needed to be the focus of our efforts. But we wanted to find a way to support Tabitha. Nate suggested that high-quality, locally led health care wasn't too much of a stretch if we took a more “holistic” approach.

Professor Peacock had introduced me to the concept of holism, and I had used the idea frequently in my thesis to argue that the most effective efforts to prevent violence addressed all of its causes and weren't focused on one line of assistance. After all, youth had to be healthy to grow into leaders who could one day break Kenya's culture of corruption. This way of thinking had enabled us to justify support for Elizabeth. Although nursery school was only the first step in the education pyramid, it was the starting point. We hoped her efforts could inspire others. While Tabitha didn't exclusively focus on youth, half of her patients were under twenty years old, and she was a role model for other women. We decided that Tabitha's clinic fit into our evolving model.

We had enough money to cover the full $1,000
harambee
target, but that would have defeated our larger purpose of community participation. We decided instead to make a challenge grant and match any money raised up to a total of seventy thousand shillings. This challenge created an opportunity for Tabitha to double her target.

AN EMCEE IN a three-piece suit kicked-off the
harambee
once Beach Bum sat down. “Now Bwanas Omosh and Otis have put before us a big challenge, a very big challenge. For every shilling that we bring to the lady, I say for every shilling raised today, they will”—he paused—“they'll match it!”

The audience erupted in applause. “So now the challenge is with us right here in this room,” he continued. “I can say it is on us now, us here in Kibera. Otis and Omosh, they have done their share, and thanks to them for that.”

The show had begun. I assumed it would be a short skit that would last maybe a half hour. I didn't know that
harambee
performances were steeped in ritual and protocol. Before each initial donation, a donor stood and told a story about his connection to Tabitha and his rural motherland. The men were all Luos from the same region on the shores of Lake Victoria. With the exception of one man who remained quiet, they all lived in the predominately Luo villages of Kibera. By the two-hour point, every man except the quiet one had donated. Together, they had come up with an impressive twenty thousand shillings, about $300. Even Beach Bum had made a generous pledge.

A wail and a pounding sound interrupted the
harambee
. Tabitha sprang out of her stool and met a distraught man shouting in Luo at the front door. “It's okay,” she said, leading him to the other room. The man clutched his arm as blood dripped from his sleeve. Tabitha cleaned the wound and bandaged his arm. I would later learn that the man was one of the hardcores from the Mad Lion. When Tabitha returned thirty minutes later, her pilgrim outfit was speckled with blood.

“
Panga
,” she said with a somber look. “Machete.”

“See! There it is.” The emcee raised his voice. “She turns no one away. I can say she's like the Red Cross, here in Kibera, where you know even the Red Cross, it is afraid to come. Yes, yes, we can do more to support this lady, this amazing lady.”

He squeezed another five thousand shillings from the group before his attention turned to the quiet man, the only one who had not contributed. Apart from the emcee, he was the best-dressed man in the room. He identified himself as Charles Amolo Mbidha, a former resident of Kibera who worked as a manager at the Magnate security-guard company in the city center. Charles spoke softly, and with great affection about Tabitha's nursing him when he was bedridden many years earlier and couldn't afford to pay. He delivered this eloquent speech while referencing a note card. Toward the end of it, he mentioned his son and choked up. He was too emotional to continue. Tabitha, who was often stoic, appeared to be on the verge of tears. Something terrible must have happened. Charles stopped talking and removed an envelope from his breast pocket. Tabitha opened it slowly. We sat in silent anticipation as she slowly counted the stack of brown shilling notes.

“This man, this good man, has given us a great gift.” Tabitha made eye contact with each person in the room before she continued. “Only to me it's more than that. I can say that to me it's a gift from God. He has given us thirty thousand shillings. May God bless you.”

“It's incredible!” The emcee was elated. “Incredible! And Omosh and Otis will be matching it.”

“Yes,” I interjected, “but not us. It's CFK. CFK will be matching it.” I didn't like the sound of Nate and me being given recognition for the donation. It wasn't our money. Those funds belonged to our organization, which we assumed wouldn't exist in Kenya once we returned to the States later that summer. The
harambee
was triggering new ideas:
Maybe CFK should stick around? Maybe Salim and Tabitha could lead it?

“That's right, Caroleena. Caroleena for Kibera,” the emcee enthused. “This is the beginning of a blessed thing for Kibera. One day I believe this clinic will be a hospital, a hospital I tell you. Isn't it? What I'm doing is predicting that one day there will be doctors, doctors here, here in this community.” He stomped on the floor.

“And from the community,” Tabitha said. “If God is with us, the doctors, they'll one day come from the community. Imagine.”

Yes!
I thought to myself.
Yes, that was exactly it. That was the vision. One day there would be doctors from Kibera.
In a place where many residents had never seen a doctor, one day it would produce them.

SHORTLY AFTER THE
harambee
, which raised more than $1,500 with CFK's contribution, Tabitha opened a bank account and began negotiations with the building's landlady, a Kenyan woman who lived in a posh part of Nairobi near Kibera and drove a Mercedes-Benz. Somehow the landlady had caught wind that
wazungu
were involved and had informed Tabitha that the rent was now twice the amount of her initial offer of $200 per month.

It infuriated me that this lady would pull such a move.
Why should affluent Kenyans be landlords in a slum where no one has land tenure rights?

Tabitha speculated that the lady had political ties. Every structure built in Kibera had to be sanctioned by the area chief, the lowest-level political appointee in the Office of the President. The landlady was profiting from Kibera. Our funds were for improving life in her own backyard, her country, her continent, and she was trying to take us for a ride. I could hardly contain my rage.

Tabitha tried to calm me down. “This one, let me handle,” she told me. I backed down, but days passed and Tabitha didn't seem to make any progress with the negotiations. We were losing precious time. We needed to open the new clinic before we left in two months. An opening event could build momentum and possibly even raise funds in Kenya.

I wanted to go with Tabitha and confront the landlady. Fortunately, Jennifer Coffman talked some sense into me. Jennifer had become a professor at James Madison University, and she was in Nairobi conducting research. She advised me to let Tabitha take care of it. She was right, and I would return in the future to this conversation whenever I came across a particular passage from none other than Lawrence of Arabia. Marine commanders frequently quoted this passage from Lawrence's famous “27 Articles” to illustrate the right approach to counterinsurgency:

“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”
*

What Jennifer told me that evening, and what Lawrence of Arabia put into writing in a very different context, struck at the heart of participatory development. I couldn't do it “perfectly” in Kibera. I couldn't even do it well. If I had negotiated with the landlady on my own, it likely would have exploded and further complicated Tabitha's life.

Jennifer reinforced her advice when she visited us in Kibera. She was the first American to visit and her opinion meant a great deal to me. After a long meeting with Tabitha in her ten-by-ten, Jennifer reacted, “I love her. She's amazing, so unassuming, so strong. My God, that woman is strong. Count me in for support. Donations, sure, but I want to do more.”

TABITHA EVENTUALLY BROUGHT the landlady down to $150 per month. I felt like a fool for having questioned her negotiating abilities, and from that point forward I never inserted myself into the details of running the clinic.

After Tabitha finished the rent negotiation, she asked Nate and me to help her think about whom to invite as the guest of honor for the opening ceremony. I proposed U.S. ambassador Johnnie Carson. One of my advisers at UNC was a retired ambassador and an old friend of Mr. Carson's. Plus, our new colleague Semaj Johnson had arrived from the South Bronx and was working on a grant proposal for a few thousand dollars from the United States' Ambassador's Self Help Fund for Tabitha's clinic.

“The ambassador would be good,” Tabitha reacted. I was surprised that she didn't sound more impressed. It would be a major coup if we could convince the ambassador to come to the opening of a small clinic inside Kibera that had no formal ties to the U.S. government. We also considered some prominent Kenyans who might be able to help us fund-raise. However, it was difficult to come up with many candidates because the wealthiest Kenyans all seemed to be connected to public allegations of large-scale corruption. Toward the end of our brainstorming session, Nate threw out an idea in jest. “How 'bout Mama Omosh?”