It Happened on the Way to War (22 page)

Within minutes of twisting along narrow back alleys, I was completely disoriented as Kassim led us deep inside one of Kibera's eleven villages. The charred remains of mud-and-tin shacks appeared suddenly and stretched across an area as long as a soccer field. It was a miracle people were able to stop the blaze. Kassim explained that we were standing at one of Kibera's ethnic fault lines. The side we had come from was predominately inhabited by Nubians; the other was “Luo land.” Kassim didn't know many details about the clashes. He did, however, have a strong point of view about its causes, which reached straight to the top of the government.

President Moi had made an unusual public appearance earlier that fall when he stepped into Kibera and called for landlords to reduce their rents. Moi made his pronouncement as a favor to Raila Odinga, the Luo politician who had agreed to form a coalition with Moi's political party, KANU, after Moi announced his intention to step down from the presidency in 2002. It was an unlikely alliance. Moi, who was a member of the Kalenjin ethnic group, had once thrown Odinga in prison after a failed coup attempt in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, if the KANU candidate lost the election, speculation was that Moi might be held accountable and brought to trial as a private citizen for corruption scandals of staggering proportions. “That's Kenya politics,” Kassim said, “all for themselves. Big men eat big.”

As soon as President Moi made his announcement for lower rents in Kibera, large numbers of Luo tenants stopped paying rent. Nubians owned an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the homes in Kibera, and rent collection was a primary source of income for many households. Both sides, Nubian and Luo, claimed the other initiated the fighting. The violence had escalated quickly and spilled into other parts of Kibera by the time Moi dispatched his brutal paramilitary unit. The fighting stopped, though the root causes of the dispute remained unresolved.

It was in this context that we planned our final CFK soccer tournament. Although we mandated that teams be ethnically diverse, one of the top two teams was predominately Luo, and the other was mostly Nubian. Kassim thought it was risky and suggested that we mobilize additional security on game day.

“Is there anyone who would want to disrupt the game because of who we are? Does CFK have any enemies?” I asked.

“There's Taib,” Kassim remarked. I hadn't thought about Taib since I had sent my angry retribution letter to Oluoch's employer. KIYESA, the pay-to-play soccer league that Taib established before running for the Kibera councillor's seat, appeared to be defunct. “He's still pissed off,” Kassim added. “He keeps bothering me and Ali about it, says this bullshit about
mzungu
betrayal.”

“You think he can turn the Nubian community against us?”

“Argh,” Kash grunted. “You know Taib is all talk. Don't fear him.”

“The only thing is what he says about Salim being a street kid from Mathare,” Kassim said. “Some of the youths, they hear that and they wonder why it is that CFK is led by a guy from Mathare when we have so much talent here.”

I had heard rumors about a few people opposing Salim's leadership on such grounds.

“But,” Kassim added before I could ask Kash for his opinion, “Taib doesn't know that no one could do this like Salim. Salim knows how organizations work. In a way I can say that he is above the petty tribal politics of Kibera because he's an outsider. I mean, he looks like, I don't know, like a Somali. And of course Salim has Tabitha, and Kash, too. Man, we're a powerful team.”

We were a powerful team, though our bank account didn't look so powerful. We were running out of money. Our account had less than $1,500. I spent my own money on plane tickets, postage, and administrative supplies. Salim lived on his meager savings from MYSA, and Kash continued to work in the community for income. Tabitha paid herself a pittance—four thousand shillings, about $50 a month. It was the same stipend she gave Jane, her two nurse assistants, and a Kenyan nurse named Dorine Okoko who could have chosen a better-paying, far-less-intense clinic but stayed with CFK because of Tabitha's leadership, the learning opportunities, and the spiritual gratification she received from serving the community.

I was concerned but hopeful about our finances, and I believe my optimism helped support Salim and Tabitha through one of CFK's most fragile moments. They could build and lead a community-based organization in an African slum. I could provide entrée to the vast resources of the United States. We could only do it together, and together we planned for our most significant meeting.

We still needed one large funder, a sponsor. We didn't have many prospects apart from Salim's mentor Dr. Mary Ann Burris. I suggested to Salim and Tabitha that we ask Mary Ann for a formal meeting and present her with a polished proposal. Salim countered with an idea that we re-invite her to Kibera for our final soccer match. It was a high-risk proposition because we were still worried about an ethnic riot breaking out during the game. We discussed it for a few minutes until Tabitha weighed in with one of her favorite lines: “In life we have to take risks. Let's invite this lady to come and see the work we are doing with our bare hands. I'll make sure she's okay.”

MARY ANN MET Tabitha and me at the clinic on game day. Tabitha escorted her past a queue of patients including a handful of HIV-positive adults, typhoid victims, hungry street kids, and babies with distended bellies.

“So what is it like to run this impressive clinic while raising four children?” Mary Ann asked.

Tabitha replied matter-of-factly, “You know, for me I can say it's not easy. It's a hard life. But we have to persevere.”

My cell phone beeped with Kassim's security updates from the soccer field: “All secure.” “No problem.” “In control.”

By the time we reached the soccer field thousands of fans were crammed along the muddy sidelines. “How about girls?” Mary Ann asked Salim, referring to the field and the largely male audience.

Salim was spending a fair amount of time launching a girls' soccer league with our Nubian youth representative, Abdul “Cantar” Hussein. Unfortunately, it was slow going due to the deeply entrenched gender bias in the community. “We really need a separate program for girls,” Salim told Mary Ann. Although I agreed with him wholeheartedly about the need, we first had to figure out how to raise at least $30,000 to fund our next year of operations in Kenya before launching new programs. If the Ford Foundation supported us, we could pursue our plans to grow the soccer and leadership-development program to two thousand participants and help Tabitha double the number of patients she treated each year to roughly five thousand. Without Ford, we would be stuck and might need to downsize our ambitions.

The soccer game went off without a security incident. As the fans stormed the field and hoisted the winning team onto their shoulders, Mary Ann casually commented, “I think I can get you guys support. Let me know how much you need and we'll work on the grant together. It will take a couple months, but New York [Ford Foundation headquarters] has never turned down one of my proposals.”

I contained my urge to shout
Oohrah
, our Marine battle cry. “Thank you, Mary Ann. Thank you for believing in us,” I said with Salim. We had our sponsor.

BACK IN MIKE Company after Christmas Break, I was lucky to have more downtime as a training officer. CFK needed a lot of work in the United States, and I immersed myself in a swirl of activity with the help of a half dozen U.S. volunteers and daily contact with Salim. We published an annual report and raised $5,000, a vital bridge before the Ford Foundation grant came through. That money enabled Ben Mshila and the Kenyan CFK board to put Kash on the payroll and give Tabitha money to buy medicine and develop her home-based care program for HIV-positive widows. We prepared our books for our first tax filings in the United States and in Kenya, and we selected our first class of undergraduate summer volunteers to help Salim in Kibera.

More e-mail came in every day. Some of my replies evolved into prolonged exchanges that every now and then led to good things. A bedridden women's rights advocate e-mailing from her home in a forest in Maine had asked me about the Nubians. After many months of e-mail, I called her and told her about Ali and his love for his daughter, Khadija. For the next eight years, this woman, Mary Beth Crocket, sponsored Khadija through school with part of her disability check and the meager earnings her husband made driving tractor-trailer trucks. On another occasion, two recent college graduates who had participated in a study abroad program in Kenya with the School for International Training, Karen Austrian and Emily Verellen, e-mailed with a proposal to launch a girls' center that would create safe spaces and be led by young women from Kibera. Salim and Tabitha saw the tremendous need for such a center. With their support Karen and Emily joined CFK and won grants from Columbia University and American Jewish World Services. Together with a group of young women in Kibera, and a young Kenyan leader named Caroline Sakwa, Karen and Emily spent the next year creating CFK's Binti Pamoja (Daughters United) Girls' Center. It would become the first comprehensive leadership-development program for girls in the community.

One of my greatest concerns was building a stronger board in the United States. To that point, our U.S. board was hands-off and served more as an advisory council. The members included Professors Peacock and Kohn, Dr. Cross, and my mother. Each member was an older professional who cared about CFK but didn't have the time or the energy to get heavily involved. We needed a champion who could help lead CFK in the United States. I made a list of five doers who were about my age and had an interest in African development. Kim Chapman, the rugby-playing Canadian public health specialist who had graduated a year ahead of me, was at the top of the list. Although I didn't know her well, we had many mutual friends, and her office was located next to CFK's office in the international center that Professor Peacock directed. Kim had strong views about economic aid, which she saw as too often being top-down and paternalistic. She thought our model of participatory development was the right approach and agreed to take over as our first board chair shortly after we presented the offer.

Kim was a take-no-prisoners manager who was results-oriented, meticulous, and dependable. We complemented each other well. My organizational and management skills needed work, and she was less interested in networking and fund-raising, or, as she called it, being a “schmoozing salesman.” Kim became a fierce defender of our scarce resources. She was a leader who didn't tolerate sloppy thinking or let selfish interests get in the way of serving the community.

Kim and I focused on pulling together a week of big events in Chapel Hill with Salim, Kash, Nate, and me presenting to student groups and prospective donors in March before my Basic School training began. In addition to the presentations, we planned to hold our first U.S. board meeting and a major fund-raising dinner after Professor Peacock's wife, Florence, graciously offered their home for the occasion. A professional opera singer, Florence had designed and built their home to accommodate musical performances. Everyone in Chapel Hill seemed to know and admire the Peacocks, and they understood the importance of our work, in part because they had lived together in an Indonesian slum in the 1960s when Professor Peacock was an anthropology graduate student at Harvard. It was during one of Professor Peacock's seminars that I first heard the adage that came to define our ethos: “Talent is universal; opportunity is not.”

THE WEEK IN Chapel Hill was going well, though we had hoped to raise more money. Our dinner at the Peacocks' house was our last shot to land a pledge that would cover tuition and living expenses for Kash to attend UNC. An admissions officer had confided to me that Kash's chances were “optimistic” if we could secure a full financial commitment.

Salim felt conflicted. He considered Kash a friend and thought it was a great opportunity for CFK. At our core we intended to help cultivate a new generation of African leadership, and Kash seemed to be a shining example of that promise. Although he would lose the only employee in the sports program if Kash left, Salim thought he had a deep bench of talent from which to choose among the fourteen youth representatives. What bothered Salim was the amount of money Kash's UNC degree would require. The bill for four years of tuition and living expenses would be nearly $100,000, an amount that was more than three times the total CFK annual budget. Couldn't that money do more and for more people?

I too was torn about the large gulf between the amount we needed to raise for Kash and the CFK annual budget. Salim and I spoke openly about our feelings on the matter. In my mind, the two situations were not comparable. Our most affluent donors were far more likely to write large checks to support an individual whom they knew than to support programs. I hoped that the emotional commitment these donors developed to Kash would deepen their loyalty to CFK and advance our fund-raising for the organization. Salim begrudgingly acknowledged this logic and said he would support fund-raising for Kash because he trusted me, not because he agreed with the decision.

About seventy people joined us for our dinner at the Peacocks. Salim and Kash dressed in elegant gold African robes, and I wore my Marine Corps dress blues with my shiny “butter bars,” the insignia of the lowest-ranking commissioned officers in the Marine Corps. Jennifer Coffman, Kim Chapman, Nate, and my parents all attended and helped us tell the CFK story during the cocktail hour.

The spotlight turned to Salim and me. We opened the formal presentation with the short Reuters
Africa Journal
video profiling CFK, then moved through our presentation, improvising with jokes here and there. When we spoke about our first meeting at MYSA, Salim said that I was asking him so many questions he would have said yes to anything just to get me out of his office. I laughed and told the story of our first meeting at the Ford Foundation, when Mary Ann had concluded the meeting by saying that we made an odd couple.