ten

       kennedy

One night I was coming home, bone tired, from work at a maize factory where I carried huge sacks all day. I met a little boy selling a secondhand soccer ball and I knew I had to have it. I used my last twenty cents to buy it, taking it from him as though it was my lifeline. I was tired of being angry. I was tired of violence. I thought, if we could just come together as a community, even if this just meant playing soccer together, that could be the beginning of something good. Coming together as a community, as a people, creates more power than what exists when individuals are fighting each other for scraps. Soccer has always brought people together. Soccer was where I would begin.

I went to find George. My face was flushed with excitement, energy pulsing even through my fingertips.

“George,” I said, “I’m tired of what’s happening here. We must stand up and do something positive. We need to come together to try to find a solution. Enough is enough.”

George was sitting in his room, tired. He looked at me like I was crazy.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Let’s start organizing to come together around the issues we face. Let’s start to address our problems and find our own ways to make changes.” I held out the soccer ball, as if it should illuminate everything, but George’s expression didn’t change.

“Let me know what you want me to do.” He sighed, with no display of hope.

First I decided to start a men’s group in Kibera, beginning with my soccer ball. I thought if I could bring men together, maybe we could stop the violence. My initial plan soon changed as I realized how it was essential to bring the men together with the women.

I wanted to see the women and girls in my community have the chance for happier lives. I could no longer sit by while men shamelessly raped six-year-old girls. I had seen my mom abused by her husband—threatened within an inch of her life—too many times. The very worst part was how my mom always forgave him. I had seen my sister endure abuse also—pregnant, against her will—before having a chance to make her own choices in life. I wanted to raise my voice for the women in my community who had to turn to selling their bodies just to feed themselves.

Seeing that we needed both men and women to boost the economy, I started gathering friends to play soccer with my new ball—men and women and young people playing together. After playing, we got to talking and decided to start a group similar to my mother’s lending circle that focused on saving money and starting businesses. The lending group went well, attracting many members and raising a good amount of money. I altered the strategy a bit by using money I saved from my factory job to give personal loans to people. Upon receiving a loan from me, a person agreed to simply pay the loan forward, to help someone else start a small business, rather than pay me back. People started barbershops, vegetable businesses, and more. The “pay-it-forward” approach paid off faster than I could have ever anticipated.

I started another youth group that met on Sundays after church. Because of my childhood experiences, I didn’t believe in the church, but the neighborhood church gave us space and a little money. I named the group St. Dominic’s. Dominic was a friend of Saint Don Bosco; both were known as the patron saints of street boys.

The St. Dominic’s group would come together and read Bible verses aloud, searching for guidance and inspiration. I tried to choose the most powerful, inspiring verses in the Bible, including ones about King Solomon, King David, and Moses, explaining the significance these passages had for our lives in Kibera. Unfortunately, I stammered when I was nervous, probably due to all the abuse at the hands of Babi, and was ashamed of public speaking. So I handed over leadership of the group to my friend Charles. He was organized and eager to lead and didn’t stammer.

This youth group became quite popular, and it attracted some young people who would become very close friends of mine, like Kevin and James. We earned awards from the church for being so active, winning Bible quizzes, choir prizes, and theater awards—and of course we won soccer tournaments. Before each meeting, Charles and I would meet so I could guide him. At first I liked making things work from behind the scenes. But eventually I realized the group had no significant agenda for social change, focusing more on how to get free meals from the church. We were also required to lead mass in the church and to discuss church issues in exchange for support. Being tied to Catholic doctrines meant contradicting goals for our group. The church was adamantly against family planning and the use of condoms. This made no sense. I had watched too many teenage girls become mothers and lost too many dear friends to HIV/AIDS. Using protection seemed the only option.

One day, I decided to raise my concerns about safe sex with the youth group. I spoke about the need to use condoms and to spread this message about the importance of protection. I was tired of seeing my friends die. Days after my speech, I was kicked out of the church, told never to come there again. The church leaders were furious. I felt so much of what I worked to build slip away—both the youth group I’d started and my friends.

I went to find Kevin, one of the members of the church youth group, and shared my dream with him.

“Kevin, you and I have worked hard to change our community. We tried using the church, but we couldn’t achieve what we wanted. Now I have an idea. I am starting something, a movement, and I think I have the numbers and we have the people who will believe in us. What we did at St. Dominic brought people together. Now we need to set an agenda for what comes next.”

“Kennedy, I believe in you. I will support you,” Kevin told me. “That’s the way forward, man. We have to work hard to fight this poverty.”

So I invited George and Kevin and a few other friends to my house for a meeting. I prepared tea and served it with milk and bread I sacrificed to buy. There were exactly seven people: Fred, Steve, Mary, Anne, Kevin, Max, and George. After everybody had sat and enjoyed some tea, I began to talk. I had been going over what I would had been saying in my head for days.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are coming here today because I believe together we can achieve but divided we will fall. Each of us can do something important. All of you are called to this meeting because I believe in you and I trust you can do something positive for this community.”

Mary interrupted. “Kennedy, you have to pray before you start.”

So Mary led us in a prayer, asking God to bless us.

I continued my “speech,” sharing the stories of people we had lost through violence and mob justice. Many of us knew people who had committed suicide. We had seen our sisters, or ourselves, being raped by the age of ten. We were gathered because life couldn’t continue like this. I mentioned the books of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. Finally, I expressed my hope and resolve. “Today, let’s decide that one day, we will look back on this moment and laugh and cry for happiness.”

Fred, a very religious man, asked why these ideas could not be achieved through our church group.

“This doesn’t mean that we have to stop going to church,” I responded. “But the agenda there is to read the Bible. While we can benefit from the inspiration we get reading the Bible and verse, we are creating this group for action.”

Next, Steven stopped me. “Kennedy? It seems like you want to start a nonprofit, an NGO, and we are ready to support you, but where is the money coming from? Do you have a mzungu, any donor?”

I felt the blood rise in me. For too long my community had been told that we could not do anything by ourselves without money from the outside, without the financial support and wisdom from the Western world. But since we were the ones who understood all the challenges we faced, we also had the best shot at finding the solutions.

Marcus Garvey said, “Africa for Africans,” and that is what I wanted. African problems would never be solved as long as advantaged people from the Western world thought that they could save our communities by starting organizations, or volunteering in Africa, without the actual and deep engagement of the communities they sought to improve. Without mutual understanding and real community leadership, foreign-led interventions ultimately do not succeed, creating false hopes and taking advantage of the community’s vulnerability. The community also takes advantage of volunteers, seeking a quick fix, a tiny drop of money. But money alone does nothing; I knew grassroots empowerment was the only sustainable solution. As my mother always said, Only he who wears the shoe knows how it pinches.

My wariness about foreign NGOs came from seeing several organizations working in Kibera. Rather than building free clinics that were actually accessible to people, these outsiders built inefficient ones devoid of community leadership and dignity. The majority of “local” staff who were hired did not actually live in Kibera, and they looked down on and disparaged community members. I also saw how “free” schools built by Western organizations secretly charged fees, and local staff members secretly raised the prices and pocketed the money when donors got back on their planes.

NGOs came in and paid such inflated salaries that the local government and communities couldn’t compete. People stopped believing it was possible to do things for themselves. Some organizations used strategies they said came from the people of Kibera. Pretending that the locals ran the Western NGOs was a way to entice donors, grassroots was no longer a true goal but a buzzword. Sadly, the goal was not to empower true local leadership, but to find token locals to be token champions with no real decision-making power.

These organizations never helped the indigenous health or school projects that we ourselves tried to start. Outside groups seemed to feel threatened by the indigenous organizations, we who were trying to move mountains without piles of money behind us. But I always knew true, long-term change cannot happen without involving the community. I realized that my friends thought we could not do anything on our own because they had been influenced by the messages of these Western organizations.

Outsiders didn’t have answers for the problems in Kibera. We had to solve our own problems. The only way help from the outside could be effective was through real partnerships with local groups—but we had to follow the examples of King and Mandela and create the local movements ourselves first.

I looked left and right and saw everyone had this question on their minds: Where would we get the money for our movement if not from outsiders?

I answered them then, and I found a rhythm in the words, as though I were channeling Ajey’s preaching or King’s from his “I Have a Dream” speech:

“My friends, Marcus Garvey taught me that circumstance should not make us inferior. He says that we must remove the cobwebs of our minds, and it is this mentality that we will never make it out of poverty ourselves, on our own, that is the first cobweb.”

I paused, then continued. “We don’t need money to come together and clean our streets. We don’t need money to remove the garbage. We don’t need money to protect our mothers, our sisters, or any little girls from being abused. We don’t need money to play soccer and to just be there for each other.”

As I spoke, tears came from my eyes. I tried to hide them, but down they came. The group saw them and understood how serious this was, how much this mattered.

“We cannot wait for money,” I continued. “This is urgent. We are coming here today for action. We are not coming here today to start an NGO. NGOs need proposals and donors. We are here today to start a movement. A movement starts with urgency, when you have been pushed to the wall and all you can do is bounce back. That’s what we are doing here. We are bouncing back.”

They all looked at me and I thought of my mom’s saying, When a snake bites you, don’t spend time looking for a spear. Use whatever stick you have.

Then Mary spoke. “Kennedy, I am with you.”

“Kennedy, I’m there,” said George. “I may not believe your big ideas are possible, but as a brother, I support you. Let me know what I can do.”

“We will work together,” affirmed Kevin.

Together we developed a list of the challenges we faced. We only had one pen, and Kevin used it to write down everything.

I started. “Crime, violence, domestic abuse, and rape.”

“Hopelessness,” someone said.

“Sanitation.”

Everybody in the room contributed issues. Kevin wrote them all down until we had a long list.

“Now, Kevin, we will write another list that contains the ways to counterattack the problems we’ve written down. I believe where there is darkness there is light, and where there is light sometimes there is darkness. This is the way forward.”

They laughed at me, but we kept writing down our ideas:

We could all come together to clean the streets to address the poor sanitation.

We could all come together to do street theater and performances about domestic abuse and rape and to create awareness that our women should be respected.

We could grow and continue our soccer team to give the youth something to do and to instill pride in teamwork. We wanted girls to join too.

From this list we made our programs: sanitation, theater, soccer, media and journalism, girls’ and women’s empowerment.

I was appointed by the group to be the head coordinator, and I gave everyone a role. I wanted to make these seven founders feel ownership of the ideas, so they would feel pride in everything we had all come up with that day.

“Now, before we leave this place,” I told them, “we must come up with a name.”

I knew what I wanted to call this movement. I had already told Kevin: Shining Hope for Communities. I proposed it now to the group. At first the group liked it, but then they said it didn’t work. It was too long; how would people remember it? They asked some women who sold goods on the streets and they agreed. “Too much English,” one said. So we can up with the idea to call it SHOFCO for short.

George suggested that it should be something about Kibera, maybe Shine Kibera, or Kibera Stars.

I said no—it had to be about the entire world of poor people living in slums everywhere. “Shining Hope for Communities is a powerful name because it’s not only in Kibera where we will provide hope. We are going to shine in other slums too. Let’s start with Kibera, but I believe in the future we’re going to go beyond Kibera to shine hope everywhere. Eventually the world will see the light that was lit in a ghetto house tonight.”

Everyone laughed at my big ideas, but Shining Hope for Communities was born as we lit a single candle and sat watching it burn.

The seven-person SHOFCO team mobilized forty members within the first month. Most of the people from the church youth group joined us. It was really amazing and touching to see how people were coming together, though they had nothing. Soon, there wasn’t enough space in my small room for everybody to meet. My house overflowed and people were sitting outside, just to participate. We had to look around for a larger space. George got us a meeting with a pastor of a church. We presented what we were doing, and when we were finished, the pastor turned us down. He said that a house of the Lord would not consider a nonreligious group.

“We are not religious or nonreligious,” I told him. “We are a movement.”

Once again, I felt the church did not meet my needs.

So we began meeting outside on the soccer pitch, the only space large enough to hold us.

Hundreds joined in for our first cleanup activity. We had no food, nothing to offer people who helped, just singing and cleaning together. We tried to borrow some cleaning materials from a nearby organization but were denied. Despite our lack of supplies, our cleanup was so successful that I had the feeling SHOFCO was destined for big things.

We’d been working this way for nearly two years when an American organization that recognized the value of local partnership decided they wanted to support our work. At first we were hesitant, but the group, American Friends of Kenya (AFK), said that they wanted to champion local leaders and give us a small amount of money to help build our first office. We built it on a garbage heap that we cleaned up. George, “Government,” let us live there rent-free. From then on we had an office.

The word had begun to spread about what we were doing in Kibera. In 2007, SHOFCO was invited to perform at the World Social Forum. We didn’t know what the forum was, but we heard it was a place to meet other people and share ideas. We also heard you could sell stuff, so we made T-shirts and ornaments to sell to help fund our movement—anything helped. We had written a play about our struggle in Kibera, called Another World Is Possible. I played the drunken father, and Anne played a hardworking woman trying to help her family survive, a role based on my mother. The room was packed with people from all over the world; I had never seen so many white faces in one place before.

I felt adrenaline coursing through my body; I knew what a big opportunity this was to show the larger world both the problems and resilience of Kibera. As soon as the play ended, I could see how people were moved by the struggle of Kibera’s women. I was surrounded by foreigners who all wanted me to answer a burning question: What was this SHOFCO?

I was invited to give another speech at the World Social Forum about the challenges in Kibera. For the first time I spoke in front of a huge crowd without a stammer. People were really impressed by what we had been able to accomplish at SHOFCO with so few resources. We sold a lot of T-shirts and were able to raise some money. I also met several Americans who were part of a theater group. They wanted to stay in touch with me and follow SHOFCO; they even came to see our work in Kibera.

The movement was almost four years old. We had thousands of members, mostly young people and women of all ages. Many small businesses were getting started. The women’s empowerment group was up and running, making jewelry and ornaments to support themselves. I had made a name for myself in the community: the people of Kibera started calling me Mayor.

And then one day, I received an e-mail from a young American woman named Jessica. She’d heard about me from some people in the theater group I’d met at the World Social Forum, and she told me she wanted to volunteer.

We weren’t open to just any white person who wanted to come and volunteer. We were only interested in qualified people who had something substantial to offer the movement. I asked Jessica to send me her résumé. I was impressed when she sent it: I could tell she was smart and she had even won awards for her work in theater. I brought the résumé to a meeting of the SHOFCO leaders.

“She seems talented,” Mary said.

“We can’t just allow any white people to come here,” said our treasurer. “Maybe we should have her pay an entry fee?”

“Let’s not make it be about money,” I said. “We fund ourselves. When you take people’s money, you sometimes have to abide by their law. Let’s see what else people have to offer besides money. This woman Jessica, we could have her work with the theater group but not anything else. No management.”

Everyone agreed that if she had no decision-making power beyond the theater program, that would be okay.

I wrote Jessica an e-mail to tell her that her résumé was good, that we had accepted her application, and that she should tell us the date of her arrival so we could prepare the theater department to receive her.

I had landed a new job as a janitor at a computer company called New Horizons where my benefactor and American mom Linda had paid for me to take a few classes in computer literacy. I was to clean the company’s kitchen and the floors, but mostly the toilets. Many people were rude to me when they saw me cleaning the toilets. I had to remember the words of my mom: Whatever you do, do it well. Do it 100 percent.

One night I had a dream about a white lady standing on a corner in Kibera wearing a dress with red roses on it. In the dream, I heard a voice telling me, “Kennedy, this is your partner.”

I responded, “God Almighty, no. She’s a white woman, I’m a black man. I’m a Garveyist. I believe in black power. I want a black queen.”

The voice told me, “No. Hold her hand and cross the river with her. Cross the bridge with her.”

The next day I shared the dream with Antony.

He shook his head and said to me, “Your dreams always come true.”

“Antony, don’t say that. It’s just a dream. No way I’m going to be with a white woman.”