kennedy
The flight attendants call me “sir.” They bring me food and ask if I want wine, even bringing me seconds when I ask. It is unbelievable. They are treating me like a human being. They are treating me like a king.
I almost didn’t make it onto the plane. It was nearly impossible for me to pack and leave Kibera, my friends, SHOFCO—the only world I’ve ever known.
When I went to make my good-byes, everyone kept telling me that I would stay in America.
“Now you have a white woman. You’re going to have a job in America.”
“Listen, guys, I am not going to America to work in a grocery shop,” I rebutted. “Here in Kibera, I’m the mayor. I’m so proud. I have my dignity. My heart will stay here with you, and I will come back after my education.”
The night before we were supposed to leave, I still hadn’t started to pack. When she found this out, Jessica was mad, madder than I’ve ever seen her, after all her work, that I could come so far and then decide not to accept the scholarship, not to go with her, not to grab onto this huge opportunity.
“It’s not about the opportunity,” she yelled before she slammed the door on me. “It’s about me and you. I’m getting on that plane tomorrow, and if you want us to have any chance, you will be on it too.”
So I made it onto the plane. And it is amazing. When you click the chair, you can lean back. Jessica says there are better places to sit in the plane, something called business class and first class, but I don’t pay attention. It is all amazing. I can look down at America from the window. I can see that America is planned very well.
Jessica’s friend Daphne is waiting for us at John F. Kennedy airport. She is shouting when she catches sight of us: “The chief is here! The chief is here!”
“Your airport has a good name,” I tell her jokingly.
We ride in a taxi. The roads are clean. Everything looks in order. I have to be a new person. The Kennedy of Kibera is not here. This is a new Kennedy.
Daphne lives on Central Park. The building is beautiful. There is a doorman. But the greatest miracle of all is the shower. Like magic, hot water comes out from a spout above. I jump with surprise. I turn the tap from hot to cold, hot to cold—the temperature shifts instantly. I shout with delight. Jessica comes in to see if I am okay and finds me dancing and singing in the shower, shrugging my shoulders and shaking my hips.
“We’re jammin’, I wanna jam it with you,” I sing, pointing at Jessica, and she laughs.
I just want to jump and splash, enjoying this magic. I used to have to go fetch water in jerricans, cook it to make it hot, using precious fuel, and cup it in my hands to wash. I stay in the shower for one hour, until Jess comes back and tells me I’m wasting water, and that I have to get out. I smile at this—I’ve never wasted water in my life.
Jessica and Daphne take me to a place called Times Square. It is crazy. I can watch TV on the walls of the buildings. Someone gives me tickets for free drinks, so we go to a bar.
“Let’s get the most expensive drinks!” I say. “How about Champanzee?”
“Champanzee?” Jessica laughs. “You mean champagne?”
We stay out until five in the morning drinking and dancing.
I fly in another airplane to Ohio to meet my American mom, Linda, for the first time. She has written me and supported me for over ten years, but we have never met. In the picture I have of her she has a big smile, and at the airport when I see her it is even bigger. It is amazing to see this woman I call my mom.
They teach me to love Ohio. They buy me an Ohio team T-shirt and cap.
One time while we are driving Linda asks me if I am hungry. I tell her yes, I would like to eat some chicken. She drives us somewhere, reaches through the window, and pulls money out of a wall.
I’m like: “What’s going on?”
Then we drive to another wall, and she speaks into it. She tells the wall she wants chicken.
“Kennedy, what do you want to drink?”
I say Coke.
The food and the drinks just fall into the car window and she pays with a card. What is going on in America? You don’t even have to get out of the car and things just fall automatically into your lap like this? I am shocked. I can’t explain to Linda and Jessica the feelings I have. Oh America!
Linda gives me advice just like a mother. She tells me about being black in America. She says that if the police stop me, I should just lift my hands up and not argue.
“There have been instances here in America where innocent black men have been shot for nothing,” she tells me.
She is serious. I didn’t expect that America is also scary.
Now it is time to meet Jessica’s parents. We go to Ithaca, New York, to see a play her brother, Max, has written, and we will meet them there. I’m worried they might not like black people as I’ve read and heard so much now about black people having challenges in America. I try to pretend that I don’t care if they like me or not, as long as Jessica and I are together, but I secretly will them to like me, to accept me.
The first person I see is Jessica’s dad. The tears come from his eyes when he gives me a hug. Jessica has told me that he always cries at the family’s most important moments. I meet Jessica’s mom, who is smiling, and her brother, whose warmth is like an embrace.
They have a car and we drive together to go see Jessica’s brother’s play. I’ve never been to this kind of theater. The play is about Jessica, me, and a dog. Honestly I don’t really know what’s going on, but I know I’m part of the story. I hear them talking about slums, and I can see the African aspects. There is no popcorn. I thought they would give us popcorn to watch this. I’m a little bored, and I want to sleep, but everyone is looking at me to see if I like it so I sit at attention.
We go out to eat something and I try very carefully not to eat like a Kibera person in front of them. Jessica’s mom teaches me how to use a fork, with the fork on the right side and the knife on the other. She tells me that Americans care about these things. It seems important to her, so I try to learn.
When we fly to Denver, I am amazed by Jessica’s house, but a little overwhelmed and disappointed by how many clothes and shoes she has. Somehow, because I understand her so well, I’d thought her life would be simpler.
As I walk around Denver I am really worried that someone will shoot me, kill me. I heard that in America lots of people have guns. I don’t really understand the American culture. Max, with whom I have become very close, teases me that I am “culturally illiterate,” because I don’t understand any of the references to music or TV shows, even popular ones.
He makes me mad when he calls me that, but I forgive him because I appreciate his honest joking style.
Jessica’s grandfather, a mathematician, is also an honest man. The first time I meet him he is obviously uncertain about my relationship with Jessica. He thinks it’s not realistic. He says that if we get married in the future, it will be hard for our kids. I learn that no one in Jessica’s immediate family has married a non-Jew.
I love people who are honest with me, and, in this way, I love Jessica’s grandpa.
Finally it is time for us to go to Wesleyan to start school. Wesleyan is a beautiful place, so green. While Jessica goes to pick up the key to her house, I kneel down to kiss the soil, this hallowed ground that took so much struggle to reach.
“May this place be my home for the next four years.”
jessica
Kennedy is walking down the campus paths, carrying his books, and wearing a backpack and a Wesleyan T-shirt, looking like an entirely ordinary addition to Wesleyan’s freshman class. Only I know how truly extraordinary each detail of college life is, how every mundane freshman ritual is suddenly turned magical. I relish sharing this new world with Kennedy, who makes me see everything with new eyes. We walk to the campus bookstore, and I delight in helping him pick out folders with Wesleyan’s seal on the front for his classes. I notice how his fingers linger over the symbol, as if they too are trying to absorb it all.
We go to the campus coffee shop, Pi Café, and Kennedy discovers that he loves cappuccinos. We sit on the steps of the campus library drinking our cappuccinos, no words needed. I think of all the endless nights I’ve spent in this library and wonder about the papers Kennedy will write, the books he will discover, his own college journey unfolding before us. A foam mustache catches on his upper lip, and as I wipe it away, he takes me in his arms, burying his nose in my hair, his breath filled with possibility. He teases, “How will people know I drank a cappuccino if you wipe off the milk?” I laugh at his imitation of an American accent—or his “Denver accent,” as he calls it. I notice that his Wesleyan T-shirt still has the tag on it, and I rip it off with a swift jerk.
“Hey! Now no one will know that it is new!” he exclaims.
“Believe me,” I say with a smile, “they will know.”
kennedy
I enjoy life at Wesleyan. The people are friendly and curious about me. There is food whenever I want it. One day Jessica sees me with a friend, who is from rural Kenya, running across the campus. She calls out to us, asking us why we are running.
I look hurriedly at my watch, it’s twelve o’clock. “It’s lunchtime; look how many people there are here. There is no way there will be enough food for everyone. At weddings in Kenya, you have to be first in line; otherwise you are out of luck. Let’s go!”
I don’t know why she is laughing instead of running. Then, Jessica tells me something incredible: I never have to run to get food here. A new friend, named Peter, explains further. He patiently tells me that here at Wesleyan the dining hall simply has times when it’s “open,” and when it is, they never run out of food. Nothing has ever seemed more unbelievable. Peter always looks at me when we go to eat together, enjoying my amazement at the variety—I want to try everything. Except for the salad: that is rabbit food. Peter also helps me navigate much of this new world.
When I write my first paper, I don’t know how to use the printers. I am going to be late to my class, and I feel the panic rising—the feeling that I am out of place is overwhelming.
I frantically ask another student, “How do you print?”
I guess this is something that all mzungus just know how to do? He looks at me confused, but he presses several buttons in quick succession and my paper magically spurts out of the machine. I am so overjoyed I give him a huge hug. As I run to turn in my paper I see him shaking his head and know he must be thinking, Why did that crazy African hug me for something so simple? I’m realizing that the things that are simple for Americans here are not so for me. It turns out that he is the editor of the campus paper and soon he writes a story about my unexpected journey to Wesleyan.
I spread The Argus, the campus newspaper, out on a desk for Jessica to see. This is the second week in a row that they’ve run a full-page spread on my story.
“See this, Jess?”
She snatches it up. “They sure are running with it!”
“You’re the one who told me that Americans will like my story.” I had been reluctant to tell people where I was from at first, because I assumed I’d get the same reaction here that I always got in Kenya whenever I said I was from Kibera—fear and disdain. “I guess you were right. So many people have asked me to have lunch, or coffee, or dinner. Or to buy one of the SWEP bracelets from Kibera. I feel bad, I don’t want to ask people their names if they know mine, so my phone has Lunch, Dinner, Coffee, and Bracelet in it.” I shrug apologetically.
“Kennedy! You better just ask them, what are you going to do next? Lunch #1, Lunch #2?”
“Sawa, sawa.” I kiss her to send her on her way. “Don’t be late to class!”
Soon everyone says hi to me everywhere I go. Jessica jokes that I’ve become the mayor here too.
I start taking her and Daphne on what I call “Meet the People Tours.” We walk from house to house, and I just knock on the door and say “Hello!” whether I know the people or not. They always invite us in. We go in and have a few drinks, and suddenly we have new friends. More people on campus start wearing the colorful SWEP bracelets, and the SHOFCO movement spreads.
One night Jessica and I walk back from the library across the beautifully landscaped campus in the moonlight. We’re under the same moon that hangs over Kibera, only there I never really noticed it.
“So I’m confused about something,” I tell Jessica. “Can I ask you?”
“Of course!”
“So let me just get this straight. All I have to do here is read, go to class, discuss what we’ve read, and write some papers about it.”
“I guess that’s pretty much it.”
“And I get to eat and take a shower, and everything I need is right here and that’s all I have to do?”
Jessica just starts laughing, and it does sound like I’m poking fun. But I’m serious for once. “There is one thing I just don’t understand. I think sometimes that I’ve died and gone to heaven, but I have one question. If this is heaven, why is it that I can still call home, I can still talk to that other world?”
She is suddenly serious too, seeing the pain in my face and hearing it in my voice.
“I guess I thought your fight would suddenly be over; instead it’s just changed forms. You don’t have to fight for your life here, but you do have to figure out how to be from your world and live in this one.”
At least Jessica understands a little bit of what it is like, my two worlds. I take her hand in gratitude and we walk home together in silence.
I get a job at the library. My boss is a lady named Diane. She is tough, and I can tell that she thinks that some Wesleyan students are spoiled. I’m scared of Diane, and I don’t want to cross her. One morning after working late on a paper, I oversleep and come into work at eight instead of seven. I am sweating. I am sure Diane is going to fire me, and then how will I help my family back home? The consequences of losing my job are dire. I go to Diane and apologize and tell her I was up late studying. I beg her to give me another chance. Surprisingly, she tells me not to worry; it will be okay. A week later, I am late again. This time is it because of something called daylight savings. No one explained to me that in America they just change the clocks all the time. I have my watch, but America changed the time on it. I don’t know why.
Diane and the other lady working at the desk start laughing. She allows me to keep the job. I promise myself I will never be late again.
Another thing I don’t understand, like the time change, is the gym. In my life I worked in a factory; I worked in construction. I sweated and sweated until I sweat blood. There is no way I’m going to a gym just to sweat. I just want to eat and eat and enjoy. The students drive from the dorms to the gym in their cars. Driving to the gym makes no sense to me.
I follow the news about immigration and so-called illegals with great interest. Here I am, a foreigner who has every intention of going back to my country after I complete my education. There is so much fear that people like me will take jobs away from “true” Americans. It seems to me that the United States has forgotten its glory. It was once the only country in the world that opened its door to immigrants. America has enjoyed the glory of being the superpower exactly because different people from different places contributed to its success.
Then I read in the news that the economy is falling down and something called Wall Street crashed. It reminds me of when Osama bin Laden crushed the buildings in New York. I go ask my mentor, Professor Rob. He is Rob Rosenthal, a professor of sociology, but he lets me call him Professor Rob. He once studied in Holland, and because he was American it was very challenging, and he wants to help me so I don’t face so many difficulties.
“Professor, I have a question for you.”
“Please feel free to ask,” he says.
“Have we been attacked? Who attacked us this time? I hear they crashed a wall on the street in New York and that has affected the economy. I can’t see the pictures; is everybody okay? What is going on?”
Professor Rob starts laughing. Why is my professor laughing so hard that he might fall off his chair? I feel embarrassed.
He tells me it’s the economy that’s crashed. It has nothing to do with a wall.
This country is so complicated.
One night there is a party on campus for Halloween. For this event, everyone is supposed to dress up in a costume, but I don’t have one. My friend Nathan, who is quiet but so smart and kind, suggests we go to Goodwill to get costumes. As we drive there, I sit in the car thinking how strange my life has become, how disconnected it is from the world that I used to know, from what I would term the “real world.” Now, in this new life, I am going to spend precious money to buy an outfit that I will only wear once. In my life in Kibera, such an idea would have seemed ludicrous.
When we arrive at Goodwill, we walk around for several minutes, but I feel sick to my stomach and feel my anger rising. Nathan sees that I hold nothing and asks if I plan to buy anything. I try to be polite.
“Buddy, I think I have something in the house that I can use after all.”
Nathan looks straight into my face as if he reads something there. He refuses to buy anything either, and we leave the store empty-handed.
In the car I start laughing and Nathan joins me.
“Why did we change our minds?” he asks.
I become serious. “You know you are my friend, and I have to be honest with you. I felt bad, as a person who grew up in poverty, going to buy a piece of clothing that I’ll only use once. I worked in the factories as an unskilled laborer for many years. I don’t want to forget where I came from.”
Nathan listens carefully and says he had been overcome with the same feeling, about the wastefulness of it. Even though we grew up in totally different worlds, he sees where I came from. He sees me, and he is a great friend to me.
Later that night, at the party, I notice residential life coordinators, public safety officers, and police officers who are all there simply to ensure our safety. When I was growing up, no one looked out for my safety like this. Every time I saw a police officer in Kenya, he was there to harass, not to protect, me. Police officers in Kenya would threaten to imprison me if I couldn’t pay them a bribe, and my only crime was poverty.
I struggle to find my place here while I watch Jessica try to figure out what she wants to do after graduation. I wonder how her choice will affect our life together. I realize I came to the United States mainly to be with her. I hadn’t prepared to leave everything in Kibera behind, or to deal with the demands and responsibilities of meeting the high expectations set for me that I don’t have the educational background to meet. I am haunted by the fear that Wesleyan will discover my lack of competency and that, when they do, they will send me home to Kibera. While I’m not ready to go back home, I struggle to stay connected to the people there.
I start writing at Wesleyan. Professors encourage me to write down my experiences, and they start to pour out of me. I have a writing TA called Chachi who is so patient. She spends time helping me and tells me that I have something to say, to keep putting the words down on paper. She tells me that her mom, Abby, would love my story. I shrug; it’s amazing to me that anyone could be so sincerely interested.
Sometimes my tears roll down when I remember how many years I had little or nothing to eat. I didn’t care about the nutrition; I just wanted anything that could fill my stomach. I see many students who don’t need to struggle because their future rests in the hands of their families. They have plenty of time to decide what to do after graduation. There are so many opportunities here in America that you don’t have to rush.
In Kibera we don’t have any options. When I was lucky enough to have a job, there was no option other than to wake up at three A.M. to work at a construction site, where I carried heavy blocks of stones upstairs with my bare hands and back. I feel lucky and blessed to have access to the best education here in the States. But I still think of the others around the world who don’t have my opportunities. I know I don’t deserve all these things that I have here in America. Life shouldn’t be so based on luck, opportunities as hard to stumble upon as winning the lottery.
I am still not convinced that I am living in a world in which I don’t need to walk for long distances in search of water, that I no longer have to fight with my mom about the water that I want to use for my weekly bath. I no longer have to stop eating and leave the remaining food for my little brother Hillary, who might go hungry if I feed myself well. It seems impossible that I no longer have to worry about what I’ll eat tomorrow, that I no longer have to worry about whether I might not survive the year, or that I no longer have to worry I’ll spend the night in the police cell—not because I am a criminal but because I met a policeman who asked for a bribe and I had nothing in my pocket to offer. I still have a hard time believing that I’m living in a world where I can decide to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or do whatever I want with my life.
After a while at Wesleyan, I develop a dream to become a doctor because everyone says that doctors make a lot of money, but I’m failing math and science. Jessica tells me that math and science build upon years and years of educational foundation, and I feel angry. I’m jealous of these American kids who had the opportunity to build that foundation. I know that although I am at Wesleyan now, I can never go back and replace all the years of school I missed.
I ask someone else, “What is the best way to make money in America?”
This person tells me to be a corporate lawyer, that they make tons of money. So now I have this idea to become a lawyer. I don’t tell Jessica because she’ll know that I’m failing myself. I came to America to study so I could help my community. But wouldn’t I be able to help my community more if I can make a lot of money?
Then, one day, I realize I don’t have to be a doctor or a lawyer. Instead, I can be a bridge to Kibera. I tell Jessica that I want to start a group on campus to spread the word about SHOFCO, “SHOFCO-Wesleyan.”
“Good luck with that,” she tells me. “It’s very hard to mobilize people here.”
Nathan loves Africa. I tell him about my idea to start a group at Wesleyan and he helps me bring people together. Six people come to the first meeting.
I welcome everyone with my thick accent. “Welcome to everybody in the room and thank you for coming. For me this means amazing things, that we do care. Wesleyan is a place of privilege. If you want to be the real Wesleyan, we have to think beyond our box. Let me start by giving my story, where I come from.”
I share my story with these people, how I made it here. How with twenty cents I bought a soccer ball and started a soccer team, dreaming of a better life. I say, “Here at Wesleyan, we have more than twenty cents. We have connections, we have education, we have water, we have enough food: we can have an impact. If we can make the rest of the world a better place, that improvement will also happen here at Wesleyan.”
After I give that speech, everybody is amazed. I can feel the fire coming from me and going directly into them. So we start a movement. I tell these six people to bring people, and I tell them to go share the story; it’s a story of hope, it’s a story of the future.
The next meeting is on a Friday night. That Friday the room is full. People pour in. Nathan is just laughing.
“Do it again, Kennedy.”
jessica
I thought there would be something shatteringly equal about this trade we’ve made. In Kenya, I was living and walking in his world and now he is here, in mine. That maybe if we shared both worlds, they would stop belonging to either of us and both just become ours.
But we’ve been fighting since we got to school, little things lighting explosives between us. Kennedy always tries to keep his voice low, but it’s hard for him to control, and the angrier he gets, the more his stammer takes hold.
Last night I hardly slept at all. I feel disoriented and bleary eyed, my joints achy. I’d promised I’d help him register for a class he wasn’t sure how to get into, and I forgot. He was quiet, the way he gets when he is truly angry. He picked up his backpack and the MacBook that a kind librarian found for him to use and just left. I wanted to run after him, but my housemates were watching hockey in the living room and I knew them witnessing us fight would only make him angrier. All night, I’ve been trying to figure out what made him so incensed. All our fights recently are like this—on the surface absolutely nothing, but below them everything.
Sometimes, when we’re arguing, and he doesn’t answer his phone I close my eyes and try to play a game we made up in Kibera. If, in the middle of a disagreement, one of us could track the other down, the fight would be instantly over, a winner declared, and surprisingly this still works at Wesleyan.
In my small room in my senior house, I have two sets of drawers, and Kennedy has all his stuff in one of them, even though he has his own room. During Parents Weekend, my mom came into my room and looked around, seeing how crowded it had become with our stuff.
“If he’s not going to use his dorm room, you could use it for storage so at least Kennedy can see all the new clothes people have given him.”
I knew my mom just wanted to help us get organized.
But Kennedy misunderstood and was furious.
“I know it! I get the message! Your parents, they don’t want us to be together. I don’t want to be together!” He stormed out.
I felt exhausted by his sensitivity. I have put everything into making the transition smooth for him. He didn’t seem to notice or care. We didn’t speak for two days after that, the longest we’d ever gone without talking. Finally I sought him out and we quickly mended things, the love between us undeniable.
Maybe it was naive to think that we could just take our love and transpose it here, with all these new expectations and pressures. He changed my life, and in turn I offered him this chance to change his. In my African American theory class, my professor said something I just can’t shake: that interracial marriage is more common than interclass marriage. Even though Kennedy is now here at Wesleyan, the difference between us sometimes seems even more pronounced.
kennedy
One night, after Jessica and I have been fighting, we make up, as we always do, and decide for old times’ sake to make chapati in her kitchen. We’re working in the kitchen when my phone rings. It’s my sister Liz. I am filled with eager anticipation at the sound of her voice. But I can tell, right away, that there is something wrong.
She’s pregnant, at nineteen. My baby sister. I flash back to when my sister Jackie told me she was pregnant at seventeen. I feel anger, disappointment, and frustration. I feel like I have failed her.
“How long have you known?” I ask her.
“A few months,” she says.
Liz says that she was raped. She was out late one night, drinking, and accosted on the way home. She says she was so ashamed that she didn’t say anything about it afterward. She thought it was her fault.
I ask her to visit a clinic and have herself tested for HIV. I promise to send her money for the test.
The phone call ends. What I feel is unbearable. Tears start falling from my cheeks.
“I wish there was something I could do. I wish there was anything I could do.”
I cry all night, and Jessica holds me. African men cry inside their hearts, not outside, but this night I cannot help myself. I feel the absence of my sister, my community keenly.
For days, as we wait for the results of the HIV test, I can’t think of anything else. I don’t understand how these two worlds—Kibera and Wesleyan—can both be happening at the same time. I am angry at these kids here, these kids who have no idea or appreciation for what life has simply handed them. The lives my mother and sisters live haunt me. Although I’m halfway across the world, my entire mind is dwelling on Kibera.
I’m scared for the future of SHOFCO, my organization that has grown from nothing to something. It has been my everything, and it is the one sign of hope for my community.
I go to Jessica. “I know what I want to do. I want to be a bridge, but that is just the beginning. I want to build a school in Kibera, a school for girls like my sisters, so that we can have women leaders, instead of women who are raped and abused. The Kibera School for Girls.”
“The Kibera School for Girls,” Jessica echoes, watching my face intently and seeing on my features that this is no passing fancy. Because I tell her, it begins to seem like it could be real.
Jessica and I start discussing more openly the life of girls in my community, how Babi treats my mom, how when I walked down the streets of Kibera I would see little girls playing in the sewage and know that too often they were forced to trade their bodies for food simply to survive. I remember the tiny girl Beatrice in a bloodstained dress after she was raped. In my mind’s eye, I see the boys hanging out smoking bange and making disparaging remarks about the women who pass by, bragging about the women they have taken. I tell her about the girls who contracted HIV/AIDS and the girls who got pregnant when they were still children themselves. My sister is only one example, but these things happen constantly in the community without being reported. Maybe we can change this.
I was born to an underage woman who was denied an education and could not prosper. My stepfather mistreated my mother, and she was often beaten almost to death, but she never gave up on her kids. She taught me how to care about other people and to take action in order to change things. My mom believes in education and instilled in me the value of women, despite all the degradation they suffered around me. I recall how my mother would always make me wash dishes, which was very unusual, taking turns alongside my sisters. When I complained that I was a boy, she told me that for complaining I could now go outside and wash them in the open where everyone could see. This school will be for her.
I want to see the women in my community taking charge, both of their education and their children’s. I am willing to offer my life so that women and girls have equal access to a good future. But I want to involve the whole community: men, women, and children. For the world to change we must work in solidarity.
The school I dream of will nurture and care for students, providing them with a curriculum that will inspire them to love learning and to think critically about the world, unlike the informal “schools” that Kibera children attend. There students stand stiff, aware that the immediate result of any wrong move or wrong answer might be a beating. And teachers would use the Bible to justify these punishments: “The Bible said a child must be beaten to be a better person.” Of course children detest going to this kind of school. Given the conditions, they have no reason to want to keep struggling for an education when they have to struggle for everything else.
The Kibera School for Girls will encourage little girls to believe in themselves and nurture them to become future leaders.
One afternoon, Jessica comes rushing up to me.
“Come here,” she implores, practically dragging my full weight. “There is something I want you to see.”
She pulls me into the campus center and points to a sign: 100 PROJECTS FOR PEACE, $10,000 GRANTS. The Kathryn Wasserman Davis Foundation will fund a hundred projects that contribute to world peace. Each project will receive $10,000 to make its proposal a reality.
“What?!” I ask her, confused. She wants to work on world peace now?
“Your school for girls!” she exclaims. “We could apply to build your school for girls.”
“It’s for peace projects, Jessica. That means stuff in war zones.”
“Educated women invest 90 percent of their earnings in family, have children later who are more likely to survive, and are significantly less likely to become HIV positive. In communities where more women are educated, child mortality drops, and economics improve; it impacts everything,” Jessica lectures me. “I think we can make a strong case that a school for girls in one of Africa’s largest slums does contribute to a more peaceful world.”
“I don’t think we’ll get it,” I tell her, shaking my head. I walk away, afraid to fail.
But Jessica, like a dog with a bone, refuses to drop it. A few nights later, she hands me her first draft of the grant application.
“What do you think?” she asks nervously. “Of course it’s not done. I would need you to tell me how we actually do this, like fill in the details about where we would get the land to build it, how we would find teachers—I’ve outlined all those questions in bold . . .”
My heart is full of emotion. I look her in the eyes. “It’s great.” I see in her eyes that she will make me go through with this. Her belief in me makes me in turn believe in this crazy, impossible dream.
I read a line aloud, a great line:
“This is the very first primary school for girls in the slum providing a superior, creative education, daily nourishment, and a refuge from the pressures of the slum.”
“My God, Jess. Do you think we could actually do this?”
She takes my hand in hers. “If you tell me how to navigate the logistics, I understand the educational piece and can make a plan for your school.”
I take her hands in mine now. “I believe it. You can make anything happen. And it’s our school.” And it is, I want it to be.
“You need to make it more personal,” Daphne says after reading our grant proposal. It’s one in the morning and the proposal is due at noon tomorrow. “I’m thinking, if I’m the committee, how do I know that you guys can do this?” Daphne asks. “It sounds pretty far-fetched to me, that is, if I didn’t know either of you.”
“Daphne has a point,” Jessica says. “We should add in some more specifics.” She’s been hounding me for what she calls specifics, but I already have a very clear vision of how I want the school to be.
It’s got to be a primary school, because by the time secondary school begins, the most vulnerable girls have long since dropped out—already locked out of future opportunities. By starting with early childhood education, we can teach the brightest and the most vulnerable girls from the start, when education is so important.
I add more about the obstacles that the girls will face, which could keep them from showing up every day. Girls in Kibera are sometimes left with no options but to trade their bodies for food because there is no other way to survive. The lack of access to quality health care and resources often prevents girls from staying in school. The lack of value placed on women and girls means many of the most vulnerable girls never start school at all. This school will clear the way for these girls to reach their full potential.
I even have ideas of people who could be the teachers, the lucky few people I know from Kibera who received a church-sponsored education and went on to make something of themselves, becoming teachers. I might be able to persuade some of them to return to Kibera.
We get an e-mail saying we’re finalists for the prize and must come in for an interview. The committee asks countless questions: How will we get the land? Who will build the school? Who will run it?
I just follow my heart and my instincts as I answer.
“Was any of that true?” Jessica asks me afterward, incredulous.
“Well, it will be. We’ll make it all come true.”
She shakes her head.
A few days later, I receive an e-mail, and I start screaming for Jess.
“What is it?!”
“We got the 100 Projects for Peace!”
We are jumping up and down. I call my mom to share the news. Ten thousand dollars seems like all the money in the world.