sixteen

       jessica

Now that the building is well under way, George and I put up signs advertising admission to the school. We make hundreds of copies of the ad and put them up on all the streets of Kibera. We also get on the radio to announce the opportunity: “We are taking girls from the ages of four to six to fill our preschool, our kindergarten, and our first-grade classes.”

Before we left for Kenya, people often asked me if parents here would allow girls to go to school, even if such a school existed. Kennedy got worked up at that question, and he would respond that he believes the gender disparity that exists in Kibera’s schools is not cultural, a statement of the relative value of girls, but actually primarily economic. In Kibera 43 percent of adolescent girls are enrolled in school, compared to 29 percent of boys.^* But Kennedy explained that when families are forced to choose which child to send to school because they simply cannot afford to send both, they choose the boy because they see his education as a long-term financial investment. In Kibera, men are much more likely to get the only jobs available, working in a factory or at a construction site. There are hardly any actual jobs for women, and so it is assumed that instead of being economic contributors to their family, they will get married.

The morning we start doing the interviews for admissions, the line of parents bringing their daughters forms well before 6:30. We can only accept forty-five students: fifteen each in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Kennedy and I push through, and people crowd around us as he takes out the keys to open the gate. Working quickly, we put chairs out, but it’s clear that we don’t have nearly enough. I instruct Max to make a sign-in sheet and try to register people as they come and ask for the age of their child. Soon, he yells at me in bewilderment, besieged by clamoring parents trying to get their names written down first.

“Everyone is saying their child is the ‘right age.’ How will I know?”

I raise my eyebrows at Kennedy, looking for an answer.

He shakes his head. “Most people don’t have birth certificates. If they have anything, it’s a clinic card.” This is going to be even harder than I’d thought.

Kennedy and I set up the interview room. We stack several plastic chairs atop one another facing the desk, so that the child will be at eye level. I unpack the tangram puzzles and photocopied assessments. We’ve thought a lot about the interviewing method and rules we’ll use. Just thinking of the teeming courtyard, I can feel how hard this will be and am grateful for the clear guidelines we’ve set. I’m responsible for the first round of interviews, which will be an early childhood assessment that measures the student’s potential through testing her verbal competency, fine motor development, problem solving skills, determination, and creativity—potential. Developed with the help of several early childhood education experts, the assessment includes a tangram puzzle, on which points are given both for perseverance and for quickness of solving. In one part the applicant is asked to draw someone important to her. As she draws, I’m to ask questions about the person. Some children will be able to draw and talk at the same time and others won’t—points are given for multitasking, as well as for the number of body parts the figure drawing has.

Without the funding or infrastructure to accept all the girls who deserve this chance, we’ve decided we want to make the highest-impact investments possible with our limited funds. First, we want the very most vulnerable girls. Girls who, without this opportunity, will never have the chance to go to school. Even in Kibera, class exists. Some families earn enough money to pay to send their children to informal schools—inside the slums there are no official government schools. Those exist only in Kibera’s surrounding lower-middle-class neighborhoods and they don’t have enough spaces. While primary education is supposed to be free in Kenya, it isn’t always because the schools don’t get the support they need. Thus schools often invent their own creative fee systems. Sometimes these alternative fee structures become more expensive than schools were before primary education became free. While Kibera’s informal schools may not provide the best quality, at least if a girl is in such a school, she is off the streets.

Second, we want the very brightest. By educating the next generation of girls who will grow up to be successful leaders—lawyers and doctors and maybe even government officials—the school can effect tremendous long-term change in Kibera and beyond. Just one of our girls might one day affect millions of lives, more people than we will ever reach directly. Indeed, the success of our girls has the potential to have a powerful multiplier effect.

After the first round of assessments is done, we’ll take about the top 50 percent of the scores (a pretty generous spread), and Kennedy will proceed to conduct home visits to each and every one of these families to assess the family’s need, looking for details to evaluate their economic status. How many other children are there and are they in school? Do they have power? What is the house itself made out of and how many household items are owned? Are there other factors that make this child more vulnerable? Without us, will they send their daughter to another informal school? We’ll then rank using the combined “need score” and “potential score” to admit our first students.

We’ve also agreed on a few other things—we have a one-child-per-family rule so as to spread out the opportunity as much as possible. We will also look for ethnic and religious diversity. With the postelection violence in mind, we can’t help but think that if children go to school with others from different ethnic groups and religions, tolerance will result.

These rules give me some semblance of a system to cling to, and frankly, to hide behind. All these girls deserve a chance. I can’t help but feel anger at the world’s disparity that denies each of them the tremendous opportunities they all deserve.

I walk downstairs and get the list from Max—already fifty girls long and it’s not yet eight o’clock. I see clearly on these hopeful parents’ faces that they know that education is the best pathway to a better life for their daughters and for their families.

Hillary trounces through the courtyard and confidently makes his way upstairs. He doesn’t ask before sitting down in the chair we’ve set up for the interviewees and starting to arrange the tangram puzzle. In about a minute, he’s completed it perfectly.

“Well, we don’t have to worry about his determination or fine motor skills,” I mutter to Kennedy. “What am I supposed to do with him here all day? Can you take him?”

“Jess, I have a meeting with the chief of the area today, and then the district commissioner and the district education officer; you’ll have to figure it out.”

He kisses me on the cheek before leaving, and I suddenly feel completely desperate, entirely unprepared.

“Not one peep,” I tell Hillary, pressing my finger to my lips to make sure he understands. He shrugs impudently in reply, but he does get out of the chair for the applicant. He pulls another chair to the side of the desk, as if setting himself up to be an assistant judge.

“Robyn Adhiambo,” I call out from the top of the stairs. A little girl comes forward with perfectly even braids in her hair, and her mother starts to follow her upstairs—she looks much younger than me. I tell her in Swahili that it’s children only; we talk to parents later. We decided that applicants have to do the interview alone, because Kennedy worries that parents will want this chance so badly that they might punish their children if they see them not doing well.

Robyn continues up the stairs without looking back at her mom—clearly confidence isn’t an issue. She hoists herself up in the chair and looks at me, waiting for my next move. She’s incredibly together for four, adorable and entirely serious.

“Your name is Robyn?” I ask in Swahili. I’ve been practicing the assessment in Swahili for days to make sure I can do it flawlessly. She raises her eyebrows to say yes, making her eyes big. She completes the assessment flawlessly and then just sits back to look at me, as if now I’m under examination. Then I invite Robyn’s mom in to tell me a little bit about herself. Robyn’s mom looks like she can’t be more than early twenties. She’s skinny, with striking features, and carries another little baby with her. Is she willing to work five weeks a year in exchange for Robyn’s free education?

“Absolutely.” She says she never went to school but knows that Robyn is bright and has potential, and that she would do anything to make sure she gets that chance.

In the courtyard another little girl stands perfectly still, wrapped in a white sheet. When it’s her turn for the interview, her mother unwraps the sheet to reveal a beautiful pink dress—she wrapped her up to keep the dress clean. Her name is Mackenzie, and she is so determined; even though it takes her a while to do the puzzle, she gets it. I am impressed by her persistence. We’re taking a photo of each girl so that we remember who’s who. When we tell her it’s time for a photo, her smile opens her mouth so wide, it’s like she’s biting an apple.

A girl named Michaela comes up, with the cutest little braids and the most mischievous smile. When we ask her to draw and tell a story, she draws her father and talks about how he died. She says she loves him so much even though she doesn’t remember him clearly.

There’s another little girl named Belinda, who’s incredibly matter-of-fact. Everything she says is so clear and measured, she seems like a tiny adult in a child’s body. She tells us that her parents died from AIDS, and that she and her other siblings were all farmed off to relatives. She lives in Kibera with her uncle and her stepmother. There’s no emotion in how she says any of this. She’s just very factual, and so bright. She just shines.

I’m falling in love with all of them. There seems to be a brightness underneath all of the darkness of this place that I never saw before. Perhaps one girl at a time we will uncover more of the light.

After only ten interviews, I feel absolutely drained, but there are so many more families sitting patiently downstairs that I keep going. It’s fascinating: the clear developmental differences and verbal and imaginative inclinations between children. Some can put together the tangram puzzle with ease and can draw a person with all the body parts and tell an elaborate story about the person they’re drawing as they do it. For others the tangram puzzle takes longer, but they are incredibly creative and persistent—and we’ve worked out the scoring so either outcome can result in equivalent points.

Hillary doesn’t make it any easier; as one little girl struggles with the puzzle, he cups his hands over his mouth and emits a sitcom-worthy “ha-ha-ha” giggle. Another struggles to jump on one foot during a test for motor skills, and he does it himself before pointing at her and saying, “DO IT!” At that, I kick him out. He gives me a menacing stare before running out, but when I next look outside I see him playing happily with the little girls who are still waiting their turn.

The interviews continue for five days, and each day more parents arrive with their little girls than I could have possibly imagined. On the final day of interviews there is so much chaos, a last-minute flurry of people just hearing about the opportunity, that I don’t wrap up interviews until six P.M. Afterward, I sit in the office entering the day’s scores in the master Excel spreadsheet so that I can sort it, to generate the list of who Kennedy needs to start home visits with tomorrow.

A little girl stumbles in crying, looking confused and lost. She is tiny and has puffy lips and long eyelashes now thick with tears. I look outside in the courtyard—no one else is around. Suddenly, I remember her interview. She was playful and bright, and when asked to draw a picture of a person she loved, she’d drawn her mother, narrating a story so sweet in its detail of how her mother likes to take her for walks.

I greet her in Swahili and ask, “Where is your mom?” At that word she starts to hiccup and cry more, shaking her head in bewilderment.

“Did you get lost? Where did you last see her?”

She opens her eyes wide but still shakes her head. I go to the bathroom and tear off a piece of toilet paper. “Here, blow.”

She presses her face into the tissue and blows her nose, and I wipe her tearstained cheeks. Slowly, she stops looking at me with fear in her eyes and starts to play a game of peekaboo, hiding behind the desk. I play along. She holds on to the edge and hides her face by turning away and burying it in her arms, her smile now mischievous. Then she pops up suddenly and I feign both fear and shock.

Her mom bursts in the office door—overcome with joy at seeing her there.

“Priscilla!” she cries, rushing to sweep the little girl up in her arms. Priscilla presses her face into her mother’s neck and peers over her shoulder to look at me with a smile.

“Thank you,” she says. As she and Priscilla leave hand in hand she tells me, “Please, you’re welcome at our house anytime.”

After they leave, I check the score sheet: Priscilla’s score places her among the very highest. All night, I can’t get that image of Priscilla and her mother hugging out of my head: a universal image of motherhood.

It’s early morning and a haze hangs low. I pull my sweater close against the chill and struggle to keep pace with Kennedy and George, watching carefully where I place my foot to avoid stepping into ankle-high mud. On this pathway the smell of the river is suffocating—a combination of stale urine and sewage. It takes all the willpower I have not to press my nose into my forearm. Kennedy and George are starting the home visits, and I’ve asked to tag along. Kennedy is insistent that I wait a little bit away until he goes first and does his initial inspection—he feels that my presence might impede his ability to make an honest assessment. George stays with me.

Priscilla’s mom meets Kennedy at a corner and they disappear down a side pathway, while George and I poke our heads into several small shops along the road. One woman sells an assortment of white stones.

“What are those?” I ask George.

“They’re for pregnant women.” I look at him sideways and he elaborates, “They eat them, when they are pregnant.”

“They eat them?”

“Yes—they have iron in them.”

I want to ask more, but my phone beeps. Done. Meet me at that corner.

I show the phone to George and he nods. “Let’s go.”

Kennedy is trying to keep a neutral face—he’s committed to impartiality in the selection process—but his expression is pained.

“What happened?” I ask, worried something is terribly wrong.

He shakes his head, indignant. “People suffer,” he whispers.

Priscilla’s mother follows hesitantly behind Kennedy, but when she sees me, she smiles.

“Karibu chai,” she says—Welcome for tea.

I look at Kennedy to get his approval, and he nods before signaling to George that they better continue, to have any chance of finishing all their visits in the next several days.

I follow Mama Priscilla down a very narrow winding path. We make a right and walk down a small alleyway in between two rows of houses that face each other; there is less than a foot between them. There is laundry hung on haphazard lines and I have to duck, but I still run into wet clothes, the moisture sticking to my face. Priscilla’s house is tucked away in the back of a long row, and I see the little girl playing outside, throwing her head back in laughter. She looks up and sees me, then runs toward me.

Mama Priscilla invites me to come inside, and I stop at the door to remove my shoes. I walk down a single crude step, and my eyes take a moment to adjust in the dark. The room is so small, hardly big enough for two grown adults to stand in. There is a small wooden table stained with blue paint—the room’s only color. She gestures to the small couch made from what looks like refurbished metal. The room is sparse—no bed or “kitchen corner,” only an old metal trunk for storage. I sit down gingerly, and Mama Priscilla places a plastic cup filled with hot tea in front of me, apologizing that she doesn’t have any milk. I think about giving the tea to Priscilla, but I remember the last time I refused tea, thinking that I was being respectful. Kennedy was livid—explaining both the pride and generosity I was simultaneously rejecting.

Mama Priscilla doesn’t say very much, and I don’t ask, but I can tell she is happy that I took her up on her offer of tea. Priscilla pops in and out of the doorway, trailed by her little brother, still playing peekaboo.

“Where is Priscilla’s father?” I ask quietly, unsure if I am overstepping.

“He doesn’t live here,” Mama Priscilla says. “I’m a second wife.”

I have so many questions I want to ask, but I don’t know where to start.

“I only finished eighth grade,” she continues. “We didn’t have money for more. I want better for Priscilla. I want her to depend on herself.”

I think to myself, So do I. I thank Mama Priscilla.

“Come back, anytime,” she calls after me.

All afternoon, as I read prospective teachers’ résumés, I think about Priscilla’s smile.

In my bank account in America, I have exactly $3,000, carefully saved from summers spent waitressing in a Japanese restaurant, babysitting, and working at a day camp. Impulsively I pick up my phone and compose a text message to Kennedy: I found a donor who can close our gap.

A moment later, my phone buzzes with his reply. You’re kidding. How?

I know how, but I don’t know why. It’s seems completely arbitrary—and completely unfair—that I am even in the position to offer this small, yet entirely meaningful sum. But it does feel like a step in the right direction.

It’s two in the morning, and the sound of Kennedy’s phone jerks me from sleep.

“Kennedy, your phone, again!” I tap him.

His phone rings at all hours, although I’m always pleading for him to turn it off, to give us a few hours’ respite from the endless demands and questions.

“What’s going on?” Building the school has made us both very heavy sleepers, and we fall into bed exhausted at the end of each day. He gropes around to find his phone and answers groggily. Then he sits up sharply, the tone of his voice intensifying in Luo, and I know something is wrong. Still on the phone, he switches on the lights and pulls on the first pair of pants and shirt his fingers grasp.

“What’s going on?” I ask again. He holds up a finger to say one minute and motions toward the door. Finally he hangs up, but instead of walking out the door he sits down on the bed.

“Liz is in labor,” he says quietly. “She’s going to have the baby.” I immediately fly out of bed and pull on a sweatshirt and jeans.

“Where? Should we go?”

“At St. Mary’s clinic; it’s a small clinic in Olympic. I know the nurse who runs it. I set it up weeks ago with a deposit so that she could go there whenever the time came.”

For people without any insurance, hospitals in Kenya can be expensive, and Kennedy slowly siphoned money from his job in the Wesleyan library for the birth and to help Liz.

I sit down next to him.

“Is she okay?” I rub his back soothingly, using my nails the way he likes, but he doesn’t say anything—he’s lost in thought. “We should go,” I say gently.

“I don’t know if I can.” He burrows his head into my chest, and I wrap my arms around him, pulling him to me.

“Liz was my baby,” he whispers.

“I know,” I say.

“I wanted so much to keep her away from all this. I tried to get her into the parish school. When I saw the boys she was keeping around, I warned her and them too. Maybe I protected her too much; she never knew how fast Kibera lets you fall, because I tried to hold her up.”

“She knows you tried, baby. And she needs you now.”

“You don’t understand.” He pulls back, catching me off guard with his vehemence. “My mom was fifteen when she had me. Jackie was seventeen. Liz is only nineteen. We’re trapped.”

And he’s right. I don’t really understand the cycle of poverty he has seen all his life, this cycle that refuses to let go. Sometimes there is nothing to do but to stand by while his heart breaks, and then keep standing there as, slowly, he pieces it back together.

Liz gives birth to a beautiful, healthy little girl. She names her Jessica, and I am deeply moved. The clinic is small—only four rooms, each shared by four people—but it is clean. I sit on Liz’s bed holding baby Jessica. The baby’s hands are so small, clutched in little fists—I’ve never before held a baby on its first day of life. Her features are beautiful, so small and precious. She begins to cry in my arms and Ajey stands up, reaching out to take her. Liz lies still, as if in shock.

I stand outside the door to the room, struggling to reconcile all our collective feelings and hopes for this baby and for Liz. When I was her age, I had just finished my freshman year of college and was home in Denver for the summer, making out with my boyfriend, staying out late, and working a few jobs to make money. That summer I felt sophisticated, independent. I’d survived a year away from home at Wesleyan, and as a result I knew everything. I was filled with politically correct opinions and absolute certainty. My parents looked at me and smiled gently, knowingly, because once they had been nineteen and insufferable too. I was a child becoming a woman, but allowed that period of transition.

I think I understand why Liz is so ambivalent toward this child, toward being a mother. She knows that she has been forced to become a woman before she is ready. She is in mourning for a childhood she never got to finish or live fully.

“Is she okay?” Kennedy asks, hovering in the doorway.

“Let’s go outside,” I whisper.

I drag my feet through the stones in the courtyard, making patterns.

“Is she okay?” he asks again.

“I don’t think so,” I say, looking him in the eye. “But I think she’s going to be. That baby is so beautiful, once she recovers from the shock of what’s happened to her, she’s going to see that. She’s going to become an amazing mom.”

“I need to talk to her,” he says. Half an hour later, Kennedy reemerges, looking lighter.

“She’s keeping the baby,” he says.

I nod, unaware that she’d been considering another option.

A week later, I drop off a bag of clothes and toys I bought for Jess—unsure of when she might be big enough or ready for any of them. Liz sits outside, holding her.

“I hope she’s like you,” Liz says. “In Africa we believe that when you name a child for someone, they take some of their character.”

“Which parts of my character do you hope she takes?”

“Your stubbornness.”

I laugh.

I hug Liz, and we sit together looking at Jess, her eyes half open, dozing and so content. I want nothing more than a world in which, when she is nineteen, she has my opportunities and Liz’s strength.

Once we’ve admitted the girls, we need to get them uniforms. George and I troop into downtown Nairobi through streets bustling with merchants. We go to a shop called The Uniform Distributors and look at ten different uniforms. George, it turns out, has very strong opinions about what uniforms our girls should have. One uniform is a faded yellow, and he says it will get dirty too fast. Another is bright red, and he says it’s too much red.

“They have to look the smartest.”

Then we look at a blue dress with a white collar. This is the one we decide on, paired with a red sweater. George is so happy. As we walk out of the store he is almost skipping down the street.

“No one has ever seen brightly colored girls like this in Kibera. They’ll stand out. They’ll stand out the way they should.”

I never thought I would be so excited about giving out a uniform, but when the time comes to hand each one out, it’s so clear that for these girls it is a symbol of education, a symbol of everything that lies ahead. Big, tough George stands in the doorway, grinning as he watches each girl walk in, take her uniform, and walk out, head held high.

Just before we open the school, we get a call from Babi that Kennedy’s mom has collapsed. Kennedy face goes white, and I snap into crisis mode. We’re at the SHOFCO office in Olympic and Ajey’s in Kibera, so we have some of Kennedy’s friends carry her up to the nearest place that a car can reach. I call an ambulance.

When the ambulance comes, Ajey is shivering and unconscious. Kennedy and I ride in the ambulance with her to a small hospital. He is so scared that all I can be is strong. At the hospital Kennedy is paralyzed; he can’t talk to the doctors or the nurses. It’s so unlike him. I find out from the doctors that Ajey has gone into shock because she has high blood pressure that has gone untreated.

Kennedy just sits by her bedside, refusing to move. I can see that the thought of losing her overwhelms him with terror.

Ajay recovers slowly but surely. On the day she’s released, we get a taxi to take her back. Kennedy and I pool our small amount of remaining savings to rent her a place in Olympic, so that she will have a more comfortable place to live. She’s so happy, she decorates and invites all the members of the SHOFCO staff over for tea.

My parents have decided to fly over for the opening of the school. Kennedy is nervous for their arrival, and I, too, wonder what they will think. Seeing my parents and my eleven-year-old sister, Raphae, coming out of the airport feels like all my worlds are suddenly colliding and yet complete. I’m so happy that they’re here in this place that’s come to mean so much to me. My mom hugs me. My sister looks like a zombie.

“Kiddo, it’s great to be here,” says my dad, hugging me.

We go back to the apartment we’ve rented on their behalf, so they can take a nap. When they wake up, we go to Nairobi Java House. My mom is relieved.

“At least there’s coffee,” she says.

I roll my eyes and say, “Mom, Nairobi is a huge city. You’ll find there’s pretty much everything.”

Kennedy and Max both shoot me a look that says Be nice! and I hold my tongue, willing myself to be patient as my parents go through what I went through not so long ago.

We take them to Kibera, first pausing at the overlook to take it in from a distance. I look at my mom, trying to read her reaction. She doesn’t say anything.

“Are you okay?” I ask her after a few more moments.

“Where did you live exactly?” she manages.

“Well,” I say, “we are going to have to walk a ways to reach it, because it’s way down there. Let’s go.”

She shakes her head and says deliberately, “I will never trust your judgment again.”

I look at my dad worriedly.

Walking through Kibera with my parents makes me notice things I stopped seeing long ago. The smells, the dried fish lying in the hot baking sun, the heat as it cascades down the iron-sheet roofs. I remember the first time I walked to Kennedy’s house and what an impossible maze this all felt like. Now, two years later, it is deeply familiar.

People we pass ask me in Swahili if that’s my mom. I nod and smile. I keep looking at my mom, desperately wanting her approval. Everyone on the road exclaims with happiness that my family has finally come, calling out that their “in-laws” have arrived for all to hear. I’m silently thankful that they are speaking in Swahili; all my family can grasp is their welcoming excitement.

The school emerges in front of us, a beacon of hope in the midst of this chaos. When we reach it, my family stops and is uncharacteristically quiet. I realize how deeply I want them to celebrate with me what we have created here. My mom is the first to speak—“Jess, this is amazing”—and I feel my face flush red, glowing with her praise and recognition.

I know it doesn’t look like much, a small, crudely plastered building. But now, looking at her, looking at my dad, I know they see the same potential that I see. It means everything to be standing here, sharing this with them.

There’s one other tiny challenge to tackle with my family, in preparation for the trip we’ll take with them to visit Kennedy’s family in the village before the school opens. I select an appropriate restaurant, one of Nairobi’s nicest, and, once we’re all sitting down, I clear my throat.

“Guys. You know the village?”

They nod, and my dad says that they’re looking forward to seeing a different part of Kenya. I catch Kennedy’s eye and he nods at me. His expression is the one that often comes over his face when he suspects things won’t go according to plan. There’s a mischievous glint in his eyes.

“Yeah, so about the village,” I continue. “Okay, in Kennedy’s culture, before he could leave the country to go to Wesleyan, we had to build this house. It’s more like a hut. We had to build it, because otherwise he couldn’t leave. They would say he has no roots without it. And, well, it turns out that in his culture, that house means, well, his family thinks that we’re married.”

All of a sudden, no one is chewing. The silence is thick enough to cut.

“They think you’re what?!” My mom is incredulous.

I try again to explain slowly, “Mom, Kennedy had to build this house.”

She interrupts, “I know, you’ve said that. Cut to the part where you said the house means you’re married?”

I nod, trying to pretend this is all perfectly standard.

My dad, who’s been silent to this point, says firmly, “Well, we’ll just have to explain to them that in our culture, you are most definitely not married.”

“Dad,” I say very quietly, my teeth clenching, my jaw tight. “If you can’t just pretend to be respectful, then I will never invite you to share someone else’s culture again.”

I get up and storm off to the bathroom, leaving Kennedy alone with my family. I feel trapped and confused. Which world is mine? I can understand my family’s resistance to their twenty-two-year-old daughter being married in another country in a strange house-building wedding without their knowing. I also understand why having these roots matters so much to Kennedy and his family. Do I belong to Kennedy’s world? I feel like I exist in a strange middle place, neither here nor there.

I walk back to the table. My dad looks contrite. Kennedy’s face looks as if he’s about to be sick.

Max is just laughing. “This is going to make a really great play one day.”

“Dad?” I say. “Can you just agree to be respectful?

My dad nods his head and says, “As long as you tell me that you’re not really married.”

Kennedy jumps in to reassure saying, “We promise. We’ll tell you if that ever happens.”

Raphae finally says, “Can we go home?”

The day of the opening arrives at last. We wake up early, and I have chills of anticipation all morning. The classrooms are set up with small tables and tiny plastic chairs. I imagine the girls sitting there, debating, learning about themselves and the world. The teachers have been training and preparing for weeks. Raphae and Max carry the bags of school supplies my parents have brought. As Kennedy and I walk through Kibera, it feels entirely different, alive and washed with hope.

Hundreds of people attend the opening of the school, everyone deeply invested. Forty-five little girls in matching uniforms, the chosen ones, their faces appropriately serious, are flanked by their parents and sisters and brothers and neighbors, whose buoyant pride shows on their faces because they have been chosen, too.

“Erokamano,” a parent sings—her beautiful clear voice so vibrant it sends a shock down my spine. Soon, everyone is clapping and echoing her words—her song translates to mean “Thank you, when we thought there was no reason to live, God has given hope, a reason to keep moving forward.” The mother who started the song belts it out, truly bringing it home, bringing us all together.

More people have come than even Kennedy expected, men and women alike who have no affiliation to the school but are here to celebrate all the same. People from the community, youth leaders and village elders, shouting and praising a school for girls. Children stream in, their curiosity irked by the commotion.

Kennedy stands in the center clapping his hands in time and dancing too. When the song is over, he speaks. He begins by saying that his mother told him when he went to America not to forget: not to forget her, not to forget Kibera, and not to forget where he came from.

“Look at me. Today, one year later, I am back, and together we have built this. We have made this possible.”

I love watching Kennedy in front of people, in his element. He comes alive reading the responses of the crowd and changing his tone to speak to what people really need to hear. I stand off to the side as I watch him. The audience guffaws and cackles in response. As he talks, a lightness comes over the crowd. Everyone who came in a bit unsure, nervous, not trusting what this was all about, knows, when Kennedy talks to them, that it’s theirs. It’s a special gift to be able to connect to people in that way, and as I watch him in front of the parents, I realize that although our love binds us in a special way, he is not mine alone, but belongs in deep and complex ways to this place and to these people, too.

Kennedy calls me up to speak in front of everyone. I shake my head, but he insists, grabbing my hand and pulling me through the throng of girls.

“What language should I use?”

“Swahili,” he says. “You can do it.”

I stand up, feeling the eyes of the elders and community, the eyes of the parents, the eyes of the girls, and then I speak. I thank the parents for giving us this chance to educate their daughters. I thank the community members for coming up to support this day. I thank my own parents and Max and Raphae for traveling across the world to share this moment with me. And I thank Kennedy for inviting me to be part of something that I didn’t completely understand until today, until I’m standing in it, standing in the light of what is possible.

I feel the girls’ keen attention and I tell them, “Girls, you can be anything you want.”

I know that this will be a hard promise to keep, but I resolve to dedicate myself to ensuring that this contract holds true.