It Happened on the Way to War (25 page)

“
TOSHA! TOSHA!”
PEOPLE shouted as they descended on Uhuru Park. “ENOUGH! ENOUGH!”

There were more people than I had ever before seen at an event. Salim and I had arrived two hours before the scheduled start of the ceremonies. He had begrudgingly agreed to accompany me after I suggested we play some pool later that night. Salim never grew tired of talking trash and cleaning my clock on the pool table.

“RAILA! RAILA!” others chanted in support of Kibera's very own Member of Parliament and incoming cabinet member Raila Odinga.

A crowd began rapping “
Unbwogable
”—the theme song of the opposition. It translated to “uncrushable.”

The only other white people I saw were journalists and dignitaries far away near the stage. Salim nudged me with his elbow and gestured to two men staring at me. I turned and flashed a two-finger peace sign, the symbol of the opposition party. They shook their fists at me approvingly. “
TOSHA! TOSHA!”

Hours passed. The mob grew restive. My heels burned in my boots as if I were at the end of a long forced march. My bladder swelled from the coffee I had drunk earlier that morning. Some men urinated on the handful of acacia trees throughout the park. Older people began to collapse from the heat. Women and children trickled out as more men tried to push their way to the stage. Every time a new entourage of dignitaries arrived, tens of thousands of people at the front lines surged toward the stage only to be bludgeoned back by an army of police on horseback swinging billy clubs. Over and over we swelled, waves in a sea of humanity. I wanted to get closer to the front. Salim held me back.

Men hurled mud at the stage.

“TOSHA!”
we shouted.

After four hours of waiting, the official party still hadn't arrived, and Salim was fed up.
“Tosha,”
he joked, and left to walk downtown to an Internet café.

I waited for another hour, pressing closer to the stage until my bladder felt as if it was going to explode. I couldn't bring myself to urinate on an acacia tree, and by that time I doubted that Moi and Kibaki would even show up. The U.S. ambassador had arrived and left after discovering that a seat had not been reserved for him.

“FREEDOM!” a man nestled in the flat-top limbs of an acacia tree shouted, and flashed a peace sign as I walked away. Shortly afterward, Moi and Kibaki arrived and performed a peaceful transition of power.

THE CITY CENTER was deserted as I walked toward the Internet café. Normally, such quiet would put me on guard. But that day a warm complacency filled my senses. I felt as if I was floating through a mystical place when an arm hooked me from behind. Startled, I jumped, then relaxed. I assumed it was a friend surprising me until the arm drew tighter around my neck.

A gang of boys circled in front of me. They began clawing at my cargo-pants pockets and swinging their little fists at my face. I kicked and grabbed the arm around my neck, gasping for air and attempting to eye-gouge the one choking me. It was a maneuver I had learned in hand-to-hand combat drills. As I started to lose consciousness, the boys yelled something, released me, and scattered.

Some Kenyan men who had witnessed the attack congregated in a group across the street. They had captured one of the assailants. I stumbled over, shirtless and bloody.

“Oh, I'm sorry, sorry,” a man in the group consoled me. He was a Good Samaritan. They all were. They had come to my rescue and were now surrounding a boy who looked like he could be eleven years old. A man stepped forward and drilled his foot into the kid's stomach. The boy coughed and held up his hand, pleading with wide, frightened eyes. Another man stepped forward and slugged him in the face, cracking his nose. The boy shrieked.

“Mwizi, mwizi,”
a man snarled. “Thief, thief.” He leaned over and punched the boy in the face. I thought they might kill him. That's what residents did to thieves in Kibera. Mob justice.

Stepping forward, I lifted the boy off the ground and hoisted him over my shoulder in a fireman's carry. He was lighter than the gear I carried in my dad's duffel.

“Where you taking him?” one of the men asked me. “We're not through.”

“Yes, you're through. Thanks.”

Lifting the boy off my shoulder, I told him that we were going to visit a friend. He followed me sheepishly, blood dripping from his nose. When I asked him some questions in Swahili, the boy's answers were too soft for me to understand. It was difficult for me to view him as a thief.

Salim was alone in the Internet café. He calmly gestured to the boy to sit down. Within a half hour, Salim knew a lot about the kid's life. The boy happened to be from Kibera. Salim struck a deal with him: We wouldn't turn him in to the police, and he could go see Tabitha to take care of his injuries. In return, we expected him to come to CFK's next war on trash.

The boy nodded and shuffled out the door, head down.

“Ya think he'll show up?” I asked.

“Not really.” Salim didn't believe the boy wanted to be rehabilitated. “You know, with life on the streets you can only be helped when you're ready to get the help. This thing, it's got to be in you.”

It was another lesson, a reminder that as an organization, and as individuals, we could only do so much. There were two different approaches: reach many and risk being superficial, or invest heavily in the few who have the desire and capacity to lead. CFK deliberately chose the latter. While it was easy for me to appreciate this approach as a strategic decision and a practical reality, it didn't make it any easier to see the boy shuffling out the door without a safety net.

In the United States, I might have taken the boy to the police, who would have engaged the state and its social services for children in abusive environments. These services were often poorly funded and rife with problems, but at least they were there. At least there was some hope for rehabilitation, some level of responsibility that society accepted for its children. In Kenya, a trip to the police would simply mean juvenile detention, which left most kids more spiteful and traumatized.

“What'd they take?” Salim asked me.

I wasn't sure. I had packed a fair amount of stuff into the eight pockets of my cargo pants and the breast pockets on my shirt. The boys had torn off three of my four cargo pockets and made away with a fistful of Creme Savers hard candies, a notepad, and a digital camera. My shirt pockets had had a little cash, perhaps $10 worth of shillings. I looked at Salim and patted the upper two side pockets on my pants. Suddenly, I panicked. My Spyderco. They had taken my Spyderco Delica. It was the pocketknife that I had carried since junior high school.

“Sorry, man,” Salim said, and handed me a short-sleeve, baby-blue, collared shirt that he was carrying in his satchel. I put the shirt on and told Salim about my Spyderco. It probably struck him as odd that I had such a strong attachment to a knife. However, he was one of my closest friends, and he could tell that I was distraught. It felt as though I had lost a part of me. I would've given those kids anything else: my belt with the hidden pouch lined with $100 bills, my muddy, scuffed-up Timberlands, sunglasses, and every piece of clothing on my body. They might have taken these things in exchange, I suspected, because my Spyderco had little street value. The pointed tip of its steel, half-serrated blade had snapped off. The waffle-pattern tread on the black plastic grip was smooth from a decade of handling.

Like a bad love story, my Spyderco was gone and there was no way to get it back. Yet I couldn't stop thinking about it, and as I deliberated why it had happened, something more disturbing came to mind.

I had let my guard down. All of the warning signs were in front of me: empty streets, eerie silence, and an unpredictable gathering of hundreds of thousands of people nearby. Yet for some reason I had become complacent and forgotten my situational awareness. This awareness was a hallmark of my military training going back to Major Boothby and ROTC. As one of the most obvious overlaps between my two worlds, it was one of the ways that my military experience added the most value to my work in Kibera. Now it was breaking down at what felt like the worst possible time. Soon I could be leading Marines into places where momentary lapses into complacency had lethal consequences.

The failure of my situational awareness had allowed an assailant's arm to wrap around my neck. Then it was no longer an issue of vigilance, but of instincts. I should immediately have resisted. Instead, I thought the person was a friend and lost split seconds when I could have fought back. My father, I believed, would instantly have resisted. He would never have assumed the assailants were friends, not for a moment. He would have drawn blood on both sides. I had become too naïve, too complacent. My instincts were wrong.

So it was that I had to revisit the essential question: Could I do both? I assumed all along that it was possible, and I wanted it to be possible. I wanted the best practices of each world to inform the other. As Colonel Greenwood and Major Boothby suggested, I thought Kibera would make me a better Marine, and vice versa. Yet maybe the two worlds were too much for each other, like oil and water, two elements that were in some way irreconcilable. I was trying to force them together through my life, but maybe they were meant to be apart.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Compartments

Kibera

JANUARY 2003

TABITHA, SALIM, AND I WERE IN THE CLINIC on New Year's Day when I received an urgent text message from Camp Lejeune. I immediately called my commanding officer. He was unrevealing with the details. We were on an unsecure line.

“You need to get back here. We're pushing the course a month forward because of what's going down [the Iraq War]. It [the HUMINT course] will start in three days. Can you make it [to Dam Neck, Virginia]?”

“I'll do my best, sir. Will it be all right if I am a bit late?” Most military schools started with a couple slow administrative days.

“Unfortunately not. You miss this one, you'll have to wait for the next class. Where you callin' from anyway?” He had more important things to worry about than my current location.

“I'm still in Nairobi.”

“Oh.”

“Sir, I'll be there.” I couldn't wait any longer to finish my training, not after my eight-month hiatus from the Basic School.

“Okay, keep me posted.”

“Roger that, sir.” I hung up, said good-bye to Salim and Tabitha, threw my clothes into my dad's old duffel, and raced to the airport to catch the night flight to London.

THE MOONLIGHT REFLECTED off my camper's rooftop as I pulled the Green Bean into Rogers Bay. My neighbor's Confederate flags flapped in the breeze. He was the only other person who lived in the campground year-round, along with a family of squirrels that he had named and befriended. Bucky, a feisty critter who was missing a front tooth, was domesticated to the point where he ate peanuts from my neighbor's mouth and sometimes slept in his bed. I enjoyed my rugged bachelor's existence with my neighbor and his squirrels. I was also proud that my camper only cost a hundred bucks a month. The utility bill didn't amount to much either. The air conditioner was busted and my water often froze in the winter, forcing me to bathe in the ocean.

My body odor was noxious the night I arrived, but there was no time for a saltwater swim. I had been traveling for sixty-five hours and needed to report to duty no later than 0700. I pounded a Red Bull energy drink, repacked my duffel, and blasted out into the predawn darkness. I arrived in Dam Neck, a small base on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean a few miles south of Virginia Beach with less than a half hour to spare.

The HUMINT course started at full speed as soon as I took my seat in our windowless classroom. The three-month course consisted of modules on three skill sets, any one of which could take a lifetime to master: interrogations, counterintelligence, and human-source operations. In the first month, we studied the Geneva Conventions and learned more than a dozen sanctioned approaches to military interrogations. The approaches seemed reasonable and well thought out. They had self-explanatory names such as “We Know All,” “Fear Up,” and “Fear Down.” So-called stress positions and other forms of physical coercion were forbidden and looked down upon as the unreliable tools of terrorists and thugs. Professionals relied on intellect and preparation.

Much of what we learned was classified, and shortly after the course started the government granted me a full Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information clearance. A security officer explained that sensitive compartmentalized information meant that I could be given access to special, isolated government programs on a need to know basis. The “need to know” was at the heart of all intelligence operations. It was a world that operated in compartments. I understood why this was important, but I wasn't sure how I would conform to the culture. My tendencies were to share information, not to guard it.

There wasn't much time to reflect. I conformed because I had to, and without complaint. HUMINT was where I wanted to be, and the training was fascinating. It required reservoirs of physical and mental stamina and pushed us far outside our comfort zones. It had an elemental quality that I found attractive as well. No matter how much technology we had at our disposal, HUMINT would always matter. We relied on it to isolate the enemy, to protect our own forces, and to minimize death and injury to noncombatants.

While the course material challenged me, it complemented some of my strengths and occasionally overlapped with my other world. Successful interrogators typically built rapport by “mirroring” body language. Although I had never heard the term
mirroring
before, I had adopted the technique subconsciously while fund-raising. When donors spoke, I often found myself adjusting my demeanor to match their dispositions. The longer people talked about things that mattered to them, the more likely it seemed to be that they would contribute, even if their personal interests were tangential to CFK's goals.

Of course, on some level the circumstances couldn't have been more different. In battle, we interrogated suspected enemy combatants who were often stunned by the shock of capture. My fund-raising meetings were typically in fancy restaurants. Yet the principles were similar. At the heart of it, both fund-raising and interrogation were about persuasion, the art and skill of convincing people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. There was an element of manipulation in both worlds that felt uncomfortable, and I wrestled with that reality. With donors, it became even more complicated because my relationships often evolved into friendships that I valued far beyond financial contributions to CFK.

ONE MORNING TOWARD the end of interrogation training, I woke up feeling restless. The little clock in the corner of my laptop read 0200 hours. The first e-mail in my in-box was a five-page diatribe titled “Salim must go.” Sent from an alias account, the e-mail was addressed to a few of our Kenya board members, Tabitha, and the CFK Listserv, a group e-mail account with three thousand people, including our most generous donors and influential leaders, such as the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, the president of the Ford Foundation, and Dr. Jendayi Frazer at the White House. We managed the list tightly, sending out only two carefully written updates each year. The rubber band inside my chest stretched as I read the e-mail's content. Excerpts included:

(A) We demand immediate resignation of the project manager (Salim). He is not a Kibera resident. He has therefore taken up an opportunity and many other opportunities from our community.

(B) We are also taking over the running of the organization.

(C) We have included Kash on board.

(D) We also consider Kassim as part of us that is the youth representatives.

(E) We have taken over the office with immediate effect.

We request immediate response from you since we believe this a hallmark of good management.

God bless you, and keep in touch

From C.F.K Youth Representatives / Kibera Community

I checked the Listserv settings. As the Listserv's administrator, I had the power to approve or reject every message. I rejected the message and paced around my room. My instinct was to come to Salim's immediate defense, though I was also angry at being caught off guard. Salim was at an Internet café in Nairobi reading the youth representative letter when I caught him on the phone minutes later.

“Yo, man, what do you make of this?” I asked.

“This thing really pisses me off.”

“Did you know it was coming?”

“Not really. I mean, I knew something was up.”

“But you didn't want to talk with me about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I feel blindsided by this.”

“You feel blindsided. How do you think I feel, mista?”

“Well, that's why I'm asking.”

“If you think I was hiding something, I don't know what to say.”

“No, no,” I backtracked. “Sorry, man. I'm sorry I said that.”

“You know what this is about?”

“No, what?” Maybe I should have seen it coming. In the previous weeks I had an e-mail exchange with Kassim about our budget after he suggested CFK needed more transparency. I agreed with Kassim and was frustrated that Salim and Tabitha were so guarded with financial information. We created CFK to be a collaborative organization, and I had hoped that the youth representatives, as unpaid volunteers, would set part of the budget for the sports program. That struck me as an innovative structure that could ensure community input and build local capacity. Salim and Tabitha, however, resisted my suggestions. They wanted to go slower and thoroughly test each youth representative to determine who among them could be trusted. I appreciated that we needed to treat financial information confidentially until we had the right processes in place. But it had been almost a year and a half, and I thought we should be ready to reveal our budget to the youth representatives. They were our ambassadors in the community.

“It started when you told them the budget,” Salim shot back.

“Me?”

“Yes, Rye, you remember you told Kassim we spend twenty-two thousand dollars a year.”

“Well, we do, don't we?”

“We do, but I don't think, honestly, you know, it was not a thing to do. To them it sounds like a lot of money.” In a place where $26 could transform lives, it was difficult for anyone, no matter what age, to imagine $22,000.

“So can't we show them the budget without the salary info? That way they understand more of the costs. I mean, our rent alone is five thousand dollars.”

“Then they'll want to change it.”

“Well, that's the point. We want their input.”

“Rye, they will want to change it to give themselves stipends. That's what this thing is about, stipends, not community.” Even if the budget was large enough to manage such payments, Salim, Tabitha, and I were united in our opposition to stipends. The power of CFK was in its volunteer ethos. We didn't want the sports program to become an easy employment opportunity for youth in Kibera. We wanted to use sports to equip young people with the skills they needed to become leaders and contribute to their communities, and we wanted to do this with the smallest administrative footprint possible.

“I get that,” I reacted. “Our selection of the reps was screwed up. Hell, half of them came from Jumba, the micro-credit guy.” We had finally formed a group of fourteen representatives, young men and women who were ethnically diverse and respected in their communities. They had become more than colleagues. They were friends. “But some of the reps are really talented, and they've been with us from the beginning,” I added.

“That thing [the youth representative council] was set up before I got here.” Salim was getting more frustrated. “Some of them feel like Kash did, like it's for them to run CFK because they were there first. They want this thing for themselves. But there are other ways to do youth empowerment.”

“Salim, they need more responsibility.”

“So they can do what they just did? No, me, I don't think so. Honestly, it's not right. Trust takes time. We need youth reps who Tabitha and me can trust.” The youth representatives were attempting a coup, and Kash was probably behind it. Salim's voice cracked. “What I'm hearing you saying is that Salim is the problem. If that's it, fine. I'll go. It's never been about me.”

“No, man, don't be crazy.” His words shouldn't have surprised me. I knew that Salim was extremely sensitive to criticism.

“No, really, I can. Maybe that's better.”

Salim was a man of honor. If he felt slighted by CFK, he would leave. Even if he didn't have another job lined up, he would leave. That was Salim's way. He would rather fight back and lose everything except his dignity than to submit to something he knew was wrong. Tabitha shared it as well, and it was rare. Kenya and much of Africa was plagued by bad leadership. The problem wasn't simply government neglect. The culture of corruption reached nearly every facet of life. It started with government graft, from the rookie policeman on the street right up to the Office of the President. By one measure from the global watchdog organization Transparency International, urban Kenyans paid an average of more than eight bribes per month. Even if most bribes were relatively small, they added up to a lot of money and hardship, particularly for the poor. Corruption was a way of life, and maybe that was part of what motivated the youth representatives to send their letter. Although I didn't know the full story, I knew what made Salim and Tabitha exceptional. It was their inability to be corrupted. Theirs was the kind of leadership that could change the status quo.

“Salim, we'd be nothing without you,” I said emphatically. “You know that. I know that. These youth reps don't get it. I'm not arguing for them. They need to go, like you said. We can't put up with revolt. But what I'm saying is we have to figure out our structure. I'm not comfortable with where we are at right now.”

“I agree.” Salim, Tabitha, and I didn't have formal management training. We were struggling to keep up with the administrative demands of our fast-growing organization.