It Happened on the Way to War (41 page)

The 1995 and 2001 clashes in Kenya were largely contained within Kibera and a few other pockets of violence. In 2008, however, the fighting exploded with a depth and breadth that was unprecedented in Kenyan history. It took everyone by surprise. Hundreds of thousands of Kenyans were displaced, and the nation became more torn by ethnic differences than it had ever been before. Difficult conversations between warring ethnic groups needed to happen. If they didn't, the tensions would be bottled up, and that would mean that the next outbreak of violence could take Kenya beyond the brink of civil war.

CFK WAS CONVENING some of these difficult conversations in Kibera. Abdul “Cantar” Hussein met me at the mud-hill pulpit near Kibera's entrance to lead me to a peace forum the morning after I arrived. Cantar was a friend of my initial point of contact to the Nubian youth community, Ali Khamis Alijab, who was now an Arabic teacher at a local mosque. Quiet and patient, Cantar had attended the first focus group discussion that Nate and I held on a dirt field overlooking Kibera in the summer of 2001.

Cantar found his voice and became a leader in CFK. After our youth-representative revolt in 2003, he was the only one of the fourteen representatives who hadn't demanded to be paid for his volunteer service with CFK, and soon afterward he was hired as CFK's first sports program officer. About half of the other fourteen representatives eventually came back to CFK as volunteers, while many of the others became leaders in other organizations. Together and with hundreds of volunteers and a dozen staff members, Salim, Cantar, Binti Pamoja's Carolina Sakwa, Tabitha, and Jane had built an organization that was more than a sports association, girls' center, waste-management program, and large health clinic. They created a holistic leadership program that was owned by the community and created opportunities for more than five thousand young people each year.

The peace forum we attended that morning was part of a reconciliation campaign funded largely by Pam Omidyar's organization Humanity United. CFK mobilized youth from different ethnic groups, some of whom had participated in the fighting, and used drama and community meetings to confront the stereotypes behind the violence. The forum brought me back in contact with Rashid Seif, the captain of the winning team during CFK's first soccer tournament. Since then Rashid had helped launch a community self-help group to create a sustainable waste-management business in collaboration with our Trash Is Cash program. I also reconnected with John Adoli, a leader in our sports program who had protected a young Kikuyu boy after thugs had torched the boy's shack and chased his parents away. John, a Luo, gave this boy shelter in his own ten-by-ten even though that action jeopardized his own security. Fatuma Roba was also at the forum that morning. When I had first met Fatuma through our Binti Pamoja Girls' Center years earlier, she was too shy to speak with me. During the ethnic violence, Fatuma covered the events in Kibera for the United Nations as a paid reporter. She would go on to create an aid organization for women who were victims of rape and war in Sudan.

LATER THAT MORNING I left the CFK peace forum to meet Salim at the new clinic. The route to the clinic was so familiar that I strolled it casually. I passed the old Mad Lion Base, which had mysteriously gone out of business shortly before Tabitha had passed away. The face of the lion with its fiery eyes was still spray pointed on the forest green wall. When I approached the alleyway that led to my old shack, I thought of Dan, who had since married and moved to Fort Jesus after cofounding a successful AIDS relief program with an American medical doctor. Passing the Mugumeno Motherland Hotel, I poked my head in and greeted the tough matron with the gap in her top row of teeth. She smiled and greeted me, “Where have you been lost, Omosh?” My favorite bumper sticker was still posted to the thin tin wall: OUR CUSTOMERS ARE SPECIAL, SERVICE IS FREE.

Across the dirt alley from the Mugumeno there was a community toilet donated by the crew of the Hollywood film
The Constant Gardener
. It was a modest and worthwhile contribution. The construction of community toilets had in recent years reduced the number of flying toilets clogging the sumps, river, and Nairobi Dam. Nearby, however, a gaunt dog slurped in a sump of sewage, and a small boy was defecating onto a sheet of paper. The dog and the boy reminded me of Tracy's reaction after her first day in Kibera years earlier. “I know there's hope and what you're doing is important,” she had said. “You want to show the good side to these places, too. But to live in such conditions would be like hell to me.”

I was thinking about Tracy's comment in light of what we had accomplished over the years and how much more there was to do when I recognized a water vendor named Owiti. He was one of Kash's best friends. We had worked out together once many years ago in Kash's gym. Veins protruded from his thick neck. He recognized me with a nod. We hadn't spoken since Kash had been expelled from CFK in 2002.

“Vipi, Owiti,”
I greeted him.

He didn't respond. When I stepped closer, I noticed his glare was fixed on something behind me. Suddenly, he leaped from his stand and collided with a body. I spun around, hands raised to defend myself.

Owiti hovered over a thin man with wild eyes. A rusty, scrap-metal bar hung out of the sleeve of the man's coat. Owiti swung his leg like a sweeper clearing a soccer ball downfield. He drilled his foot into the man's gut.

“No, no!” the man pleaded, holding his hands above his head as Owiti wound up for another kick. There was a cracking sound. The man wheezed and spit up blood.

“
Mwizi
,” Owiti said flatly, turning to me. “Thief.”

I pointed to my chest.
Was I the target?

Owiti nodded and returned to his business. A woman was waiting for him to fill her jerrycan with water.

An image of Kash came to my mind. Kash had helped keep Nate and me safe when we launched CFK. He had put out the word to his friends to watch our backs. Without him, we would almost certainly have been attacked.

I believe that Owiti the water vendor didn't protect me because of CFK. He didn't come to my aid because of who I was or what I had done for his community. He intervened in a burst of violence for Kash, his friend, a friend so close he was family. And in Kibera, and in the Marines, and in most if not all dangerous places in the world, family meant everything.

SALIM MET ME at the entrance to the new clinic along the route where Tabitha had first spotted me during our second summer. Strands of rusty rebar jutted toward the cloudless sky. A thick stone wall surrounded the three-story foundation, where a half dozen workers, all of whom were residents of Kibera, labored. It was my first time at the construction site since the tour with Congressman Price, when it had been nothing but an empty plot of dirt the size of an average American house.

The clinic that we were building would be like nothing else in Kibera. It would provide high-quality health care with medical doctors, a full laboratory, nurses from the community, and an X-ray room. It had taken four years, hundreds of community forums, donor letters, meetings, and calls to hammer through government bureaucracy that seemed to always stand in the way of doing the right thing. But we wouldn't be stopped, and it wasn't just Salim and me. It was Kim and the rest of the board back in the States and dozens of Kenyan and American volunteers and staff pouring their lives into it.

“What's up, mista?” Salim greeted me with a fist bump. He was wearing a stethoscope over his T-shirt.

“What's this,
daktari
?” I tapped the silver coin at the end of the stethoscope. “
Daktari
Mohamed.”

“Our first donation to the new Tabitha Clinic. What do you think?”

“Incredible. You're a developer. Look at this place!”

Salim rolled his eyes. “Man, don't even tell me about it.” The clinic construction had grown from a $75,000 project in 2004 after our $26,000 donation from the musician Sarah McLachlan to a full-service, $350,000 health care facility designed free of charge by one of Kenya's top architects.

Salim inspected the work at the construction site. He handled a brief negotiation with the foreman, a hefty man who was nearly twice his size and age. We walked up a flight of stairs to the second story and stood on what would become a balcony overlooking a stretch of Kibera.

“I make this trip two to three times a day,” Salim said.

“Keeps you in great shape. You're lookin' good.”

“Yeah, I don't have to go running anymore. But actually I like it. It keeps me close to the community.”

“Awesome to see the progress.”

“It is, but it's killing me.” Never one to trust quickly, Salim retained full control over the construction, and it had worn him down.

“You know, it's amazing you've made it this long,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You've been doing this for a long time. You've been with CFK when we were broke, through the youth rep revolt, clashes, all this. Seven years, man. Most people couldn't last a week in your job. The best maybe make it a couple of years before burnin' out.” There were the death threats, too. I didn't mention them because they were still a source of major stress. Salim had received more than seven credible threats to his life since we had started.

“You know, my brother, what we do, it's not work,” Salim said. “It's not a job. But even still, you're right. I need a break.”

“So what do you think?”

“I don't know.” Salim was too busy thinking about others to make plans for himself.

“Maybe more school, that Manchester program?” We spoke about additional education often. Salim wanted to attend college, but he couldn't fathom taking three to four years off work to pursue a degree. The only program that looked as if it might work was a unique master's degree in social development at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, where occasionally social entrepreneurs from the developing world were accepted without an undergraduate degree. It was an ideal fit for Salim if he could get accepted and raise enough money to cover his tuition and fees.

“I'd really like that.”

“You can do it, man, and I'll help. It'll be tough for CFK to see you go.” We could never replace Salim as our executive director. But we would try when he was ready for the next challenge.

“Don't worry. Me, I'll always be with CFK. It'll always be a part of me. You too, isn't it?”

“No doubt.”

Salim laughed as he remembered the first time we met: “You came into my office at MYSA, and, man, you were so dirty, mud all over your pants, those boots. I mean, who wears the same outfit every day? No one, not even the street kids.”

I laughed with him and imagined myself walking into his office as a twenty-one-year-old. “Did I smell?”

“Not really. You were just funny-looking, and you had those candies.”

“Creme Savers!”

“Yeah, they're horrible.”

“You didn't take one when I offered, but you gave me your time.”

“Mista, I had no choice. You wouldn't leave.”

“Oh, come on, you liked some of it. I remember you said that great line about youth being the present and the future leaders. We even talked about doing something together in Kibera, and that was just our first meeting.”

“You know, Rye,” Salim corrected me, “I had so many conversations with people from the outside wanting to learn this and that. You can spend all your time with them but with no results.”

“You didn't think you'd hear back from me?” I grinned as I said it, thinking of the thousands of hours he and I had talked since that day.

“Noooo. Are you kidding? You were just this guy. I mean, when you said you were a college student I was like, how is this guy going to get this money to establish such a thing? I just thought you were lost in the sauce.”

“Lost in the sauce.” I laughed. It was another phrase that I had adopted from the Marine Corps and brought to Kibera.

“You're still lost in the sauce,” Salim teased me, pointing at my chest. “Just look at your shirt.”

“You remember this shirt?” I was wearing the baby-blue, short-sleeve, button-down shirt Salim had given me in 2002 after I was jumped during the presidential inauguration.

“Of course, that's my shirt.”

“Did that boy who jumped me ever join our soccer league?”

“Not really, but what we said to him, it was good. Maybe he learned something that day.”

I looked down at the shirt. “I love this thing. It's perfect. Breathes easy, lots of pockets, Carolina blue. Why change if you have a good thing?”

“It doesn't look that good.”

“Hey, you bought it.”

“Well, it looks okay on me.” Salim grinned.

“It's big on me. This thing would be like a dress on you.”

“You're crazy.”

“Hey,” I said on a whim. “Let's check out the roof.”

“What do you mean, go up on it?”

“Yeah, come on.” I stepped over the balcony onto a ramp that led to the roof. Salim followed me. From on top we could see the expanse of Kibera, the brown salamander, an ocean of mud and rust strung with make-shift electric wires and dotted by blue gum trees and tin roofs shimmering in the sun.

“You remember that day? It was a crazy day,” I recalled, returning to the memory of the 2002 inauguration, when Moi stepped down in what felt like the dawn of a new era. “There were such high expectations for Kibaki, the end of corruption, of tribalism. That's what people thought was coming.”

“And it's only gotten worse,” Salim sighed.

“Do you feel safe?”

“In Kenya?”

“In Kibera, I mean, as a Kikuyu and all?”

“You know, I don't really. But if I let that stop me, then I'm just making the tribalism worse, isn't it? It has to stop somewhere.”