Out of the Bush

Mombasa: June 8, 2012Waves crashing. I watch. I breathe in the smell of the sea, after four and half grueling hours of trying to cover the 70 miles that take us from the bush to the hotel. Today’s journey was the worst ever, in my seven years of Kenyan memory. Our hopes of getting to the hotel in time for a swim melt away as we sit in a jam of crawling chaos that stretches for miles, made worse than ever because Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki is passing through with his entourage of limousines. We sit in the teeming mayhem, watching. Lorries (semi trucks) tower above us. Motorbikes and pedestrians squeeze through filaments of space, a walkway becomes another lane of vehicles, inching their way through the maze.This stretch of highway, the only way to access Mombasa, is a nightmare even without the added confusion. In the second largest city in Kenya, in the year 2012, workers have been breaking up stones by hand, packing them down along a 2 mile stretch to add another lane to accommodate the thousands of dilapidated vehicles that struggle through here in a day. “What is wrong with us?” laments Mbote, our driver and dear friend. “The Chinese could finish this job in one month! Even the Italians could. The contract must have been given to one of the Minister’s relatives,” he says with disgust. Yet he swallows his anger, buries it in a silent space, as only Kenyans can, and smiles his warm smile. I no longer wonder why Africa can spawn the warmest of gentility juxtaposed against the most explosive of brutality. They suppress what we Westerners never could suppress. They tolerate the intolerable, day after day. “We have to bear,” says Mbote. “We have no choice. But for me? I choose to be happy anyway. I must.”But enough of that. I must sort through three weeks of swirling memories and emotions to choose a highlight to share. Not an easy task, when each day here is so packed full of both the beauty and agony of human life lived in another dimension. As our student Diyo once exclaimed, “I am busy being astonished!” I will sift through the astonishment as best I can.It has now been seven years since Joseph, our Kenyan director, and I met on the dusty, rural schoolyard he called home. What started as 14 kids from the bush being sponsored by families in America, has grown into something I never could have dreamed of. This year alone there were 36 Kenya Keys secondary school graduates, 15 of whom are now volunteering in various roles in the extended community. Perhaps nothing has brought me so much surprised joy as seeing these young people, once shy and voiceless, latch on to the words and learning that has changed their lives completely. The past year Kenya Keys has started a new program where Keys' graduates volunteer for 6 to 12 months after graduating. They do this as a way to say thank you to their sponsors and to serve their community, which they do with great pride. Fueled by their gratitude and hopes of possibly earning a college sponsorship, the volunteer program was spawned by the students themselves. It’s one of those things that has been both humbling and stunning to watch happen. We constantly ask, “ How can these people who have so little be so willing to give so much?”But there they are, currently 17 of them, spread throughout the 15-mile radius of our service area, teaching in many different capacities, running our small libraries, working in health clinics, and assisting at the special needs school. “I’m a Kenya Keys intern,” they say with pride. Soon they will have the red shirts to prove it. They are a force to be reckoned with. They are following in the footsteps of those ahead of them in the program, those like Emmanuel Mwengea, doctor of pharmacology, Samson Charro, head of a micro loan division for KCB Bank, or Flora Mufisto who recovered from an elephant attack to become a student studying Math and Chemistry at the University of Nairobi. Mentoring is in their blood. Their long dreamed-of paychecks are spent on educating their siblings. Their loyalty to the Kenya Keys principles of self-reliance, leadership, and spreading the light of education has become an intrinsic part of who they are.It’s not just the Kenya Keys “high performers” that we salute on our departure. It’s the students on the lower rungs as well, those that will never be able to proceed on to college but are now at least literate in their illiterate world. Old and young, they visit one of the seven small libraries opened by Kenya Keys. Their ease with words and numbers will give them options they never would have had, and ensures that their children’s future will be carved out of something other than hopelessness and despair.With humble gratitude, representing the Kenya Keys body of sponsors, we say to the students, “Spread your wings and fly! Grace this land, with all its fabled beauty and tangled paradox, with the light of your new ideas and fierce determination.” This cadre of students born of illiterate parents and raised in mud huts, will be part of the remaking of Kenya. They will never stand for watching rocks be crushed and leveled by hand to make sure a Minister’s relative can remodel his estate. Their voices will be heard. Of this, we no longer doubt.Thank you for your interest and support. To read about Gloria Hope and other program details, please follow the blog. Click here.