Archive for July, 2008
Hello Bob, hello Kibera
(Rather than sending out many short blogs, I am going to have to send out occasional, lengthy ones until I find a more efficient method of Email.)
So far each day in Kenya has been a bit unstable. Due to the fact that I am trying to play the role of host, showing volunteers and directors of the Carr Educational Project around this remarkable land and our campus loved ones back home is tough. To put it mildly it is very hard living on the other side of the world from my wife. This is exacerbated by the fact that she is also my partner and cofounder of Daraja Academy. She has worked just as hard as I have making this dream of equal access to education for girls possible. Now she hears updates concerning the state of Daraja, learns about our roadblocks and successes during short, 3-minute cell phone calls in the dark of the night.
Carr Educational Foundation director Bob Bessin arrived at 8pm Thursday night. Our crew – Mark Lukach, Grey Brooks, Peter Wathitu and I picked him up at the airport and quickly bounced him over dark Nairobi roads, man-hole sized pot holes, and all to the place where Stanford HumBi Professor Bob Siegel and his graduate student Dashka were recouping from their descent of Mt. Kenya. Dinner was incredible. Dashka and a group of former Stanford classmates are starting a girl’s secondary school that sounds very similar to Daraja Academy in Iringa, Tanzania. Ironically, Iringa is very close, by Africa’s standards, to Makambako, where I lived in 1999. Finding like-minded Americans always fills my tanks, and a full tank shouldn’t be a suggestion, it’s got to be a requisite when visiting Kibera – tomorrow’s destination.
Friday morning 8 a.m.
As a junior at the University of San Diego I took a class that was taught by an incredibly wise philosophy professor. Early on he warned us to be cautious passing on things we’d learned in class to our peers. He explained to all of us wide eyed, impressionable 20-somethings that attempting to explain to our peers concepts, which had shaken us to our foundations, was similar to explaining what “sweet taste like” to a person who’d never tasted anything sweet in their lives. Words just simply could not convey the tangible sensations, feelings, and emotional connections we’d felt during the moments of realization. Describing a visit to the Nairobi slum of Kibera where one of Daraja Academies’ feeder schools operates is much, much harder.
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Filed under From the Founder, News : Comments (5) : Jul 30th, 2008
Arriving at campus
There have been possibly three soul quaking occurrences that have taken place over the course of my lifetime. Occurrences, which moved me, so deeply that I knew I would not be the same man after its passing. To my recollection those events consist of giving and receiving marriage vows with my wife to-be above the crashing waves of the Big Island’s north shore, standing for the first time after laying supine for 5+ months in early May 1993 after “the crash” – and arriving on campus yesterday.
Calling it a campus is actually a misnomer. The 150 acres that has been known for the past decade as the Laikipia Baraka School, and is now Daraja Academy is a bustling community. Over a half dozen tribes: Kikuyu, Masaii, Turkana, Luya, Kalenjin, Embu and Nandi have lived, eaten and slept together communally, cooperating for the better part of 5 years without permanent employment – a good example to Kenya, if not the world as a whole. Babies toddle past grazing goats as mothers hang their colorful wash on the lines strung between the staff houses.
Two of the Carr Educational Foundation’s (CEF) directors, Songai Mohochi and Mark Lukach, a member of the Advisory Board and CEF’s Volunteer Coordinator, Grey Brooks, the school’s Director of Operation’s Peter Wathitu and myself had been bouncing over nearly 1,000 km of Kenyan “road” leading up to our approach of campus. Many of the “roads” we traversed, especially the stretch from Kisii to Narok, looked to be in the same stage of construction that they were the last time I traveled them… in 1988 – the same piles of gravel, the same bulldozers and backhoes, and the same napping workers and pacing, hands on their hips over-seers.
The route from Kuria land was dusty, it was bumpy and it was LONG. But we made it to campus. The true reason we are here.
Filed under From the Founder, News : Comments (7) : Jul 21st, 2008
