It Happened on the Way to War (38 page)

Yet the dichotomy remained. CFK focused on preventing violence; the Marines employed it. I understood and respected that for some, such as Salim and my mother, this divide was not reconcilable. I certainly wrestled with its inherent contradiction, especially before I had begun deploying as a Marine and built firmer compartments between my worlds. My fundamental view, however, remained the same. It came down to the fact that we lived in a volatile and violent world. Despite its misuse in controversial wars, the Marine Corps, like the rest of our armed forces, existed to protect the United States and, in some cases, enhance the safety of other parts of the world. Our military forces were rather blunt instruments for reducing threats to our national security, but they were also extremely effective in the most urgent and precarious situations. The military didn't decide our nation's wars; it executed them on the command of our elected leadership. This tenet of civilian control is a pillar of our Constitution, that great body of ideas and ideals that my father and I swore to defend with our lives. Of course, that wasn't the only answer. The military was flawed, too, and bureaucracies had tendencies to perpetuate themselves far beyond their useful lives. So much in the end came down to leadership, at home and abroad, and in and out of uniform.

Elephants aside, this was the rationale that enabled me to volunteer for a war that I knew was unnecessary and severely flawed. My father held similar beliefs even though he distrusted war and almost died in one that was also unnecessary.
Would we fail in Iraq as we had in Vietnam?
I didn't know, though at the time it looked probable, especially if we continued to rely on military might instead of the more sophisticated soft-power instruments in our deep reservoir of resources outside the armed forces.

So it was that my thoughts returned to my father as I pulled out of the main gate at Camp Lejeune. He was wounded more profoundly by his war than the bruising that I had taken in mine. Vietnam defined much of his generation and probably a lot more of him than he realized. The failures there, the needless wasting of so many Vietnamese and American lives, disturbed him in ways that I suspected could still be as raw and as agonizing as they had been forty years earlier. For many reasons, including his love, my experience reintegrating into society would be far less arduous. Yet it was still difficult, and my first coping mechanism was to turn to the one place where I knew I could still make an impact—Kibera.

WORKING FIENDISHLY, I packed my schedule for the three summer months before starting at Harvard: three weeks in Kibera; fund-raisers in London, California, and New York; a conference on poverty at the Aspen Institute in Colorado; a meeting at the National Security Council in Washington, D.C.; a weekend with my parents in Rhode Island; the move to Cambridge; and then the grand finale—two weeks in Morocco, where I would propose to Tracy at the home of my interpreter and friend from Iraq, Mike.

Tracy, who didn't know about my proposal plans, thought I was nuts for wanting to do so much during the first large chunk of free time since graduating from college. She realized, though, that my staying busy was therapeutic. The daily barrage of news from Iraq was grim, and I grew irritable and difficult when I had too much time on my hands.

As before, fund-raising was a large part of my work with CFK. We were struggling to generate the scarce resources needed to keep pace with our growth in the community. We landed a breakthrough opportunity when one of the most recognizable figures in international development decided to pay us a visit. Unfortunately, we didn't know who she was before her arrival one morning to our youth center. She traveled under the cover of a U.S. embassy delegation. Salim welcomed her and gave an overview of CFK with some members of our Binti Pamoja Girls' Center and local mothers from a self-help group.

Afterward, the woman walked into our small office and spoke in a soft, humble manner to our staff. She apologized for the inconvenience that her presence caused and asked some thoughtful questions about CFK's model of participatory development and youth empowerment. Before she left, Salim begged her pardon and asked her to sign one of the chai-stained pages of our guest book. It was good manners for hosts to offer their guest book, though he still had no idea who she was.

Happily, she signed her name.
Melinda Gates.

Instantly recognizing her name, Salim took a deep breath. Whether he was speaking with a street child high from huffing glue or one of the most affluent women in the world, he was quick on his feet. “Missus Gates, thanks again for coming to see us. Now you're part of our community, and you're welcome anytime.”

“Well, thank you, Salim. You're doing impressive work.” She smiled graciously.

“Um, do you have a card?”

“Oh.” She laughed. “No, I don't carry one. But, I think you can reach me through my assistant here.”

In a
Newsweek
article about her visit to Kibera, Melinda Gates wrote:

A few months ago, on a trip to Africa, I met with a group of women in Kibera, the biggest slum in Kenya. These women ranged in age from 16 to 45 but had one thing in common: AIDS had devastated their lives … Through our foundation, my husband, Bill, and I are working to develop tools that can put the power to prevent AIDS into the hands of women.
*

Our Binti Pamoja Girls' Center worked in concert with the sports program and the Tabitha Clinic to prevent AIDS and gender-based violence, and so began a courtship with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

DURING MY FIRST week back in Kibera that summer, we hosted a U.S. congressional delegation. Kibera had become as much a stopping point for celebrities seeking a glimpse of poverty as Fallujah had become a destination for politicians and senior officers searching for war stories. Salim and I were cynical of most visits. They rarely resulted in tangible benefits to the community, and their press coverage often amounted to glib photo ops geared to Western audiences. I was more interested in being with our team than giving slum tours. Nevertheless, this delegation was an exception, because it was led by the senior congressman from North Carolina, a former professor of political science at Duke University and a gracious Southern gentleman named David Price. Representative Price's district included Chapel Hill. He was a fellow UNC graduate, and he had sent me a handwritten, heartfelt letter when I was in Iraq.

Salim and I welcomed the congressman and his team to our office. We gave them a brief overview of our work and a tour that included walking through the mud to an eighth-of-an-acre mound of dirt, the future site of the new Tabitha Clinic. We needed to raise more than $150,000 before we could begin construction of what we hoped would become one of the few permanent buildings in Kibera, a two-story, ecofriendly clinic built by and for the community. After the tour, Representative Price chatted with a few UNC student volunteers and some of our staff at our youth center. He asked thoughtful questions about the history of poverty, local politics, and the challenges we faced.

“What can I do to help you?” Representative Price asked me. I should have been prepared for the question. We didn't seek USAID program support because of the strings attached with it, including, potentially, a loss of local ownership.

“What do you think, Salim?” I turned to my cofounder. Salim didn't miss a beat. He never did. He asked if the congressman could help us raise funds to build the new clinic in Tabitha's honor. As Representative Price explained the unfortunate restrictions of U.S. government funding for capital expenditures overseas, I spotted a copy of the
Daily Nation
, Kenya's largest newspaper. The cover had a photograph of U.S. senator Barack Obama. I didn't know much about Senator Obama, but I was amazed by the press coverage he was receiving in advance of his first official visit to Kenya in August 2006, long before he was being considered as a serious candidate for the U.S. presidency.

“Sir, is there any chance you could help us arrange a visit for Senator Obama during his upcoming trip?” I asked.

Representative Price responded enthusiastically, and, months later with help from the congressman and many others, Barack and Michelle Obama arrived at CFK. Thousands of residents clogged the streets, chanting, “Obama has come! Open the way!”

The Obamas' first stop was our youth center, where they met with Salim and some young leaders from Kibera. After listening to a young girl speak about HIV/AIDS prevention, the Obamas inquired about health care in Kibera. Salim told them Tabitha's story and our vision to build a new Tabitha Clinic.

“Impressive!” Michelle Obama exclaimed.

I STARTED SPENDING my mornings with Jane Atieno, Tabitha's best friend and former neighbor. She was the first resident of Kibera I had met after arriving to Oluoch and Elizabeth's house in Fort Jesus as a twenty-one-year-old eager to make a difference through research. At CFK, Jane did more than prepare chai and keep the office and the clinic clean. She was part of the soul of our organization. She was in charge of Tabitha's home-based-care program, providing food and love to widowed mothers battling AIDS, many of whom were abandoned by their friends and family because of the stigmas associated with the disease. Antiretroviral medication was prohibitively expensive, and without proper treatment, half of the group's two dozen members had passed away in the year and a half after Tabitha's death.

On our first morning together, I accompanied Jane on some home visits. She met me with her radiant smile.

“Mama Jane!”

“Omosh!” She always called me by my African nickname. We hugged. I reached for the twenty-pound bag of beans she was carrying.

“No, no. This, I have.”

I insisted and took the sack. Jane led me zigzagging through the mud toward the river. As we walked, she updated me on Tabitha's four children. Jane had become a surrogate to them. She felt it was the least she could do for her best friend. She recalled when she and Tabitha were unemployed and “really struggling.” Tabitha's husband had passed away, and Jane's husband was out of work. They teamed up to search for employment. Tabitha did most of the talking because “she was educated and had the English. She was educated, but she never held that thing above others. She was never too proud.”

“That was before you met Oluoch and Elizabeth?”

“Same-same time. I took the job and Tabitha she kept looking. You heard about Elizabeth?”

“No, what?” Elizabeth and I hadn't communicated in a long time. The orange van that Oluoch had purchased with our loan sat for years outside their flat in Fort Jesus, one block away from Salim's apartment.

“Sorry, Omosh.”

“What? What is it?”

“Elizabeth, she passed.”

“No!” She wasn't that old, perhaps fifty. “How?”

“She was sick, an ulcer. That's what they say.”

During my first summer in Kibera, Elizabeth had told me that she was getting old and didn't have much time left to pursue her dream of starting a nursery school for orphans. She was twice my age. The sound of urgency in her voice had struck me.

“And her school?” The last I had heard, the school was educating fifty children.

“It passed with her.” Jane said that Elizabeth had taught until she began losing weight.

“Oluoch?”

“You know, he's not her husband.” It was another secret that I had never known. Elizabeth was separated from her husband. Her family owned the house in Fort Jesus, and a nasty feud between them and Oluoch erupted as Elizabeth's health began its rapid decline. It was painful, bitter news, all of it. Elizabeth was a good person. She deserved a more dignified departure from this world, and, as I felt with Kash, I regretted not reaching out and reconciling our relationship.

OUR FIRST HOME visit was to a woman named Achieng. Achieng was a friend and patient of Tabitha's whom I had met years ago but couldn't remember. We turned past the empty plot where we planned to build the new Tabitha Clinic. It was on the same path where Tabitha had spotted me five years earlier, grasped my hand, and led me to her first clinic.

Achieng was cleaning laundry in a bucket outside of her mud shack. She looked up and greeted us with a warm smile. It bothered me that I didn't recognize her.

Achieng welcomed us to her sofa, a metal cage without padding, and she made us chai.
Kiroboto
, bedbugs, darted everywhere. A few bounced onto my head and burrowed into my scalp.

“You don't remember me, Omosh?” Achieng asked. She was thick-boned and tall, with striking white teeth.

“Sorry,
mama
.” I handed her some beans from the bag we'd brought.

“Oh, thank you. It's okay that you don't remember. I looked different then, isn't it?” She turned to Jane.

“Oh, yes,” Jane agreed. “Very different. You know for a time, Achieng, she was struggling to get out of the bed.”

Achieng turned and pulled back the
kanga
that separated her bed from the rest of her home. She reached into a plastic bin.

“This, this was what I looked like when you saw me last.”

She placed a grainy photograph on the table and slid it in front of me. There was no resemblance, in appearance or spirit. It was a photograph of a skeleton: sunken cheeks, clumps of hair missing, skin clinging to the bones, and eyes so swollen they looked like they were going to fall out. As she spoke, I thought about Vanessa. My eyes swelled and I leaned back against the sofa's metal frame, struggling to contain myself.

Achieng and Jane didn't know how to react. They were showing me a miracle, something to rejoice about. Months earlier, President Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief had reached Kibera and made antiretrovirals available free of charge. Achieng and thousands of people like her suddenly had new lives.

Jane touched my knee. “Omosh, what's wrong?”

“I'm sorry
,
” I said, raking my fingernails through my hair to kill the
kiroboto
. “I'm sorry. It's just, never mind. This is, this is incredible. What happened, Achieng? I mean, how did you recover?”