[Kibera slum, Nairobi, Kenya] My second visit to Kibera, May 4 (posting this entry after mulling it over for a week). Being taken in a little deeper this time. I had been to a “drinking den” on my first visit, but my shepherd this time, Osir, takes me to another one (despite my stated focus on reconnecting with some artists I met earlier).

The half-dozen gatherees are socializing, and drinking changaa, the traditional homemade liquor of the Luo people, in a shack with a dirt floor, cardboard wall. A child who might be 2 years old sleeps nearby. (She’s at the far right in the photo below- maybe that’s her pink backpack on the wall above her?) Another boy, about 8, refills the liquor jug when needed, if mom (the proprietress) is otherwise busy.

It’s a funny dance, having the rare mzungu (white guy) in their midst. Do they want to have their photo taken, or not? Do they want to chat, or not? Sometimes it’s both at once.

One guy (in the hat, on the right, in photo above) strikes up a chat. “I love a good book. Do you like to read?” Nonchalantly, he tosses at me his current read – or rather, the ripped-out middle third. The front portion of The Parcifal Mosaic has been passed on to its lucky next reader; the final third, well, he’ll have to get to that when he can find out who has it. It’s all about sharing when it comes to books in Kibera, if it comes to that at all.

“Ludlum does the best stories, but only if you can deal with extremely complex characters. Man, he does characters like nobody can.” The others chime in enthusiastically; maybe they are reading the first third, or the last. I tell them I read 3 or 4 Ludlum stories in high school, not so much since. (Can’t focus on all those characters.)

These guys are readers. Osir, too. When I later mention some books I was reading on my travels, he asks, “do you have any that I might like?” (I wasn’t sure if either of the titles on my nightstand at the Holiday Inn would quite make the best slum reading: Briefing for a Decent into Hell, and Things Fall Apart. People, you cannot make this stuff up.)

Osir tells me Kibera has no library. (No surprise, there’s barely running water, primarily to community pumps.) The adults, with plenty of time on their hands, are more than eager to read, it’s obvious; books for kids in school are hard enough to come by, let alone those for the pure joy of reading.

I think, how sad these kids might not get to read, for example, books like Miss Pickerell on the Moon, one title that oddly sticks in my head as having provided joy and distraction in 4th grade. Sure, it’s the ludicrous, implausible tale of a grandmother exploring interplanetary travel, but who more than these kids needs the message that improbable dreams can come true?

Let me cut to the chase here – it’s midnight and I wake at 4 for an early flight. If you live in Chicago, and you have spare paperbacks lying around the house, especially kids books, let me have ‘em. I’ll be coming back later this year for work, and can load up a big suitcase and share them with folks in the slum (perhaps via Osir’s church or something). I know the argument of some people that you should go through proper channels and let the Red Cross or Unicef deal with this stuff, but obviously, it’s not quite happening. At the end of the day (and it certainly is that here), you gotta believe that small individual acts have a place, too, and can sometimes make a difference.

Hmmm … speaking of Kenyan kids with a dream, here’s an idea – bulk purchase of Audacity of Hope, anyone?

[Decoration inside home in Kibera slum, Kenya]

Lara Weber, Chicago (Lara was a Community Health Volunteer, Peace Corps / Zambia, 2000. We were briefly neighbors in Lakeview and acquainted via Chicago journalism circles. She now works at the Tribune.) “I’d always just assumed that I’d spend some time living overseas, doing study abroad or taking a job outside of the U.S. So when I hit my 30s and realized I hadn’t done it yet, I knew it was time. The AIDS crisis was just starting to get more attention, and since I was joining the Peace Corps, I really wanted to be as close to that issue as possible. It just felt like the thing I was supposed to be doing right then and there in my life. (Plus, I’d spent a decade as a journalist and felt wrong working on world issues from the point of view of a tower on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.)

“So when a Peace Corps assignment in public health in Zambia was offered, I was thrilled. For two years, I lived in a mud hut in a very remote part of northeastern Zambia, in a place that was just beginning to confront its own HIV/AIDS situation. I met and worked with incredible local health officials and I did see change happen while I was there. And, naturally, I changed quite a bit as well. In the midst of extreme poverty and disease, I got to know people who love life and aren’t burdened by the pressures we put upon ourselves in the ‘developed’ world. I experienced the greatest happiness of my life because of the people in my village who took me in as family and taught me to let go and laugh.

“What takes me back to Africa? Well, it doesn’t take much. The smell of a summer rain shower takes me right back to the rainy season, when roads are cut off by swollen rivers and the mud makes a bike ride an expedition but the world is lush and green. A taxi ride in Chicago with an African transplant driver is one of my secret pleasures of city life. Few are from Zambia, but it doesn’t matter.

“Sharing stories of Africa – and slipping into my ‘Zambian English’ accent – with an immigrant from Ghana or Kenya or Nigeria … what a way to take the stress away after a long day. Eating a mango. The grocery store varieties in Chicago will never compare to the thousands of mangos that literally dripped from the trees surrounding my house. But all I need is one bite of a sweet, ripe slice of mango and there I go again – back to the village, sitting in front of my mud house with a group of kids, completely overindulging on mounds of mangos. Heaven. There’s so much more. But it’s always the little things that take me back fastest.”

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Anita Verna Crofts, Seattle (Anita works at the University of Washington as part of a privately funded initiative called the Population Leadership Program, funded by the Gates Foundation and the Packard Foundation. We corresponded last week while we were both in Africa – so close and yet so far! We have just recently become friends via the fabulous Samantha Bailey whom we both adore.)

“I’m wrapping up a three-week stint in Sudan and Ethiopia, having been part of a training team from the UW that traveled to Sudan at the invitation of the Ministry of Health, and to Ethiopia at the invitation of three peer institutions: Jimma University, Gondar University, and Haramaya University. Our training included leadership development work, digital storytelling (my piece), translating research to policy, and program management.

“I find what compels me most about working in Africa and what motivates me to return are my African colleagues and friends. Their optimism and commitment to their work, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds and in the case of Sudan, a fragile peace, is extraordinary. Furthermore, they are some of the warmest and most hospitable individuals I have ever met.

“My food research was so interesting: my charge had been to see how Sudanese were preserving food traditions in the face of adversity, resettlement, and war. What unfolded was the silver lining of this resettlement and displacement: regional food traditions were converging in Khartoum (home to one-third of all Sudanese: that’s like 90 million people living in Chicago) as people from war-torn areas east, west, north, and south, fled to the capital. Now, as their dishes are becoming popular in Khartoum, food is forming a Sudanese identity – slowly – beyond a regional/tribal/religious one. Great stuff.

“The day we left Sudan, a Sudanese journalist recently released from six years in Guantanamo landed at the Khartoum airport and was greeted by a bank of media just hours before we flew out to Addis Ababa. Given the devastating seeds my government has sown through their perverse policies, I feel the need has never been greater for me to travel and connect with people as a counterpart ambassador of peace and friendship.”

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Molly Phee, New York City (Molly is an employee with the State Department’s Foreign Service who has lived and worked in exotic places including … Iraq. Needless to say, she’s looking forward to her next assignment, in July: Rome! Following she shares thoughts of her time and service in Kenya and Egypt. Molly and I went to IU together and have not stayed in touch as well as I might have liked!)

“I have ventured abroad for two reasons. The first is to experience and learn and live as much as I can, because we have only one life and an incredible world to discover. The second, and with a gimlet understanding of what I can really offer, is to contribute in whatever way I can either to U.S. interests or to helping those abroad as appropriate. Of course we also travel because we can, because we were fortunate to be born into America in the 20th century and have access to these wonderful opportunities. And because I saw the movie Stepford Wives as an impressionable young high school teenager and decided I would die in suburbia!

“I first went to Kenya in the summer of 1988 when I was a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. I had an internship at the UN Environment Program (UNEP), which is located on a beautiful campus in the suburbs of Nairobi. It was an extraordinary experience, and my exposure had a big impact on my thinking. I learned from what I saw in Kenya that political systems do matter, and bad governance can deny or thwart the capabilities of a nation and its people. I think the events of this spring only underscore that view.

“I was in Cairo from 1996-2000. My first year there I studied Arabic and then I worked as a political officer in the U.S. embassy for the next three years.

“A fascinating question about North Africa or the Arab states in Africa is the degree of their African identity. Egyptians think of themselves as the leader of the Arab world and do not generally identify themselves with sub-Saharan Africans. You can see this tension play out tragically in East Africa now particularly in the Sudan. There is also the academic debate in the United States, particularly among black Americans, about whether the Pharoahs were black. (Mainstream scholarship says no.) So, is your identity based on your geographic location on a continent or your language or your religion or your ethnicity or your skin color? Or, do we have to limit our identity to one characteristic, can our society or state or the international community tolerate a complex identity (also a particularly relevant question today in places such as Iraq and Lebanon, where the struggle for power and the absence of security tends to force folks to choose one primary identity to the detriment of national reconciliation).”

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Re-reading their thoughts and publishing them here has given me an idea for a future post, about how my design of a newspaper here in Nairobi just could contribute to a more clear dialogue about Kenya’s fragile but hopeful democracy. You never know! I’ll close by saying just how great it is to know people like these women who are so passionate about their life experiences, and to have had just a little bit of my own here in Africa – with more to come, as today I finalized agreement with my client for a retainer for 12 months (returning at least twice, with talk of another year beyond that)!