Tuesday would be our last day in Africa. We started with chapel in the morning (see video above -- what a way to start a day), and then we broke off as teams to do training of three different groups. Betty and I went to the skills center to teach the eldest of the three groups (16-18 year olds).

The classroom was a set of concrete tables positioned outside on the corner of a building under a roof. The kids straggled in and waited for class to start. Several of them were playing a version of tic-tac-toe. They had used a piece of charcoal to mark the playing board, and they used rocks as game pieces. I challenged one to a game, and he beat me handily.

The kids settled in after much cajoling from the MITS teacher, Mary. Betty and I launched into our training. We had everyone introduce themselves, and then we talked about conflict. We talked about the types of conflict and had them give examples of each. 

They were shy and quiet at first. Betty, in her patient way, eventually got them to open up and start talking. Once they got involved and interested, the training started to become impactful. All along I was just thinking how difficult it must be for them. A few years ago they were 100% independent, living off the streets, surviving, and suspicious of all adults. Now here they are sitting still in a classroom summoning the discipline to get something out of listening to two people from a world away that can't possibly relate to their lives.

But they did. They remained engaged. I admire these kids very much.

On Monday, Jackton (a MITS leader and the witty driver from the airport pickup) took our group on safari. We loaded up into a van before sunrise, and an hour later, we were all seeing things we’d never seen before (at least not in the wild). After the safari we went to an elephant orphanage.

Sometimes pictures just do a better job than words can. This is one of those times.

"Why are there so many children living on the streets in Nairobi?” I asked Darlene Coulston, co-founder of Made in the Streets. Our group sat with Charles and Darlene Coulston after dinner, chatting.

“Extreme poverty,” she answered.

She went on to describe the dynamic of the slums of Nairobi. Row after row of shanties the size of tents. Raw sewage everywhere. Families have nothing to eat, so they send their children to find food and money. If you want to eat, go find food. The particularly vulnerable families are those abandoned by the father.

The home to which the children return after a day of foraging and begging is depressing: mothers and/or fathers quick to beat the hell out of each other and the kids; everyone high from sniffing glue; younger siblings, not old enough to forage, waste away in filth; no toys, no entertainment; nothing resembling a healthy environment in any way.

As they go out each day from home, they see other kids that are living on the streets, on their own. The kids have formed loose affiliations and hierarchies; they are smoking cigarettes and have plenty of glue; they have things, and freedom, and each other. No one beats them except the cops, whom they avoid at all costs. So one day, the kid that has been taking food and money home to his parents decides not to go home. I’ll make it on my own.

Thousands of children live on the streets. At night they sleep with their group at bases, which might be a dump or a street corner. Safety in numbers. During the day, they fan out into affluent Nairobi neighborhoods to steal, beg, and rummage. Most are boys, but a few girls find their way from nightmarish homes to the relative safety of the bases. The girls housekeep at the bases during the day. At night they give their bodies in return for protection. They are preteens and young teenagers.

The organization Charles and Darlene Coulston co-founded nearly twenty years ago is called Made in the Streets (MITS), and they select street kids with promise, and bring them into the MITS facility on the outskirts of Nairobi. MITS provides safety, shelter, food, and an education. It is a faith-based organization, so chapel is every morning with church service on Sunday. The children are given a basic education, and then they choose a skill to learn. Examples of skills taught at MITS are carpentry, fashion design, and catering.

One key to this system is that it is voluntary. Kids can leave anytime. Some do. They find that they have to be responsible and follow the rules at MITS. They have chores to do. They have to study. It can be unfamiliar and unsettling. Many disappear and make their way back to the streets, but most stay. When they graduate at 18 or 19, they go out into the world to find a job. MITS supports them for a few months while they job search, and then they are on their own. Roughly 90% make it.

At any one time, there are around one hundred children at the MITS facility, which includes 35 acres scattered around in one- to seven-acre plots. There is a boys facility and a girls facility. There is a new mothers facility, a church, a soccer field and basketball court, and of course classrooms and skills centers.

The key to the ministry is the MITS office in Eastleigh—ground zero for Nairobi street kids—which is an area most Kenyans avoid. The MITS employees are on the streets everyday getting to know the kids. When they identify one with promise, they start testing his or her mettle. The MITS staff (many of them former street kids), will ask a promising kid to lay off of glue-sniffing for a week, or come to bible readings a few times, or come to weekly training for a few weeks. Then the staff decides on admission.

Girls find an easier path to MITS, especially if pregnant.

What an amazing organization. This is true ministry. They are fully funded by donations. Go to their website and donate money to them. I am always hesitant to contribute money to organizations with which I am not familiar, but I have witnessed what’s happening at MITS, and I assure you your money will be put to excellent use.

madeinthestreets.org

On Saturday, September 27th, we flew east several hundred miles from Kigali, Rwanda, to Nairobi, Kenya. This part of our journey was an add-on, arranged through a fellow SMU student whose parents run a non-profit organization there. What we would see would expand our view of the horrific conditions in which some children live in this world.

Kenya has been a seat of reported violence over the months leading up to this trip. We all knew it was more dangerous than Rwanda, so when we arrived in Kenya, we were on higher alert. We waited at the busy Nairobi airport for a few hours (Africa Time applies in Kenya as well) and our ride showed up. His name was Jackton. Any anxiety we had about the wait at the airport melted away as Jackton swooped us up and began our tour of Kenya, with his gregarious nature and witty one-liners:

“There are some cows, just doing what they do.”

“I’m from the Luo tribe. Obviously, we are the smartest tribe.”

“Kenya is not crazy, it is alive!”

We saw only one part of Kenya, but the part we saw was very different from Rwanda. The most obvious difference was litter. The streets of Rwanda were very clean. The government had invested in infrastructure to keep it so. The streets of Kenya were not. Memories of Iraq surfaced in my mind as we passed through chaotic, disorderly markets and busy highways to our destination. Trash was everywhere.

There are about 42 different tribes in Kenya. The Maasai were the most visible to us on the journey. They are herdsmen. They move their cattle and goats from place to place along the highways, setting up camp in the medians, shoulders, markets, and anywhere else they can find grass until the grass is gone, and then they move on to the next place. They wear blankets around their shoulders and a machete on their belts.

We were in Kenya to visit an organization called Made in the Streets (MITS) founded by a wonderful couple named Charles and Darlene Coulston. After having met them, my idea of ministry has been reset. Made in the Streets is a gritty, bold, incredible organization. But more on Made in the Streets in the next post.

In Rwanda, we stayed in a dormitory-style building. In Kenya, the MITS staff put us up in their guest house. So the seven of us settled into the house a la Big Brother and rested from the trip. I had my own room upstairs, and that night it would be the site of an epic battle.

HANNIBAL AT THE GATES

My bed was draped in a mosquito net. When I lay down at around midnight to fall asleep, I had full faith in my sanctuary. 

But I had a martyr in my bed that night. It started just as I closed my eyes, drifting off to dreamyland. I heard the telltale whining sound. Not like a fly buzz. Higher pitched. She was inside my net. She was willing to die for her cause, and I was committed to ending her miserable little life. And so it began.

For her first attack, she circled me like a drone and did a kamikaze dive onto my face. I jumped a foot off the bed, levitated there for three seconds, every muscle tense, and slapped my hands together where I knew she must be. I was so certain I had killed her that I rolled over and smiled. And then the second attack came. She held a circular pattern just above my ear, and the whine of her wings now had an antagonistic, almost cocky, quality to it. Over and over she dove and attacked, and I swatted and parried. Over and over.

I was an hour into it. My next decision: should I get out of bed to turn on the light and level the playing field? So far, I was going off my wolflike hearing and catlike reflexes, and she was kicking my ass. I took inventory of my advantages over her: I had opposable thumbs, a (somewhat) developed frontal lobe, an education on the art of war from an esteemed military institution, combat experience, and a flood of adrenaline streaming through my veins. It was time to up the ante. It was time to even the playing field. The lights went on.

The battle moved from my face to the net. On seven different occasions, I saw her land on the inside of the net, and on seven occasions, I swatted, clapped, and clawed at her desperately, and on seven occasions, I missed. It was like she was teleporting herself to another location just as my hand would arrive. She would just disappear. I could hear her laughing at me.

The next hour and a half that bitch would disappear for excruciatingly long periods. She forced me numerous times to reevaluate the state of the battle during periods of prolonged peace. Had I won? Was she dead? Or had she just given up? And time after time, just as I would decide to turn out the light and claim victory, the answer came back in the form of her whining wings.

I began to call her Hannibal, because of her obvious similarities to both the brilliant tactician that plagued Ancient Rome, and to the man-eating psychopath from Silence of the Lambs. And then my next move came to me. Synapses started firing. Hannibal…Rome…a quote from the movie Gladiator. I remembered conspirators whispering about the snake that would lie perfectly still while his enemy nibbled at him, and when his foe thought him dead, the snake would strike. And I remembered how Clarice had been used as bait to lure Hannibal the Cannibal into the manhunt for the killer. I knew what I must do. Give ground to take ground. Bait and switch. Ambush. Malaria was now an acceptable outcome if only I could squash her.

I lay perfectly still. My heart beat in my ears. I was sweating and trembling with anticipation. And then….whhhhiiiiiiiinnnnnneeeeee.

She landed on my neck, on my right side. Perfect. My throwing hand side. My free throw shooting side. I waited. I could sense her hesitation. I could hear her playing through the scenarios in her mind, “Is this idiot trying to trick me? Is he really giving up? I just can’t help myself…his blood is so sweet…just one little taste and then I’ll use my magical teleportation device to the other side of the universe. Just one little taste.” 

I thought of the movie Ghost, where the experienced ghost on the train is trying to teach Patrick Swayze how to move things. "You take all your emotions! All your anger, all your love, all your hate! And push it way down here into the pit of your stomach! And then let it explode, like a reactor! Pow!" I could hear that sound from the movie...that scratchy, burning sound that would build just before Swayze reached out to move something. Every muscle tensed.

I slapped my neck in the jugular so hard that I immediately lost consciousness. I woke up dizzy with ringing ears. What had happened? Where am I?

I looked down at her little tangled black body flattened on the palm of my hand, splattered in a pool of my blood, and I let out a war cry (in my head, so as not to wake the others in the house) the likes of which would have stopped either of the mighty Hannibals dead in their tracks. 

3:15 a.m. 

Victory.

On the 25th and 26th our group trained the ALARM staff. The African Leadership and Reconciliation Ministries has a staff of a few dozen in Rwanda who seek to train church and community leaders on servant leadership while also promoting peaceful reconciliation of tensions lingering from the genocide.

Our group taught nine ALARM staff on leadership, conflict resolution, dealing with trauma, and other topics. On the first day, I facilitated a short discussion regarding leadership. Biblical leaders such as Jesus, Paul, Moses and Job inspired this group. They named a set of traits important to good leadership that was very similar to the set of traits named by the security forces.

On the second day, my role was to give an entrepreneurial perspective on turning strategic goals into action steps. I used books and articles from the Harvard Business School Library to help drive our discussion regarding their many strategic efforts. One of which is to make a school near a coffee plantation they own self-sustaining.

One of our trainers talked about how the ALARM staff—ever understaffed and over-worked—must each find time for take care of themselves. The staff chattered among themselves for a few seconds in response to this comment. Then they informed us that in their culture, “taking care of yourself” literally doesn’t translate to Rwandan. Theirs is a collectivist culture, where the group is placed ahead of the individual, so much so that they don’t even have language for what Americans would call “taking care of yourself:” things like meditation, exercise, and hobbies that can give people a break to stay energized and centered.

One other aspect of the African culture became evident: something we all began calling “Africa Time.” Rwandans, like many Africans, place relationships ahead of schedule. For example, if I’m Rwandan and I’m heading to a meeting, but I run into a friend on the way, I may feel obligated to talk to my friend for an hour or two, disregarding any commitment to punctuality in favor of valuing my friend.

This mentality—neither good nor bad—has led to a culture very lax about timetables. We would be scheduled to come back from lunch at 130p, and they might mosey in at 225p. On one hand, it fosters very strong relationships, and places people ahead of schedules. On the other hand, I could see how it would ultimately impact the efficiency of the entire economy. Not as much gets done.

Rwandans are ceremonial. The ALARM staff, who’d been our guides and our trainees and had become our friends, held a closing ceremony to our training. They clapped, danced and sang a song. Their leader, Ben, a lovable man with a perpetual grin and a high-pitched giggle, gave a speech. We all gathered in the middle of the room to pray together. They gave each of us a gift of traditional Rwandan garb, coffee, and tea.

The leader of the security forces, Raymond, came by that evening to take us out to dinner. He wanted to show his group’s appreciation for the training we had done for them earlier in the week. We ate a very good meal at a high-end Rwandan hotel, and then Raymond presented us with gifts. He had framed a group picture of our team with his staff and gave each of us a copy. He again expressed his gratitude toward our group and told us that Rwanda is now our home, and that his sector, Kinyinya, is now our home within our home. His sincere appreciation and kind words touched us all.

That evening we all packed and prepared for the next phase of our journey. In the morning, we had an early departure to Nairobi, Kenya.

On the morning of the 24th, we woke early and traveled and hour and a half from our motel on Lake Muhaze to a refugee camp. Unfortunately, Allison had gotten sick that morning and was unable to go.

Our purpose was to provide training and deliver supplies to the refugee camp. It didn’t go quite as expected, but it was still impactful.

The refugee camp consisted of men, women and children who had come from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a dangerous country torn apart by war. There were approximately 10,000 people in the camp, roughly half consisting of children. Many of the refugees were educated people such as teachers, doctors, and businessmen who were violently pushed from their homeland. In their former lives they had homes, land, peace and means. Now this was their reality. From a teacher with a home and a purpose to a refugee living in squalor.

The camp consisted of small, tightly packed shacks built from mud, sticks and scrap material. No electricity and no running water. Children that should have been wearing diapers ran around naked, because without the availability of diapers, their being naked was the next best option. The ever-wonderful resilience of children shone through. They ran beside our vehicle and waved and smiled, and played in the dirt or with sticks.

The camp reminded me of many of the poorer neighborhoods in Iraq I used to patrol.

We arrived and were welcomed by a committee selected from among the leaders of the people living at the refugee camp. Betty and Joey then trained the adults on coping with trauma. Malcolm, Dan, and Robyn went with the children to the side of a hill under the shade of tall trees, where they handed out crayons and construction paper. The children sat quietly and began coloring pictures. Many drew different versions of the same things, such as their homes in the Congo, pictures of their family, and helicopters. They were eager to show off their drawings to us.

I went with the medical staff to arrange our leaving several bags of medical supplies and feminine products at the camp. This turned out to be a frustrating, bureaucratic process. We had unknowingly not brought the appropriate paperwork. We were supposed to have an inventory of the things we brought, approved beforehand. We did not, so the camp manager refused to allow us to leave the supplies.

One particularly depressing aspect of this was that we had brought soccer balls for the kids, and Malcolm and Dan were inflating them so the children could play with them. The children were so excited! But we then got word that none of the things we brought would be left at the camp, not even the soccer balls. So we gathered up all of the supplies, put them back in the bags, and carried them through an ever-growing and frustrated crowd of people.

Betty and Joey had finished their training. To end our visit, we had a solemn ceremony in which Ben, the Rwandan Director of ALARM, told the group that we could not leave the supplies. They were noticeable upset. We stayed for a few minutes more and purchased some things that people from the camp had made. I bought a basket woven from hay. Then we got in the van and left.

We were all thankful for the training Betty and Joey did with these severely traumatized people. Women had lost their husbands and children. Many had undergone unthinkable atrocities, and dealing with traumatized people is one of Betty’s specialties. We were also thankful for the time we spent with the children, giving them a chance to color.

But we were very disappointed that the things we brought were not left behind. As I had gone through the medical supplies with the staff (prior to learning we wouldn’t be allowed to leave them) they were so happy. We were bringing them things they desperately needed. Many of the women had seen the feminine products we had brought, and they were begging me for them. And the kids so wanted those soccer balls.

I left angry. But we were comforted by the people from ALARM who assured us they would get the supplies approved and back to the camp.

On the way back from the camp we picked up Allison and stopped at the Eastland Motel Kayonza and ate lunch. I had a hamburger and French fries and my first beer in Rwanda, a Mutzig lager. It cheered me up a little.

I left the hay basked in the van while we ate. I got back to the van after lunch and opened it, and cockroaches ran out of it all over the van. I guess the little rascals had been hiding in the lid of the basket. I gladly let them flee.

Another surreal day in Rwanda.