A step toward a lasting union

By Darrell Laurant

Published: October 18, 2008

Patrick Lumumba could get used to this: friendly people, good food, flush toilets.

At the same time, however, he knows that his visit to Lynchburg is just a pleasant and somewhat unreal interlude until he returns to Nairobi, Kenya, on Oct. 29. He is spending most of this month in the U.S., not for R&R, but to raise money for Mercy Care Centre, a school in the Mathare Valley slum where he is headmaster.

And so far, so good. A $20 a plate African dinner (the main course: ground nut stew) in the E.C. Glass High School cafeteria last Saturday was very successful. Glass teacher Patti Worsham and her retired colleague, Betsy Garrard, have just succeeded (they hope) in unlocking a $62,000 grant to install labs for computer, science and language studies at Mercy Care.

Perhaps most importantly, Garrard said, “I think every Glass student now knows where Kenya is, where Nairobi is and where Patrick’s school is.”

Where it is, and has been for 18 years, is smack in the middle of one of the most vile and poverty-stricken places on earth — 500,000 people crammed into a two-mile-square area with little running water, electricity or sanitary facilities.

“You have a 10-by-10 room,” Lumumba said Wednesday as he stood up in front of a student audience in Worsham’s classroom, conveying the shocking limitation of those dimensions with his large hands. “With seven people living there. Here is one bedroom, here is another, here is the kitchen.”

Meanwhile, the streets of the slum are teeming with people and wracked by violence. When rioting broke out following national elections last year, more than 500 people were killed in Mathare Valley fighting. Even now, young members of the Kikuyu and Luo tribes attack each other with the single-minded ferocity of Crips and Bloods in America’s inner cities.

“Everything is tribal,” Lumumba said. “I have learned about the major tribes, so when a car pulls up next to me and someone asks what tribe I’m from, I ask ‘What tribe are you from?’ When they tell me, I say, ‘Me, too.’”

In some cases, a wrong answer can be fatal.

Still, Lumumba has gained respect in the slum, and the school where he has served as headmaster for 15 years has become a refuge for its 400 students.

“School starts at 6 in the morning and ends at 7 at night,” he said. “That long day is to keep them off the streets, and also because we feed them three meals a day.”

New students, Lumumba said, “must first be shown love, because many of them come thinking no one cares about them. Then, we feed them, because most are starving. Only then can we teach them.”

From the outside, Mercy Care School isn’t much more appealing than the shacks surrounding it — peeling paint on the walls, a corrugated tin roof. There is only electricity in two rooms, no air conditioning, a single latrine for everyone (imagine how American students would react to that situation). But, says Worsham, who has visited Mercy Care on two occasions, “The kids there love the place, and they love learning. It’s really inspiring to see.”

The contact with Lynchburg came through local residents Carroll and Wayne Brown, who opened East Africa’s first school for physical therapy in Tanzania and have done missionary work in Kenya. They heard about Mercy Care — founded by Dorna Amimo, the wife of an Anglican priest — and were touched and intrigued by it. They spread the news to Worsham and Garrard, who passed the benevolent infection to their students.

“E.C. Glass is now the official sister school to Mercy Care,” said Garrard. “Our goal is not to help out one time, but to establish consistent, long-care projects.”

Which, to me, raises the question: What if every school, municipality and large business in the “developed world” paired off with a similar entity in a place like Kenya?

Think of the possibilities. Promising students with no hope of attending college in their country could be given scholarships at U.S. colleges. All sorts of cultural exchanges could be undertaken. And in the process, the “privileged” partners in this arrangement would gain a greater appreciation of what poverty really is — not having your cable TV turned off, but having to spend four hours a day scavenging for food at a garbage dump.

“Everywhere I go here,” Patrick Lumumba said last week, “I see smiles.”

Back home in Mathare Valley, smiles can be in short supply.