Find Me Unafraid, book review

find me unafraid by Kennedy Odede and Jessica Posner non-fiction 2015 HarperCollins

Kibera slum in Kenya's capital city of Nairobi is a cesspool of poverty, joblessness, crime and frustration. Depending on the report, somewhere between 250,000, or up to two million people live there, with little hope of bettering their life. This book tells how its own people changed that.

We first meet author Kennedy Odede hiding from uniformed men who are searching for him to kill him. During the riots following a corrupt election in 2007, the powers-that-be do not want him organizing people in the slum.

He was born the first child of a fifteen-year-old single mom who had no steady source of income, but was fiercely independent. He grew up without schooling, learning to read by studying scraps of newspaper on the streets of Kibera. He dreamed of going to school, but there was never enough money even for food, let alone pay for school. For years he hung out with a street gang who lived by their wits, until one day a mob beat the gang leader to death.

As he grew older, he found occasional manual labor for a dollar a day, but a foreman might even cheat him out of that. There were always others waiting to take his place. One day he bought a soccer ball for twenty cents and organized a team. From there, he and six friends proceed to start a theater group, a small-loan cooperative savings group, a work day where neighbors pick up the trash from the streets. They call it “Shining Hope for Communities” (SHOFCO). Within a month, forty members were meeting in the open soccer field. Within two years they had built their first office, not much more than a bigger shack among the crowded little shacks of Kibera. By 2007, SHOFCO had attracted thousands of members, mostly women and young people, The World Social Forum, meeting in Nairobi, invites the theater group to perform, and invites Kennedy to speak. People in Kibera start calling him “Mayor.”

The other author, Jessica Posner, is an American college student, spending a semester abroad to supplement her studies in theater and community development. She believes in immersing herself in the local culture, and asks if she can stay with Kennedy's family. “Absolutely not!” is Kennedy's horrified response. No foreigner ever stays in Kibera. A single latrine serves one hundred families. There is no clean water, no safety, only two small rooms of cardboard and leaky sheet metal, closely surrounded by mud and noisy neighbors. When she visits his home, she is privately aghast, but is way too stubborn to back down. She finally divides her time between Kennedy's home and her “home stay” house, a fifteen-minute walk from Kennedy's, just outside the slum boundary. They soon develop a close relationship.

Late afternoons, after daily search for a job, many people come to Kennedy's house to discuss their problems. More and more, he and Jessica see that women have no protection against abusive husbands or neighbors who rape or rob. Police rarely take action without a bribe. There are few ways a woman can earn a living with no education. More violence is not the answer, but what is? In Kennedy's mind the idea of a tuition-free school for girls in the heart of Kibera slum takes root and grows.

But after the election riots in 2007, the urgent matter is to get him out of Kenya before he is murdered. He barely manages to escape into Tanzania, after vigilantes at a checkpoint kill all the occupants of the car ahead of him in line.

Kennedy's SHOFCO movement is widely known by now, and Jessica is able to get him a full scholarship to Wesleyan University and a student's visa despite his lack of formal education. Jessica enters him in multiple grant competitions. “Do you know somebody called Paul Newman?” Kennedy asks her one afternoon. He wants to meet us next week.” One of Newman's favorite sayings is, “There are three rules to business, and luckily we don't know any of them.” Newman wants to use his own personal luck to create luck in the lives of others.” His foundation's check for $50,000 to build a tuition-free-school for girls in the slum is soon followed by other donors.

But foreign benefactors, or visiting students who soon go back home, no matter how well-meaning they are, are not enough to create self-confidence in a people who  have never known hope. It took a young man who grew up among them, and had a dream and a twenty-cent soccer ball.

Read this story in its entirety: Kennedy's and Jessica's romance and eventual marriage, the six-year old kindergartner who organizes a strike, the brilliant student struggling with AIDS and TB, the growth of a small school building into a community center with clean water, a medical clinic, a safe-house for physically or sexually abused women and girls, and small businesses springing up, all in the middle of one of the largest slums in all Africa.