In “Just Look What You Did!” Mr. Kristof says donations from Times readers have supported a girls’ school run by a young Kenyan man and a young American woman. And, yes, this is also a love story. Ms. Collins has “Happy Tidings From the Hill.” Good news, people! The government will be functioning in October. Congress paid the bills for seven more weeks. And did you hear? Willow the cat is back! Here’s Mr. Kristof:
In a Mother’s Day column in the spring, I suggested that readers commemorate the day not only with flowers but also with a donation to lift up women around the world. Readers showered one group that I mentioned, www.MothersDayMovement.org, with more than $135,000 that was forwarded to a slum empowerment group in Kenya.
So while in Kenya recently, I dropped by to see what was being done with your money. In the grim alleys of the Kibera slum in the capital of Nairobi, I found a dazzling girls’ school being built with some of those donations — and, yes, I found a love story.
The saga begins with a young man named Kennedy Odede who grew up in the slum. He never received a formal education and lived homeless on the streets after the age of 10, but he was exceptionally bright and taught himself to read.
When he was about 15, a visiting American gave him a book about Nelson Mandela — a biography that captivated Kennedy. Another American visitor, charmed by hearing of the impact of the first book, gave him a biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “That book changed my life,” Kennedy recalls.
Dazzled by Mandela and King, Kennedy resolved to fight for social justice. Already active in Kibera, he bought a soccer ball and announced the formation of a youth soccer club that would wrestle with social issues.
Kennedy had become outraged at the abuse of women, partly because his 16-year-old sister had been raped and become pregnant. So his soccer club began to hold street theater performances to denounce sexual violence.
Jessica Posner, a Wesleyan University student interested in theater, heard about the performances and decided to spend a junior year abroad helping the group. She arrived in Nairobi — and then insisted on living inside the Kibera slum itself.
“I thought she was crazy,” Kennedy remembers. He told her that there was no indoor toilet or running water, and plenty of rats. She is white, and Kennedy told her that no white people lived anywhere nearby. But Jessica got her way, sharing a room with four other people — and a romance blossomed.
Kennedy told Jessica of his dream to get an education, and Jessica nudged the Wesleyan admissions office into offering him a full scholarship — even though he had never gone to formal school before.
So Kennedy flew to Connecticut to begin college as a freshman at the age of 23, and, after her graduation, Jessica flew out to Nairobi to help expand his program, called Shining Hope for Communities (ShiningHopeforCommunities.org). They won grants from Newman’s Own Foundation, Echoing Green and DoSomething.org, and they used the money and Jessica’s savings to start the Kibera School for Girls.
Jessica, now 25, showed me around — chattering with local people in the Swahili and Luo languages. It’s staggering what she and Kennedy have created. The Kibera School for Girls now has 64 students in pre-kindergarten through second grade, adding one grade a year. Almost 500 children competed for the 19 slots in the current pre-kindergarten.
The school looks like a good American school, and classes are taught in English. Even though English is a second or third language for these children, 82 percent perform at American grade level — and these kids are ravenous to learn.
“Some of the first and second graders are reading at seventh-grade level,” Jessica said proudly.
Still, obstacles are enormous. This broke my heart: At least 20 percent of the girls have been raped, the teachers say. Rapes have left two of the kindergarten girls with fistulas, internal injuries causing them to leak wastes.
The school has helped prosecute an alleged rapist of a 4-year-old kindergartner who required surgical repairs and is working to end the impunity on sexual violence in the community. It also provides a dormitory for half-a-dozen girls who are at risk of sexual violence in their own homes.
With the money from Times readers, Shining Hope is now building a much larger school that is expected to accommodate 500 pupils. It has also bolstered services, including free family planning, for women at a clinic it runs. It trains women entrepreneurs and has just installed a new water tower that is expected to become the slum’s largest source of clean water. It operates a public library and computer center where slum-dwellers can earn money by performing Internet piece work.
Shining Hope also oversees a network of public toilets, one of which produces biogas used to cook meals for children at the school.
All this may be just a beginning. Kennedy says his dream is to expand Shining Hope across East Africa.
So that’s what your money has wrought. You should be proud. And one more thing to make the story perfect: In June, after Kennedy graduates, he and Jessica plan to marry.
And now here’s Ms. Collins:
In our never-ending battle to bring you good news from the world of politics, let’s focus today on the fact that Congress appears to have reached a deal to keep the government operating for seven more weeks.
Think of all the things you’ll be able to do in October if there’s a government. Camp out in a national park! Mail a letter! Fly to Omaha without fear that your plane will crash into a plane flying to Sioux Falls because of a lack of air traffic controllers! Wage war in Afghanistan!
Life doesn’t get any better than that.
The latest stalemate in Washington has been over the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had been running out of cash what with all the recent fires, floods, earthquakes, plagues of frogs and what have you. Republicans wanted to balance any new FEMA money with cuts elsewhere. Democrats said that when disaster strikes, the tradition is to pony up and deal with the financing issues later.
Republicans said yeah, and that’s how we wound up $14.7 trillion in the hole. And then the Democrats said no way, we got the hole from the Bush tax cuts, and then the Republicans kicked them in the groin and everybody had to go to the emergency room.
O.K., I can hear you all asking: Whatever happened to Willow the cat?
Willow, you may remember, disappeared from her home in Colorado five years ago and turned up recently in a shelter in New York City. Now that was a feel-good story. Her whole family was flown to New York to appear on the “Today” show for a reunion. Why can’t Congress ever do things like that?
Back to Congress: The government’s fiscal year ends this weekend, and FEMA decided it could make it to Saturday on spare cash that it had found in the sofa. Whew.
The Senate then voted 79 to 12 to keep the government running for the following seven weeks. “It shows us the way out. It means we no longer have to fight,” said Harry Reid, in a deeply uncharacteristic show of euphoria.
You may be wondering about the 12 people who voted against this idea. They were all Republicans, and their most common argument was that they just wanted to make things work better. “Americans are tired of gridlock and games in Washington, and so am I,” said Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri in a press release.
Way to battle gridlock, Senator Roy Blunt!
Marco Rubio of Florida, who is constantly being mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate in the event the Republicans ever find someone to nominate for president, said that he had voted against the bill because he wanted to protest “this dysfunctional Washington way” of running the government. This is a little like protesting the slowness of rush-hour traffic by abandoning your car in the center lane.
But back to Willow the cat. During one of her TV reunions, Willow bit her owners’ 3-year-old daughter. In the flesh, Willow looked pretty standoffish. We might as well have been celebrating the return of a long-lost goldfish. Maybe she liked living in New York.
Meanwhile, the bill to keep the government operating for seven weeks now goes to the House, where it’s expected to pass. Probably. They think.
But wait! There’s more! Remember when I told you the current fiscal year ends this weekend? (It was a few paragraphs back, before Willow bit the 3-year-old.) Congress is on vacation. So in order to get us through the gap, the Senate passed yet another spending bill, this one to keep things running for four days.
That was on a voice vote, depriving anybody of the opportunity to take a strong, principled, public stance against having government on Saturday.
It now goes to the House, where in one of those parliamentary thingies that drive us all to discussions of missing cats or the possible breakup of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, the bill is supposed to be passed on Thursday in an empty chamber.
If a single representative shows up and objects, the four-day funding bill is dead and the government shuts down this weekend. But, of course, what would make anyone think that there could be a member of the House of Representatives crazy enough to make the trip back to Washington just to bring the entire federal government to a crashing halt?
“Actually, we’re holding our breath,” said one House staffer, who claimed that the Republican leadership had made a list of the most free-spirited members of the Tea Party cadre and got commitments from everyone to get through the weekend with the Grand Canyon open for business.
Which, if it works, would be pretty good news, don’t you think? No one in the House of Representatives actually wants to single-handedly shut government down in its tracks.
Ever lower, goes the bar.
