Video about Jamii Bora Trust's miracle

Kenya had months of post-election violence in 2008, and it also had some success stories about conflict resolution. I've written in an earlier blog about Jamii Bora Trust in Kibera, Nairobi's largest slum, perhaps one of the largest in Africa. Thanks to Tony Cox, we've edited a short video which shows how Jamii Bora's branch manager for Kibera, Andrew Otieno, got youths who looted and burned Toi Market to rebuild it, then rebuild their lives through getting training and loans from Jamii Bora.
The sound quality is poor, so look out for these points:

• a member talking about how she'll use her loan in her catering business
• Andrew about how he increased the membership at Kibera branch from 7k to 50k from Jan. to Nov 08
• John, the ex-Rebel Leader, about how they looted, then burned the market
• John and Bernard about how they couldn't believe that Jamii Bora would give them a chance after they had destroyed the market
• John and Bernard about their box-making business and how they now have a stake in society

A miracle brought about by the 'whole community' approach at Jamii Bora Trust!
www.youtube.com/user/SantaMicrofinance

200 kilometers to get a Microfinance loan

Whenever you complain about your 'hole in the wall' being out of cash, think about this event told us last night at our Microfinance without Borders course by Sadrudin Akbarali, of the Aga Khan Agency for Microfinance (AKAM). He started microfinance in Tajikisthan in 1995 when the only sign of entrepreneurship he could find was one woman with a stall selling random items.

Sadrudin told us about a person who walked 200 kilometers over the mountains to the branch he opened in 2000 to get a loan. With inflation at 20% the poor person would have lost some of the value of the money by the time he returned. Happily today there are 30,000 borrowers of micro loans in Tajikisthan and many more branches of the Microfinance Bank that the Aga Khan Agency for Microfinance has set up.

Everyday Miracles

Lots of gloom about with media hype about the credit crunch. Makes it easy to ignore miracles that happen when we look closely, put things into perspective, see the brightness. Monday I had a slight concern so went off first thing to my GP's 'drop in' surgery in Soho, unique for being bi-lingual Chinese and English. The cheerful Chinese-British receptionist said 'Phyllis' straight away without having to ask my name. I congratulated her and she replied, 'So many people are amazed at my memory. I tell them to watch out because I remember what they do as well as their names.' We had a laugh, and no sooner had my bottom hit the chair then the GP, a French-British one, called 'SantaMaria' and I went in to see him. We had a good consultation, my concern was addressed and off I went.
So often people are complaining about Britain's National Health Service, as if complaining were a national disease that the NHS also has to cure. We often forget to see the great service, extraordinary in fact, as my Monday morning example illustrates. It's hailed as one of the best practices in the UK, one that's bi-lingual Chinese-English with the French-British doctor learning Chinese as well. I know the NHS has its imperfections, and I know excellence when I see it as I did Monday morning.
By the way Dr Brassey apologised during the consultation for taking a call from a patient stuck in Bankok airport who needed his help. How's that for service, helping someone half way across the world!

Maori Michaelangelo in London, John Hovell

Maori Michaelangelo in London
"See how nature - trees, grass, grow in silence: see the stars, the moon, and the sun, how they move in silence … We need silence to be able to touch souls." Mother Teresa

I'd seen Father John at St Martin-in-the-Field church here in London, a three months’ visitor from New Zealand, and discovered his talents as a painter shortly before his leaving for home 1st December. It came out of his casual remark about his being a painter as well as priest.

‘Oh, what kind?’ I asked.
‘Ceilings mainly’, John modestly replied.
Richard Carter, John's host for the last three months and a priest at St Martin's chimed in, ‘Lots of ceilings, all over New Zealand.’
John, incredibly modest, was not very forthcoming and smiled shyly.
‘Do you have a website? thinking it would be wonderful to see some of these ceilings.
‘No!’ John replied in a split second.
Richard laughed and added, ‘John’s not a technology fan. He writes letters.’
Dan, Richard's brother standing nearby added, ‘I ring and ring and ring, sometimes he answers.’
‘Are your ceilings on anyone else's websites?’ I asked, growing more curious after John said his ceilings were filled with sea creatures, sea and estuary scapes.
‘Probably, I've done a lot of Maori Morae, traditional buildings.’

I wheedled out of John that he and Richard had worked together in the Solomon Islands for almost 20 years, teaching theology, John previously had taught art in New Zealand before becoming an Anglican priest. He started doing the ceilings in New Zealand as part of his Maori heritage, art done for free by custom, a gift to the community.
We started searching for John's art on my iPhone, narrowing down to John Hovell, Harataunga Morae, and struck gold. Rakairo, Harataunga, meeting house in Kennedy Bay, eastern Coromandel coast NZ, appeared in Taonga, Sept 03, a NZ Anglican magazine article by Julia Stuart, ‘A Maori Michaelangelo’ (http://www.anglican.org.nz/news/Taonga/Taonga%20Sept%2003.pdf)














It was a ceiling of sea delights, and John explained how he had achieved such a marvel. This was a newer Morae, a Maori meeting house, so they could take down the panels, put them on trestle tables, allowing John to first draw the designs, then paint standing up. Ceilings in older meeting houses had to be done Michelangelo-style, John lying on his back and applying small amounts of acrylic paints. I asked John who had paid for his work, and he said, ‘We Maoris do not take payment for our artwork, it’s a gift from God that we gift on.’ John’s Maori grandmother has made him ‘quarter-cast Maori’ and he follows the custom. Many of his art students have done well, and many of his paintings have been taken as designs by craftspeople working in glass, needlework, other media. He said he had done a series of paintings for a church needlework group to make into tapestries, and they had kept the paintings. He added, ‘I know they’re in safekeeping in someone’s houses, enjoyment for them.’

‘Maori Michaelangelo’ had a photo of the small 50 seat Church St Paul in Kennedy Bay, NZ. featuring Hovell’s Stations of the Cross which evoke Christ’s last hikoi or journey to Calvary.
John’s note near the door explains:
“They are envisaged as a meditative walk across beaches and mudflats, stopping to look at small beautiful elements of the estuarine environment, contemplating the grandeur of God’s plan revealed at the smallest moments of nature.”












John explained how he managed to sandwich his painting between his work as a priest in New Zealand and the Solomon Islands, working on holidays. He’s now going back to New Zealand to prepare an exhibition of his paintings and has promised to send photos of his works, scattered throughout NZ.

As we left St Martin’s I asked if he planned to return to the UK as this had been his first ever visit. ‘Nope, I’ll be too busy. Many ceilings to paint, other work.’ He added: ‘When I’m working I am in complete silence.’

I took some photos of John in St Martin’s and a view outside with John in front of the statue of the child in St Martin’s portico and the National Gallery behind. I was amazed at John’s modesty about his art teaching, his ministry in New Zealand and the Solomon Islands, his art, the bounty of his silent working, bringing the wonders of nature and God to the ceilings and walls of New Zealand, to all of us to touch our souls.

The first Sunday of Advent, the day before John departed for New Zealand, Richard Carter’s sermon for the Advent Carol Service at St Martin’s was about ‘Creating Space’. He opened with a reflection on the nebulae of the universe, coming down to the trillions of cells in our bodies, the wonders of space and of ourselves, our human vulnerability. He mentioned the statue of the baby with its umbilical cord in the portico of St Martin’s and one recent morning finding a homeless man sleeping on top of the baby. Richard kindly asked the man what he was doing there.

‘I’m keeping the baby warm’

he replied. As John returns to New Zealand, going back to his ministry and his painting, I know he’s keeping the baby warm, bringing the sea to ceilings, bringing us somehow into the warmth of creation, allowing us in our vulnerability to experience a taste of ‘all of it’. Richard continued his sermon with a reflection on our human vulnerability, remembering a prayer he and his Christian brotherhood fellow members would say before going to sea in the Solomon Islands:

‘The sea so wide and deep
My canoe so small’

Safe hikoi home, John, and thank you for your visit.

6 a.m. and 6 p.m. in Nairobi: Obama’s and John’s Victories

Dateline Nairobi: 6 a.m. Wednesday 5th November 2008 found me awake, hearing Obama’s victory speech in tears of joy. 6 p.m. that same day found me again in tears in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum of a million inhabitants, hearing John’s story of how he, a 23 year old ‘general’ commanded 200 youths with pangas (machetes) to destroy Toi market after the December 2007 Kenyan elections. The tears came, not about the destruction, but from John’s heart rending account of how he and the youths worked with Jami Bora Trust to rebuild the market, create a new future on ‘the other side’ of violence. Two victories by two sons of Kenya, both descendants of the Luo tribe from the shores of Lake Victoria, both given opportunities, both being more than a tribe or a race, both making a difference to the world.

You might ask how John’s victory could be compared with Obama’s. As I videoed his testimony I heard how John and his gang razed Toi Market, a site for 1,700 traders of foodstuffs, household goods and small workshops to serve Kibera’s million. After wrecking the place and declaring it a ‘no go’ area for others than Luos and Nubians (people from Sudan settled in Kibara by the British before Kenyan independence), they met with Andrew, the manager of Jami Bora Trust, agreed to give up their battleground, to rebuild their market, to hand in their pangas for tools to make iron storage boxes and jikos, charcoal stoves. How did Andrew, a medic and resident of Kibera, win their confidence when John and his gang had scared off armed police and the District Commissioner? Andrew with only himself and his organisation, the Jami Bora Trust?

How has Jami Bora succeeded in some of the worst conditions in urban Africa? How have former beggars, thieves and hooligans become microfinance members, loan officers, business coaches, market rebuilders, a phoenix rising from the ashes? ‘Jami Bora’ means ‘Good Families’ in Kiswahili and its microfinance credit system, housing, training and health insurance serves 200,000 in Kenya, aiming to reach half a million by the end of 2010. How has it been so successful since Ingrid Munroe and the ‘Mamas’, the beggars from Kibera founded it in 1999? Ingrid, a Swedish former UN worker past retirement age and married to a Canadian, first came to Kenya in 1985 to organise the UN Year of Shelter and stayed. At retirement time, the ‘Mamas’ of Kibera told her, ‘Mama, you can’t leave us. Let’s work together.’

So they have created a miracle when other projects with huge donor funds have failed to make a dent in Kibera’s poverty. Their housing project and new town, 40 kilometers from Kibera, due to be populated by 2,000 former beggar families in January 2009, is being built at 10% of the cost of the nearby UN Habitat programme. Owners of the houses will pay 3000 Kenyan Shillings per month, about $50, gradually increasing monthly payments over 20 years to be full owners. Their town will have a market, a wetlands sewerage system of a series of ponds ending with waste water clean enough for the gardens by each house, workshops for trained people, its own school. Jami Bora won a three year court battle with locals, not wanting former beggars as neighbours. Losers of the court cases will be winners, the customers for Jami Bora’s thriving businesses. Two other projects are already underway for housing, cost efficient because the future owners make as many of the housing components themselves, rows upon rows of concrete blocks, stockpiling until it’s time to build.

Jami Bora has created this miracle through local ownership, local initiatives and local people. Ingrid has put the success of her street-wise system down to her education from her three adopted sons, three former street children, and then all of the former beggars as members and staff knowing by instinct what to do.

We didn’t have to think about how to rebuild Toi Market, we knew we had to include the people who burnt it down, include them as part of the process to create something to benefit everyone. Jami Bora’s strength is the different ethnic groups in our management teams. That’s why we never broke down on tribal grounds in the crisis. My strength is because I don’t belong to any tribe.

Ingrid and her husband, no ordinary ex-patriates in Kenya, have five children, four adopted and one ‘home grown’. The three youngest were street children from Kibera, brothers subjected to cruelties beyond belief. The middle one was in jail for four years from the age of four to eight, the elder maimed from being run over by a truck, the last one had no language before coming to the Munroes. They are now in their 20s, two with their own families in Kenya, the third studying in Sweden.

I learned beggar mentality from the three boys who spoke only Sheng, a slang of English and Kiswahili, when they came to us. As they learned English and Kiswahili, we could follow what happened to them. The trust between the beggars and me was based on the boys and the street mothers who showed solidarity with the street children, even though they weren’t their own. The one in prison from the age of four to eight bottled everything up for a year and a half, then had nightmares for six months. My husband and I took turns with him.

This quiet woman also told of how her eldest adopted son, had to leave first the International, then the British school in Nairobi, socially shunned by ‘do gooder’ ex-pat families once they found out he was an ex-street child, finally finding a home in the Swedish school, the first time the three felt they were not different.

Ingrid’s sons educated her instincts, guiding her to draw her microfinance credit programme members from the beggars, starting with a loan for as little as $5. This $5 for a bag of charcoal enabled a beggar over time to become today a charcoal wholesaler. I met members in Jami Bora’s busy Kibera branch by the rebuilt Toi Market making savings deposits, a requirement for qualifying for a loan. Others were making out loan applications accompanied by a member of their five-person group that guarantees loan pay-back. A loan officer and former beggar himself explained:

This is no easy credit system here. If they want to borrow Kenyan Shillings 10,000, they first have to save 5,000 and belong to a group. We visit their businesses. They have a plan. They bring a guarantor.

Jami Bora cuts its costs of doing small loans by using the latest technology, Point of Sale machines that print out receipts immediately to savers and borrowers. In the beginning they solved problems of payment defaults with a study that revealed slow payments were often due to costs of medical emergencies. With Jami Bora’s ‘can do’ attitude they invented a low-cost, self-sustaining health insurance scheme, costing less than $25 per year for a member and four children under the age of 18.

We have made it up as we went along, using street people, former beggars. We have found our best social workers from those who took the longest to develop, the biggest back sliders, the ones with the most excuses. They wind up being the best coaches.

This brings us full circle to John’s victory in parallel to Obama’s, rebuilding Toi Market. John and Bernard, his deputy, told me how they transformed from hard bitten thugs to micro entrepreneurs, coming to the ‘other side’ after flattening the market. Bernard said, ‘We carried pangas. If John told me to cut you, I’d do it without thinking. I’d just do it.’ John added, ‘You can’t imagine the force of 200 youths, beating away armed police and the District Commissioner.’ When asked what had turned things around both John and Bernard pointed to Andrew, Jami Bora’s branch manager:

He’s the one. He talked to us, convinced us this market was for everyone, Luos, Nubians, Kikuyus, we all need to make a living. They started by giving us maize for a day’s work, then 500 shillings [$6] a day, we built 500 stalls in three weeks, people got back to work. We couldn’t believe they weren’t punishing us, they gave us a chance. They gave us an emergency loan, then training. We now make metal boxes and charcoal stoves. We had been idlers, along with the prostitutes and other lay abouts, we had nothing at stake.

They ushered me to their workshops, showed me their products: brightly painted blue metal boxes for storing clothes, water tight for the flimsy Kibera shacks and jikos, charcoal-burning stoves. They hammered metal for the video, proud of the noise of making rather than destroying, opened the doors to their lock-up storage, counting the shiny metal boxes ready for painting, the jikos lined up for the next step of production. Andrew, other Jami Bora staff, John, Bernard and others took me to the seventh story of the building surrounded by the Toi Market, pointing to the new roofs of the 1,900 stalls built: 1700 to replace the burnt ones, 200 for John’s youths.

People come from other areas at the weekends to buy fresh cabbages, other things here, not just Kibera people. They know they can get fresh. You should see the rich cars.

By then it was dusk, seven p.m., kerosene and electric lights lit, smoke rising from the shanties as we looked over the shiny new roofs of the Toi Market stalls, took photos. They pointed out vehicles in the scrap yard below: ‘You throw these away in your country. Here we try to make them run again.’ Earlier they had posed in front of their blue homemade boxes, holding up a photo of Obama and my bag that says, ‘What are you grateful for?’ John looked over the shiny roofs from the seventh floor vantage point, looked at Andrew and said, ‘It’s better than before.’

Sisters of Justice

We took a bit of ugali, a maize cake with our right hands, pushing bits of stew and kale into it, enjoying the typical Kenyan food and way of eating. ‘It’s sweeter like this’, Martha had said and I agreed, eating with her and her husband Koome, as we laughed about the day’s events. Kawe, their daughter and I had enjoyed a day’s visit to the Safari Walk, Nairobi’s zoo with raised walkways for viewing rescued animals, glad to be welcomed by her parents Martha and Koome, eating ugali, getting to know one another, and were soon joined by three extended family members. Koome took the younger ones to the front room while Martha, Pamela and I ate and talked.

These warm Kenyan women are each extraordinary, Martha one of 50 High Court Judges and responsible for a district with eight million inhabitants in Kenya’s Rift Valley, and Pamela one of 22 Electoral Commissioners. Pamela had landed in the hot seat, just one month before the December 2007 elections leading to the January political turmoil, upsetting Kenya’s previous peaceful image. They explained that the chaos, although on the surface tribally based, went beyond tribal issues, and came down to land rights. Members of the majority tribe, the Kikuyus, had moved from the central province to buy farmland in the Rift Valley, living peacefully until seemingly orchestrated unrest erupted in January. We were unable to resolve the tangled issues over our ugali, and we soon got to the fundamental issues of land rights. ‘We won’t have equality for women until we get land rights sorted’, Martha pointed out. ‘We have a tangled mess. Every five years there’s a Land Commission that makes an enquiry, then it’s put on a shelf and collects dust until the next one comes along. We need to take those enquiries off the shelf and get down to it.’

She gave an example of how a recent case pointed out injustice to women. A father decided to dispossess his two daughters, giving land to the sons. The two women took their father to court, and Marttha dispensed justice by looking at old legislation going back to colonial days: ‘Anyone living and using land is the owner as long as they are using the land’. She pointed out that the daughters had been living and using the land until the father decided to throw them off, an illegal act. ‘These women had taken their father to court, how many others do not have the capacity to do that?’ she stated. Both Martha and Pamela agreed that women, who often do the bulk of the work tilling crops, often get a raw deal when it comes to inheritance. Furthermore, land ownership disputes often stop Kenyan development, old issues left unresolved that stop progress.
I had previously asked if there were any way that Advocates for International Development, a UK not-for-profit offering pro bono legal work could be of service. They heartily agreed that land rights were a prime area to start with. Also, the Minister of Justice’s recently launched Legal Aid scheme could benefit from partnering with local chambers to build capacity through guidelines and sharing information, developing materials to help people understand their rights, simplifying procedures. As Martha said, ‘That would help judges a great deal, people could arrive in court with full knowledge of their rights and seeking protection. When they have a clear idea of their rights, it makes it much easier for us.’ She explained how the partnership between the Rift Valley and Newcastle Law Societies had established a secretariat for children in need of legal assistance. The Rift Valley Law Society developed the programme to assist under 18 year olds, many vulnerable due to the HIV-AIDs pandemic. The result is access and improved quality of justice through the pro bono work of 250 Rift Valley Law Society members, the training organised by Newcastle Law Society and exchange visits between Rift Valley and Newcastle lawyers, staying in each others’ homes and sharing expertise.

We agreed to find ways to put A4ID and the Kenya’s Justice Department together by my meeting the Minister of Justice, another powerful woman and a next door neighbour. The ugali, stew and kale finished, we sisters of justice cleansed our hands, content with sharing our meal and connections to improve women’s and ultimately everyone’s rights through land rights.

Silence in Nairobi

Coming from the centre of London with an occasional pigeon nibbling at my window box plants, an odd sea gull squawking in the spaces between the Georgian rooftops and the Paris-like buildings to the dawn chorus in a Nairobi suburb brought me back decades to my US Peace Corps volunteer days in Kenya, a teacher at a boys' secondary school in the bush. The gardener sweeping outside, the swish swish of morning ritual, sweeping away the night before, the dead leaves of the past, the rhythm of greeting a new day. As I struggled to adjust to the three hour change, London to Nairobi, realising it was still 4.30 in the old place I took time to move into this new zone, this new sound scape.

Swahili outside my door, voices a garden or two over, the birds another layer of soft, sometimes strident fussing, buckets being filled and placed for mopping, metal handle clanging. I stepped into a world of morning chores, birds and people doing their things of life, this All Souls or is it All Saints Day? My airplane was my broomstick for the Halloween or All hallows flight, the day to scare away the ghosts by playing with them, dressing up as them. I had sat between two young men, one on a project to vaccinate 100,000 Masai cattle, the other to check on and then create new water filtration systems using sand in a series of pools in Northern Kenya on the border with Somalia, eight hours then eight hours drive more. I told my story of working with microfinance, recalling my mission to find out about best practice in Kenya, explore in Tanzania for partners to work with, listen for opportunities to use our people from London with improving the performance of the microfinance institutions, these ‘banks for the poor’.

After the visa line and paying my fifty dollars to pass go, easy baggage claim I was met by Kagwiria or ‘Kawe’, a former intern for our work with the UK National Committee of 2005 UN Year of Microcredit, and her neighbour Joe, a student. As we drove the 30 minutes from one end of Nairobi to another we talked about the economic and political situation. Here politics seem closer to life, especially after the turmoil that followed the late 2007 election. On one side of Nairobi people were cheering and partying the result of the old being defeated, the new about to come in, on another the riots, seemingly planned and coordinated to happen, were starting. No one had nightmared that so much unleashed violence could turn the ‘darling, the success story’ of East Africa into festering sores bursting and spewing their infections, killing and displacing people, only now ten months later having the confidence to return home. Peace, relative prosperity and pride gone in an instant, the mighty fallen from their political perches, just as it happens in so many other places, Kenyans in the UK telling me ashamedly that the unrest had been festering underneath, now that the boil had been lanced, it was time to let the wound heal, to tackle the infection where it had started.

Kawe and I talked late into the night over my supper of home cooked stew, rice and salad, bringing me down to earth again. At 26 she’s working with a consultancy that assists Microfinance Institutions to transform into Microfinance banks, as part of a team taking them through a two-year process to get their accounting, human resources, legal systems in order to get approval to act as a bank. This costs about £400,000, a hefty sum given by international donors, to become ‘Microfinance Depositing Taking Institutions’. Then there is the added cost of implementing all the systems, training the staff in the institution. You might ask, ‘Why are they going through this? Why not simply stay as a plain vanilla Microfinance Institution? Aren’t they able to do enough for the poor by giving them credit?’


The answer is that most poor people surveyed say they want a safe place for their savings, not just small loans. We in ‘Northern’ countries are used to banking services, take them as a necessary part of life, even though we’re now braying at the moon about the collapse of credit, this ‘credit crunch’, this unprecedented downturn. We’re scratching our heads, wondering why it took us so long to see we’d get caught by our habits of overspending, our belief in up and not down for prices. In the meantime, poor people with very little access to financial services are asking for a place to save, a microinsurance policy to cover their cow or against drought, a small loan with short term pay back, and if they’re really lucky, a cheaper system for transferring or receiving money from relatives abroad. We were overglutted, still are, with credit card offerings, 0% loans for TVs with three years to pay, offers to spend, spend, spend as if there were no tomorrow. That was until shares started dropping in price, banks going to the government for bail outs, the inter-bank lending stopping because of lack of confidence in the system.

Here is the contrast in the silence. Many of us with so much noise about our consumer lives and our busyness find it hard to hear anything else or to access the silence underneath it all, the real thing that underlies our being. Sometimes it takes a jolt, a metaphorical slap in the face for us to wake up to what is really important.

On the London to Nairobi flight to my left was the German living in Scotland whose team’s mission is to vaccinate 100,000 cattle belonging to Masai, their cattle their lifeline. On my right, the engineer from Mississippi with his team’s project to increase the number of water filtration systems so people on the edge in northern Kenya could start to make the connection between pure water and health. Seated in the middle, with the mission of microfinance, sensible credit, savings, insurance and money transfer as one of the ways for people to take slow and sure steps out of poverty, getting access to planning for their futures. Seems as if the three of us in our three seats had fairly sensible goals for our missions to East Africa, seeking to access a silence underlying it all, an eternal silence of sharing in the pool of existence and access to life worthwhile. I listen to the birds, the sweeping and mopping with their own song notes, the wind brushing the leaves, the silence underneath it all.

The Mayan way of giving birth

The Mayan way of giving birth

Eucevia, a Mayan woman in her late 20s, lived in an aldea or outlying village from San Juan Comalapa, my town in Guatemala where I worked as a US Peace Corps Volunteer,1965-1967. She came into Comalapa for the Tuesday market and for the weaving club meetings, always with a lovely smile and greetings in Spanish and her Mayan Kachiquel. She sometimes had a toddler in tow and a baby in her shawl, a basket balanced on her head, always a small gift which I had to accept as part of local custom. One day she came troubled into town, unable to find a doctor for her babe in arms with diarrhea. We found the usual remedy in the pharmacy and she headed back, hoping for the best.
I didn't see her for several weeks, so went on horseback to her aldea, about two hours' away. I had been to her compound with several tiled houses, one for the kitchen, the other a bedroom, another for storage, a work area in the center for animals, threshing wheat or drying maize. She was nowhere around, rather unusually. I waited a while and finally I saw Eucevia coming up from the river with a basin of washing on her head. Her usual smile was missing, I sensed something amiss. She had only her toddler daughter with her, no babe in arms. I could see straight away that the little boy had died, 'I'm coming from washing his things' she said. We sat together and were silent. What could we say? Her little girl shuffled her feet, no one felt like talking.
Eucevia invited me to eat, and we sat heating tortillas and beans, finally finding something to say. I then made a promise that when she had her next baby, I'd come to help deliver it, as I was doing research on midwifery practices, working with my friend Doňa Martita, who attended childbirths. Eucevia and I looked at one another and sealed the promise to be together for the next childbirth.
Time passed quickly and we kept making progress with our weekly meetings for the Mayan women's weaving group, growing both in numbers and the women's confidence. Eucevia kept showing up, and I noticed under her expanding belt and skirt that she was indeed pregnant. Mayan women have practical clothes, a long wrap around skirt held up by a 12 foot long woven belt that they wind around and tuck the end underneath. The belt both holds the skirt up and acts as a protection for the stomach and back, especially useful during pregnancy. Their blouse or guipil can be split at the side for easy breast feeding when the time comes. Eucevia's waist was definitely getting bigger, and she promised to remember our pact. I told Doňa Martita about the forthcoming event and she, the experienced midwife, agreed to come with me at any time day or night.
One night I heard a knock on the door at 10 pm, far past the time for visitors to Tom's and my little house on the far edge of the town. It was Eucevia's husband, 'The time has come, please come.' I rushed on my bike to Doňa Martita's, she gathered the equipment and we quickly got horses from the local stable, grateful that it was a full moon lit night. Eucevia's husband led the way, and we arrived at their compound at the top of a hill, surprised to see Eucevia greeting us. She insisted on offering us tortilla and beans, and Doňa Martita and I thought to ourselves that this was a false alarm. After she was sure that we had eaten and had enough to drink, Eucevia said, 'It's time', and asked us to come into the bedroom house, a separate building. We asked her husband to boil water and we went inside.

There was a simple wooden plank bed, covered with petates or straw mats, some blankets, a basin. The bed was quite high up, resting on saw horses. Eucevia by now was having more frequent labor pains, and her water burst. Doňa Martita and I asked her to lie on the bed, and she said, 'No, this is the way we do it.' There was a rope lasso hanging from the rafter, and Eucevia knelt on the bed. Doňa Martita and I took Eucevia's cue and realised the wisdom of her position. She half squatted with her legs apart, held on to the looped lasso with both hands and pushed. We got ourselves ready to 'catch' the baby, and sure enough, quite quickly the baby just about fell out of Eucevia, helped out by gravity rather than her having to push out while lying on her back, a method presumably invented by doctors so they could more easily see what was happening.

A baby girl literally fell from heaven into the world, and all that Doňa Martita and I had to do was to catch her, be ready there for her to arrive.
Doňa Martita and I tied off and cut the umbilical cord, cleaned the baby and gave her to Eucevia, still alert and eager to greet her new daughter. We called the father who came to rejoice with us. They invited Doňa Martita and me to spend the night, and we camped out in blankets in the same room with Eucevia and her daughter. By now it was cold, and we huddled in our blankets on the floor, Eucevia and her daughter on the bed. We kept talking late into the night, we three women, savoring the stillness, the dark, the closeness, the joy of witnessing the birth done the Mayan way. As we finally fell to sleep at about three in the morning, I yet again realized I still had so much to learn and felt fortunate that my friends were generous in teaching me. The still and silent darkness was a comfort, the lost child remembered with the new one newly brought into the world.

Sequel: In 1994 I went back to visit Eucevia and her family, surprising them by driving to their aldea with some of the original weavers from the first Mayan women weavers’ group in Guatemala we started in 1965-67. Lucia and Reina, two of the weavers, walked with me up the hill to Eucevia's compound. There was a double surprise: Eucevia’s family was of course surprised to see me there with the women from Comalapa. The second surprise was that it was the birthday of the daughter Katarina born 27 years ago, and she was there to celebrate with her family. So it was exactly on her birthday that I showed up unannounced. Another amazing thing is that Katarina worked in rural community development with Oxfam, a UK charity, and she was teaching nutrition, mother and child care as well as enterprise development in remote areas, the work that I had been doing as a Peace Corps volunteer when I met her mother. We had come full circle.

April 1994: Katarina’s 27^th birthday (Eucevia, Phyllis, youngest daughter, Katarina, girl from Comalapa, Eucevia’s husband in hammock, ill with arthritis)

http://phyllis-santamaria.blogspot.com

Voices from Inner City Youth

Photos: Stephen Lawrence (13 September 1974 – 22 April 1993)
Oscar Wilde's statue behind St Martin-in-the-Fields Church
Tom, Dan Baltzer, Doreen Lawrence, Casey

St Martin-in-the-Fields church overlooks Trafalgar Square in the heart of London and has a mission of inclusion and being out in the community. Its massive £36 million rebuilding project nears completion after 18 months' excavations, pounding, creating and dust, dust, dust. Last night I was excited to walk through the newly completed courtyard, the roof of the new parts of the building two floors below, visit the statue of Oscar Wilde behind the church, then enter the new spaces through a glass entrance in the courtyard. I love the caption on the Oscar Wilde statue: 'We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars'. Last night's Education Programme's event, 'Voices from Inner City Youth' brought us people looking at the stars: Tom and Casey from Kids Company and Doreen Lawrence of the Stephen Lawrence Trust.

We first heard from Dan Baltzer of Kids Company about its family environment to 12,000 of London's children who would otherwise be left to their own devices. Tom, now a staff member, told us how Kids Company 'helped me to slow everything down' when he had got into petty crime, had lost his purpose. Kids Company offers a 'direct line to someone to explain where you are, how you could be, work your own way'. He now works with other young people, realising that 'only a young person can help other young people'. A somewhat shy young black man in his early 20s, trendily dressed, he soon warmed up as his enthusiasm for Kids Company shone through, his vision of the stars brightening the more he spoke. 'Every generation puts something into the pot. I'm coming to talk to lots of meetings'. His ended with these words: 'We have a flame inside us, unless we control it, we burn everything around us.' We felt his wonderful steady warmth, applauded him warmly in return, then were introduced to Casey, the next star gazer.

Dressed in jeans, a beige coat and topped with a striped knitted hat, 18 year old Casey stepped up to bat. I saw Casey as someone who was going to keep her eye on the ball and hit a home run. She started, 'I'm a bit shy this minute although I'm not a shy person.' Then she told her story. 'I was an 11 year old runaway. I'm not blaming my mother. She had her illness. I turned to people on the streets because they became my family.' She heard about Camilla, founder of Kids Company, and thought to herself, 'I've got to meet this woman in a turban, no way!' Camilla sat her down, talked to her, kept calling Casey when she didn't turn up. When she did, she'd go to the club, abusing staff, refusing to listen. Camilla had support workers calling Casey every day.

I had tantrums, pushed people away because I wasn't used to people looking after me. Camilla supported me the whole way. I can tell you now that crime does not pay, it's gonna come back on you. I came out of prison, [three times] I can't explain it, Camilla was more than my family. If I wasn't in Kids Company for seven years, I'd be in prison or dead. You have to meet Camilla, she's taken on what society has refused to do. At 11 I was on the street. She never blamed me. They want to keep pushing everyone to their potential. It made me know there's people out there who care for you.

I fell in love with Casey, this hard hitting young woman, already through thousands of lives in her 18 years, coming back with love. 'I don't blame adults. Kids come in to us wearing clothes too small, not being fed.' She was one of those kids, had come through the other side, looking at the stars, ready to start college in January to get skills so she could be an entrepreneur. We burned our hands with applause, Casey took her seat and we were introduced to Doreen Lawrence.

Her son Stephen Lawrence was killed in 1993, a quiet studious young man, who asked his mother when she had cautioned him about being on the streets, 'I'm not doing anything, why should this happen to me?' The most terrible did happen to Stephen, his life cut short before realising his dream of being an architect. His mother has led the campaign to get justice for her son's death, tirelessly campaigning to change attitudes, combat racism in the police. She has talked to young people who say they don't expect to live beyond the age of 25. 'Things have improved in the last ten years with the 2003 enquiry for 'Stop and Search' resulting in the monitoring of written records. The Race Relations Act has brought police into the act. There's now double jeopardy' and added quietly that it hasn't helped in the case against Stephen's murderers, still walking the streets today.

Doreen Lawrence will not rest in her campaign against racism and violence while creating a legacy of excellence for young people in her son's name. Her recipes include changing the mindsets of young people through education, making known positive role models other than pop and football stars, sensitising the media about the negative portrayal of blacks. 'What's this about headlines, 'Black on Black crime'? A crime is a crime. Stop that'.

She urged more reporting of 'good news' that doesn't get out there enough: Achievement Awards for black children hosted by Diane Abbot at the House of Commons recently, the 'Power List' of 100 black people of influence, the Reed Report on positive role models for young black men that includes lawyers, doctors. 'Why isn't this more known about?'

Doreen has used Stephen's death to help others through the Stephen Lawrence charitable trust, educating 70 architects from the black community in the last ten years. There's the Stephen Lawrence Prize for an outstanding building, part of the Royal Institute of British Architects' Sterling Prize, and she encouraged us to visit the bridge at Kew Gardens, sculpture and function combined to open up a new area there, bearing a plaque with the prize in Stephen's name.
She spoke proudly about the Stephen Lawrence Centre, taking eight years to reach fruition, it encourages people to look at their environment through community learning and social research. I quote Doreen's vision of the Stephen Lawrence Centre from its brochure:

The name Stephen Lawrence means different things to different people. Personally, I hope the Stephen Lawrence Centre will become a magnet for aspiring young people who want to break the cycle of negative stereotyping, giving them the vision to shape their own futures by setting themselves clear goals, gaining new skills and staying positive and determined.

Doreen joined the panel of Tom and Casey to answer our questions, the first about knife crime. Casey said the main problem is that angry young people get 'hyped up by the media, making it bigger'. Then young people start carrying knives, 'protecting themselves'. Tom added, 'Because of the way the media is promoting the issues, young people are creating gangs. The young people are ignorant. They need to be prevented from carrying weapons.' Casey added: 'the community needs to be searching for different ways of dealing with problems, learning how to address anger.' Doreen repeated her recipe: 'The media needs a balance, showing young people what they can do'. When Doreen asked how this knife and gun culture started in the last ten years, Casey responded from her experience of being on the streets, an angry kid: 'Kids need a support structure. They are not evil, no one's born a certain way.'

When asked about the police, Casey came up with some hopeful words: 'The police all around London are addressing issues. The crime rate is going down where Kids Company operates. There were mixed views about churches offering something: Casey said they have the time, space and people to offer help. Tom was less enthusiastic: 'I grew up in a church, then grew away. The church is stuck behind walls. Church is important, faith more so. Church needs to take a stand because young people, we don't see church.'

We had a summing up from Maire MacCormack from Scotland's Commissioner for Children and Young People, giving us grim statistics: 71% of media reports are negative, especially on young black boys; 3.1 million children are living in poverty in the UK, the UK bottom of the table on UNICEF's ranking of 21 industrialised countries on the well being of their children. We were reeling from the numbers until Maire ended on a hopeful note and brought us back to Tom, Casey and Doreen, members of the black community taking action to change the world. Casey's refrain, 'You've got to meet Camilla' ringing in my ears, I realised I had already met her in Casey, the 18 year old young woman speaking of love after seven years at Kids Company, the best 'word of mouth' in the world. When Doreen handed me the Stephen Lawrence Trust brochure I felt her courage to make the world a better place in the eyes of her son in his blue and white striped shirt. Remembering my visit to Oscar Wilde's statue behind St Martin's before the talk, I felt I was in the company of people looking at the stars--Tom, Doreen and Casey--and who were pointing to other stars, Stephen and Camilla.



Resources

• Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust: www.stephenlawrence.org.uk
  
• Kids Company: www.kidsco.org.uk
• St-Martin-in-the-Field: www.smitf.org

Remaining events in the Autumn Education series

• Tuesday 28 October, 7 pm, Church: Voice from South Africa, Tongues of Fire Youth Theatre
• Tuesday 4 November, 7 pm, Church: Voice for Creation, Brother Samuel
• Tuesday 11 November, 7 pm, St Martin's Hall: Voices of those Seeking Asylum, Helen Bamber and Juliet Stevenson