International Day of the African Child Full Video Release!

Make action of the chills!  All our love,

Flying Kites Family

 

4 Days

Of my goal to 100, we’ve so far gathered 50 extraordinary souls to sponsor the gift of childhood for children as deserving as all. Of 90 days now hammering this hopeful landing, only 4 remain. And it won’t be by miracle or by hope that we show these children 100 people care enough to act, it will be achieved only by those who people make real sacrifice for the sake of it.

Join me in this pursuit at a moment I need you most! Commit to them, to waking one morning to a hand-written note from the child now knowing you as family… and allow your day and their sense of community to explode with light.

Twelve dollars a month. These are the faces worthy!

 

Mail: “We are together!”
To: brian@flyingkites.org

That simple. We’ll introduce you to these faces in days to follow.

68 in 25; Week Ten – Voice

Our voice is powerful, powerful in what it can do, not do, and undo. It can be as much an engineer of clarity and union and strength and transcendent meaning, as it can be lazy and aggressive, divide us, feed the ego it’s dissolving meal, and leave us weak and broken.

The quest to purify our own voice is no different than it’s ever been. Spend a lifetime learning yourself, identifying what you really need, and you’ll learn to speak bravely in the hunt and capture. Learn compassion in the way you communicate your needs, the way you listen and feel for the needs of others, and learn to give and take for the sake of both, and two extraordinary things will happen:

You’ll get more than you ever thought you needed, and you’ll need less than you ever thought you would.

As if encompassing clarity in our own voice isn’t difficult enough, there’s a new dimension to the challenge in this world of explosive interconnection. We’re linked more visibly, instantly, inextricably than we’ve ever been before, and our one voice joins a second voice, a collective one, at unprecedented ease. Governments can topple in a weekend, in a week a video can flash in more eyes than the population of Japan, and our rush to react can be as giant as our vanish and vacancy. For every colossal ounce of shape-shifting potential this lends, there is massive fragility in our speed.

Fifty years ago, Charlie Brown was on the cover of Time Magazine, Andy Warhol debuted the Cambell’s Soup Cans, Cuba and the Soviet Union signed a trade pact, Nelson Mandela was arrested for ‘inciting rebellion,’ John F. Kennedy announced his aim to put a man on the moon, the Beatles found Ringo, Dylan went electric, the Vietnam War was smaller than a fist on the horizon, and whispers of a personal computer began a skeptical stir. The world was no less confusing, arousing, conflicted, lost, or found as it is now. But now, something new and especially dangerous happens, we confuse the expression of action as action itself. We confuse clicking, ‘liking,’ voting, tweeting, talking, debating and watching and waiting, as enough. But it’s not. It’s the beginning of a story, so many stories, so much potential, but just scattered beginnings.  We’re losing the art of writing whole stories, stories round with body, resolution and endings.

Our challenge this week, in this long-drawn campaign to live more thoughtfully and compassionately, is to recognize our powers of voice: our speaking voice, our collective powers, and above all – the soundless, echoing voice of our real action. In speaking and projecting, both in vocal chords and megabites, be slow and mindful. Make room for your needs as much as you make room for the needs of others. And, lastly, of utmost importance, don’t die full of beautiful intentions and hope for change, make something real. It is as much a doorway, as it is your responsibility.

I set the goal a few weeks ago to find100 people of the thousands who read to support me in form of an act; to part with $12 per month and by sponsoring one these awe-inspiring children in their quest to have a voice; to lead and be heard. Since that day, 33 caring people have stepped up, which means I need 68 more, in less than 25 days.

I need you; your act. And I’ve made it as simple as it can be:

Send me an email, a facebook message, or a pigeon (brian@flyingkites.org),and paste this sentence in the body:

“I’d like to forever change the course of another’s life.”

It’s that easy, and it’s real.

Thank you for caring enough to read, and for some of you – for staying with me all this time.

Love,

Brian

Eunice was just eight years old when she was ushered with her older brother into a children’s home in a Nairobi slum area called Kayole. The home was horrendously overcrowded with orphaned children, near 300, without adult supervision past 7 p.m. Food was scarce, abuse was unbridled, and her older brother spent his nights sleepless, defending Eunice from the abuse that plagued the home. When her brother, whose name is Francis, reached to Flying Kites for help, we were honored to welcome them into our home.

Since then, only a year and a half ago, Eunice has climbed from last in her class to number eight out of twenty one. Despite the depths to which her young life has taken her, she remains resiliently open to great joy and it never ceases to amaze us.

Eunice is fearless but never foolish, a characteristic that has gained her equal harmony between the boys and the girls in the house. She is a precocious young girl who is both humble and full of fire. Eunice has a flair for making funny faces, playing card games, and just like her older brother, a gift for dancing, rapping, and writing poetry. There is a depth to Eunice that gives her a presence that belies her young years and enables her to connect with both children and adults in an incredible way. Eunice has a laugh that can instantly cast a bright light over an entire room. To see her and her brother arm in arm together is melting, and the echoes of their laughter and the inspiration they gain from one another is as definitive of love and conquering as anything.

Gorgeous is the Mystery

Two years ago, I drew a ‘y’ on a napkin.  One arm pointed naively, generally, abundantly toward East Africa, while the other pointed in similar suit to New York.  Both were as vague in shape as they were powerful in pull.  Choosing which vision to chase was as electrifying as it was agonizing! I wanted so badly to see into the future of both and know things I could never have known. I found peace in a choice and a feeling, dug blind as a mole and ardent as a forest fire, and my life has forever been illuminated.

Two lessons learned. The first is that it matters far more to trust in callings unknown and step toward them, than ever to question where they will lead.  And second, the Universe is an eavesdropper; a feeler; a provider for the radiant soul.  Speak, shine and even more than getting what you want, you’ll get what you need.

Where’s this all going?

In January 2013, Flying Kites has offered me the opportunity to serve as Executive Director in Brooklyn, New York.

It means a lot of things.  It means book one becomes book two – subways, neons, and a whole new kind of forest. It means a profound, creative opportunity and a whole new cultural vantage point.  But it also means gigantic change, some of which sparkles and some of which aches.  All of which we will explore together, because I am excited to announce I am taking that step.  But I need you with me.  I need you to help me make the next ten months the most epic, the most beloved, and the most meaningful.

Are you with me?!

I’m setting a new goal.  I’m going to convince you to do something remarkable, today.  I’m going to ask you to make a real commitment to one of our children by sponsoring them.  $12 a month. That’s it.  Give it a name: two less drinks; one less shirt. Give it a name! It’s a trade. And because I know the kind of heart reading this, the kind of people I love, I’m setting the goal of signing-up 100 people by May 1^st. 

Help me show these kids and this family (and my bosses!) that they’ve put their stock in a good horse – a good mole.  Email me direct (brian@flyingkites.org) and paste this in the body:

‘I’m with you! I’m beside you! I’d like to forever change a life today.’

Together, we’ll pick a very real child and develop a very real relationship. You and I.

Gorgeous is the mystery!  Simple is the step.

Brightest Hope and Love,

Brian

Week Nine: How Little We Know

To borrow the words of our profound little Benson, “Uncle, you have not done writing in so long. You will start where?”

I will start with a list.  The kids first kiss with the ocean; my mom and brothers carving tall grass in the Mara, sweeping kids into their arms, button-hooking the luminous hills of Rwanda like the glowing pages of a pop-up-book; a fifty year rain record; Father Christmas and ‘the deers;’ the rainforest; the new year; back to school; more jobs; Angie’s mom; the most awe-inspiring Kilimanjaro group, and the sun – thank heavens – the shining summer sun!

2011 was a mad course; a hailstorm of implausible trials; a relentless test of sacrifice and surrender.  From it though came opportunities to better love, better provide, and more wholly find meaning in this wild journey.   So with optimism saluted and love exalted, I welcome the clean vastness of the year now upon us.

We are limitless.  Let’s start acting like it!

Scene from Rwanda / Ode to my Mom and Brothers:

In the trunk of the LandCruiser, a seat is folded down.  From it, I am watching hills upon hills of tea leaves and banana trees dance a slow whip along rivers looking born from a pottery-wheel.  My mom – in her quiet strength – is taking in every child waving and every dress blushing in the wind.  My brothers are laughing, making me feel like I could easily die from happiness overwhelm.  And then the rainforest, when I suddenly knew nothing about anything and was honored to be so humbled by such fearsome beauty.  Please, bury my heart in the rainforest.

To Mom and Blake and Brandon, I am so thankful and so in love it chokes me in fullness. For every pothole and mud stuck shoe, every airport race, fear-conquering and wandering conversation, I am grateful.  Thank you for your patience, your sense of humor, and for expanding my bounds and the bounds of love for the kids. You can see me now, and that makes all the difference.

Chapter 3 : How Little We Know.

This weeks test of compassion is to embrace how little we know.  By this and only by this can we more fully ‘inhabit our humanity’ and sail in the beauty of mystery, instead of ‘pluck out the heart of it’ for ourselves and for others.

Muumbi and Mwangi.  Do you know these names?  If you don’t, it’s best yourecoil to last post and come furling back to see some serious wings throw open.  For those who do, it’s time we cut loose the hive of inspiration and stand the hairs on our arms like soldiers of the Royal Compassion Army.  Wisdom is the horizon love, let’s run for it.

Muumbi is in an IDP camp; her worldly possessions scorched, her family scattered, and her future is in every way cryptic and dark.  She is one refugee in a forest of desperate thousands.  Mwangi is sitting on a mattress with his pregnant wife, his orphaned nephew, and food has run out.  He doesn’t have one coin to build on, not one second to rest, but every reason to fold and sleep. He is one hungry man in a sea of billions upon billions hungry.

Not everyone makes a comeback you know.  It’s a lottery, who will be chosen.  And why them?  Why them and not me?  We spend so much energy swimming in search of answers for these huge aching questions.  But what if the creators of the lottery and thus the creators of those questions of inequality?  We are. And if we created it, can we not repair it?  We can!  And what if the answer to all our hungry, panging questions was wildly simple?  It is.  The answer:

Create scarcity and there will be scarcity;

Create abundance and there will be abundance.

Compassion is an inexhaustible resource; boundless, timeless, and infinite.  It’s our GIVING of it – our making sacrifice for another’s betterment – our inaction – that divides a world of scarcity from the world of which we dream.

Think of it like this.  For your two hands, there are two hands reaching.

Chapter 4:  Hands Together

It’s not easy to shine in an IDP camp, but blessings come from strange places.  In her efforts to project hope and find potential goodness, Muumbi found light where there seemed little.

“I met my greatest friends in camp.  Still now, they are the greatest.  One of them was working for the Red Cross at the time, helping care for us others, and she told me there a was ‘a good Samaritan’ I should meet and she arranged a meeting.”

He was a total stranger.  He said, “I have a house you and your family can live in for the next five years.  No cost.  I ask only that you return a favor to someone else someday.”

I asked Muumbi what she feels now thinking about his act, and she said this:

“In losing everything, I learned you can be rich and be poor in the same day.  To be rich takes a long time and a lot of hard work; but to be poor can take only one day.  And I’ve also learned that goodness comes from the smallest things and the smallest acts.  That man, that ‘good Samaritan,’ saved my family’s life sharing just what he had.  We didn’t have a single piece of furniture, not even a chair to sit on, but just by coming together – my husband and I and our remaining children – we had a chance to come back and live.  Not the life we used to live, but a life that could still have peace.  We came together and achieved this.  Every hand was needed and when people gave just what they could, that was enough.”

Chapter 5:  Pairing and Pairing

For Mwangi, one person could spare only a 100 shilling note torn in two pieces ($1.20).  He said he couldn’t’ find anyone who would take it and wished our warrior luck.

“I knew I could go without eating, but my wife could not.  I can hardly think about that pressure even now.  I took the bill, hoping so much it could be the start of a change, and went to the bank.  The woman at the counter said the only way she could change it was if I had an account, but I didn’t have any money to open one.  So she said ‘I’m sorry, there is nothing I can do’ an called the next customer. I started to choke up, as if to cry, and I turned to walk away.  She said ‘sir, wait’ and reached through the window for the bill. I remember how that felt to me; the hope that I felt just from that turn.”

Mwangi bought food with the bill and later met a man who he told the ‘torn-bill story’ to.  The man decided to loan him 5000 shillings ($65), with which Mwangi bought kitchen utensils from the city and went from village to village, door to door selling, until he had enough to pay the loan and start over.  “Ask anyone who I am and they will tell you they know me, just because of how far I went with those spoons!”

“I knew I couldn’t support my nephew, even with what I had going and my son was born at this point, so I took my nephew to a place called Flying Kites.  I appealed for help, but they were full.  Many people come to them seeking help.  But I was lucky to meet the manager and overhear him talking about how they were struggling to get birth certificates made for some of the children because of some government issues, so I volunteered to help them.  I felt that if I could show him my ability, they might consider me for employment.  I stopped selling my wares and put myself completely into this small project.  And I impressed them.  They really stood for me after that.”

“So, first came Flying Kites.”

“Then came Mike and Jane.”

“And then came Njabini Apparel.”

“In the strangest way, I am doing everything I have ever dreamed of being able to do now.”

Chapter 6: Njabini Apparel

What if one pair of hands could grab many?  What if hands once reaching, were now hands grasping others?  What if scarcity became abundance?!!!

This is the story of Njabini Apparel:

A woman named Jane introduced a you man named Mike, a Flying Kites volunteer, to a woman named Muumbi.  Muumbi made the first line of test products.  Mike founded the fundamentals and developed a market, and he needed a manager to scale the whole business up.  In consulting Flying Kites, he found Mwangi.  And what was once was a single scarf is now near 170 per month, and what once was just Muumbi – one woman and one family forever altered – is now fifteen and growing.

…

“I think about my son and I could cry,” says Mwangi. “I think about how beautiful his life will be, how different it will be from mine, and I wake feeling so proud.  Because of Njabini Apparel I am now in business school, as I always dreamed, and I get to manage a business that helps women provide for their families.  Flying Kites found my nephew a sponsor so he is in a great school with many opportunities, and now I get to be a leader in my community, bettering my community.  So when you ask me about our products, I will tell you we make them as perfect as we can… because our whole life is in them.”

“I think about the day I was sitting on that bed, and I can only thank my wife.  If she wasn’t serious about loving me, she could have left me on that day.  She is a good friend.”

Muumbi now provides for three of her children, her husband, and two of her grandchildren left without parents from the violence.  “Can you imagine that I used to be unable to afford a single pencil?  And now because someone buys a pair of slippers my son and daughters and grandchildren can go to good schools?  We eat and grow because of Njabini Apparel.  I used to just want for my children to be fed, and now one is working to become a doctor and one a nurse.  So when I make a scarf, I use the pride of a mother.  I used to be so ashamed that I couldn’t provide for them, but now I am able, and I am so grateful for this.”

Mike Behan is student at Northwestern University and because he is an incredible friend, I know he will kill me if I praise him with too much gusto.  But he deserves every ounce of love.  Njabini Apparel is building something for the community, owned by the community.  If you ask Mike or Mwangi whose company this is, they will both say ‘this is the women’s company.’  ‘They are the pioneers of this.’  The truth is, it’s equal parts of all.  And we, as Flying Kites, are the beneficiaries of their work.  So every purchase goes to supporting women, supporting childcare, and supporting the local economy. Support Muumbi, Mwangi, Mike by visiting Njabini Apparel and ordering their product.  Just as hands reach, feet can reach too.  Give them slippers.

http://www.njabiniapparel.org/

In end, it’s as simple as a whole world of people looking for the same thing:  Abundance.  Deeper meaning.  Deeper connection.  A good Samaritan, a Red Cross worker, a torn bill, a bank teller, a grocery store entrepreneur, a young man with a great idea; an orphanage in the mountains.

What hands will you grab today?  Embrace the mystery of what could come.

Create Abundance!

Brian

***All photos by Brandon Jones

Week Eight : Action : What Would You Wish?

Week Seven: Mindfulness

I read a story about a woman who collected rare books and original works of art and treasures from a life of world travels.  Her house was a museum; her soul exhibition. Then a forest fire came, swept the gilded mountainside, and swallowed everything.

And of all the priceless artifacts, what remained?

…

Only the things she gave to others.

…

 “This,” she said, “was her lesson in nonattachment and the virtue of open-handed generosity.”

For it’s simplicity and inherent wisdom, I love this story.  In my life here, there are few constants.  In fact, it feels often that there are only two.  There are forest fires and there is the beauty of what remains.  Or, in less poetic terms, there is endless change and challenge, and thus endless opportunities to unearth boundless meaning and enlightenment.

It’s not hard to find people here or anywhere in this world who have at one point lost everything.  And I mean everything.  Then of equal wonder, there is another course of emptying; there are those who willingly and lovingly give all they have away.  They are immensely dissimilar courses, as different as something being taken is from something given away.  But reader, if there is one thing I have learned from this place, it is that we are destined to be thrust open, ever-more deeply!  By force or by choice, it is our destiny to learn to let go.  And in doing so we learn to separate what one day wash away, from what will endlessly remain.  Or, as Rumi said,  “If you are in love with the infinite, why grieve over earth washing away in the rain?”

“Of all you see, only love is infinite.”

Wisdom is the horizon my friend; there is no time to waste!  The tingle pouring from the crown of your scalp, the one galloping down your spine, that’s the vehicle which will carry us.

Since I last wrote, Kenya has engaged in war, my hair has grown longer, food prices have exploded like a stop-motion film, and between theft and surgery and biblical rains, this recent chapter has been something I imagine sea captains write their wives about.  But like yogis and sea captains alike, every flow has it’s ebb.  And I’m finally in a place to breathe and be thankful for the lessons left gleaming in the wake.

Angie is here, gardening gorgeous dreams and inspiring a whole new sense of family.  And by her lead, a whole new cast of inspired sculptors are here lending their strong hearts, hands, and wings.  Julianna is missed deeply and daily, though we smile knowing she is home building our bright future.  And the children!  The children are as fit as I’ve ever known them, academically, physically, emotionally.  Imagine twenty-six feather-weight fighters on the road to glory!  Pink gloves, sharpened pencils and pearly whites.

But here’s the kicker, we as Flying Kites need help.  Everyone who reads this blog or browses our website sends the most gorgeous words of encouragement and invest great hope in the value of such equitable work, but less than two percent actually do something tangible to make it grow.  So I’m appealing to you today, with all the energy I have.  It will take more than a wish to make us live.  It will take an act.  So for me, or for whatever reason you chose, take thirty seconds to give five dollars, even ten.  Make a wish a reality.  Just click.

We have more lives to learn from and to change.  So with a pure heart, let’s plunge into the present.  I am looking into eyes that could jump a car.

Chapter 1:  Mummbi (Moo-m-bee)

Mummbi’s fingers dive through one another like dolphins towing leashes of warm yellow yarn.  She’s knitting a scarf, narrating a tale of tragedy and redemption and ceaseless substance.  She speaks of it all like weather; like water sculpting rocks.  She is a grandmother of similar composition; water and sculpted rocks.

“When they came, I grabbed only one thing.”  Her hands locked in a pause and her eyes flicked up. “I grabbed a thermos full of hot tea.  And then we ran.”  She hung like a picture frame in that moment, like the event was projecting on the wall behind me, then she kick-started her fingers and resumed the dolphin dance. “I knew with this I’d have something for the baby.  But that was it, three of my eight children, my grandchild, my husband, and a thermos of milk.”

They burned everything.  But neither flames or screams consumed Mummbi the way worry for her five missing children did.  I’d love to tell you that she found them.  But she didn’t find them all.  News of some came from friends; news of others came from the morgue.

It was a tribal war, so it didn’t matter what kind of person you were.  It mattered only what kind of person you were.  So they ran to their kind, to the Kikuyu Highlands, where a Red Cross IDP camp was filling like a teacup in a field of rain.

“The moment we arrived, we were separated.”  There were halls for women; halls for men, for children, for the sick and halls for the elderly.  For two weeks she was frozen here, without anyone or anything besides a bed to try and sleep in.  She did not know whether her missing children were dead or alive.  She didn’t know when she would reunite with her family in the camp; she didn’t know what they would do from here; where they would go; how anything could ever be anything again.

She said, “I begged them to let me stay with my daughter who has epilepsy, but they could only allow me to see her when she was having a seizure.  So in a strange way I was hanging to the hope that I might get to see her.  That felt like all I had.”

“This was the lowest place I’d ever known.”

Then something extraordinary happened.  A single friendship.  And from this a single act of profound generosity.  And from here, eventually, the beginnings of redemption.  But how and where?  So much has been lost.

Wisdom is the horizon!  Stay with me!

Chapter 2:  Mwangi

His hands are clasped on his stacked knee, legs crossed, and his broad smile is tucked neatly beneath his bowing forehead, like a pocket-watch in a winter coat.  What he could say is that he dug holes to put himself through school.  That for two cents a hole, he worked hard from the moment the bell rang until the sun bruised itself purple.  And when the final exam came (the equivalent of SAT’s), he could say ‘I didn’t have the 4,500 shillings ($45) to enter the room, so I had to spend the entire year to come just digging and washing and hustling, playing teacher and student in the evenings, until the opportunity came again.’  And what he could say is ‘that test finally came, and I earned every ounce of question and every right answer on it.’  But all that humble Mwangi says is, “I worked hard to put myself through school.”

His dream was to make it to college and someday hold a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management.   So with his hard earned high-school diploma, he set off to find work, to save money, to once again put himself through school.  He took a job with a company called Spring Box, making plastic bottle tops in a plastic bottle factory.  “At first I was excited!  True. I was making 200 shillings ($2) a day, and it took time before I realized I could never really live on such an amount.  Then I met a girl on a bus, and we fell in love.  And I didn’t even have enough money to take her out.  So I started working much harder.”

He stopped eating lunch, started working fourteen hour nightshifts, and he jumped on so much overtime he typically worked all but two or three days a month. “I realized I was going nowhere in the company, but I was grateful to be able to work as hard as I wanted to.  I knew I was learning important new skills, so I focused on those things.  I was pursuing my dream.”

Mwangi saved enough money to pay the dowry for his bride and left Spring Box.  And while there wasn’t enough for the management course or much to start a life alone on, the couple came up with a plan.  They’d moved into Mwangi’s parent’s house, Mwangi would return to odd-jobs, they’d invest the money they had, and they’d began saving for the future; a future which was already growing in the belly of mom.

Now, reader, the fire sparks.  Mwangi’s step-sister started taking drugs a long time before this and after five years of having neither seen or heard from her, they too got a call from the morgue.  And only a few short days later, her young son stood cold at the family’s door.  So they took him in and loved him as their own.  At this very same time, Mwangi’s father’s condition worsened.  He’d suffered from a spinal disorder all his life, but support from a loan group kept him ahead of his medical bills.  Until, it didn’t.  Until he defaulted on a hefty loan.

Mwangi looks down at his knuckles, his breath shortens, and his eyes are swelling.  Like Muumbi, the film is reeling.  “It was brutal,” he said softly, “There were no negotiations.  They came and took our land by force.  I had 1,600 shillings ($16) in my pocket and I was afraid for my life and for my family.  Everything we’d started to build was taken.”

“It felt like all of the sudden, everything was gone.  I was in a town called Njabini, in a one room apartment with my pregnant wife and my orphaned nephew.  All we had was a single bed in the middle of the room, a bag of porridge flour, a bag of rice, and two cans of charcoal.  Not a coin in my pocket, and  I can cry thinking about that day even now.  I will always remember that day.”

Reader, this is thankfully not the end of the story, but it’s also not the end of the trial.  The food ran out.  And the pains of being hungry are nothing compared to the pains of knowing your pregnant wife and your unborn baby are hungry.  But once again, as we will soon find, a single friendship and a single act of generosity will snap like a key through a bolt, and a course of unimaginable redemption for both Muumbi and Mwangi will converge.

And an opportunity for us to join their story will come.

For now, my friend, this is where I must leave you.  I hope light is crashing all around you and you blanketed in gratitude for all the freedoms you have; for how totally limitless you really are.  Give love today with unguarded faith and receive it wholly and mindfully.  Every drop makes for a bucket more full.

This week’s focus is the practice of mindfulness, the practice of “using our mental energies more kindly and productively.”  It is a way, by non-judgment and self-reflection, to become more harmonious with the fullness of each living moment.

Let today be enough.  Let today be full.   Make an orphanage in Kenya grow.

Love is Infinite!

Brian

Week Six: Open Your Eyes

Week Five: Empathy

YOU!  Yes YOU, reading this!

I am watching tears fall like an April windowpane from two eyes that could not be more deserving.  This elation; this equity is in bloom because of YOU. Kadogo is sitting in a worn navy dress; her soft face is buried in her hands, and she is gasping for air, gazing in intervals toward the ceiling.  Her life has been forever changed today, simply because a handful of people cared enough to sacrifice for the betterment of another.  I am blessed to be the translator of this extraordinary, human togetherness.

She used the corner of a sweater sleeve to wipe her wet lips, saying “Do you know what you have done?  My goal for almost all my life until now has just been to have a small farm, and a good house; something to share with my children.  And now, for the first time, it’s like a light has been shined on this part of the path.  It feels as though I have been pregnant for so long, and just now I gave birth.  It’s very painful, childbirth, but when you have a baby, it’s like you are on another stage of Earth.  Nothing else can say how I feel.”

“To you who did this, you will never be forgotten in my heart.”

…

We will continue following the lives we touch mighty lover.  In five weeks, we’ve altered the course of ten lives, at least, all through mothers, all sustainably and lovingly; all through simple acts of compassion.   Think about how simply we can change lives on the other side of the planet.  In a matter of seconds, we can touch someone nine thousand miles away.  I could dance for this, but you’ve heard plenty of my fireworks.  Let’s just dig our hearts into the next.

The Art of Opening:

In Kiswahili, the word Susu (pronounced ‘Sho Sho’) means grandmother.   This term is extended not just relatives by blood, but rather as an endearing name for women of elder wisdom and value.  A clever young person can collect many of these guide-lights, but inevitably a few shine with particular resonance. The one sitting with me now is without question one of the most inspiring I know.  So for today we will call her by this name, Susu.

When you touch Susu’s hand you can feel the whole Earth; soil, rain, splinters, thorns and new growth.  They are as worn and cracked as an elephant hide; strong as an axe handle.  And with everything she says, they are her paintbrush.

Today, she is wrapped in dirty neons, pink and green; all flowers.  Her eyes explode at the corners like sunrays; her beautiful wrinkles pinch closely together like hands in prayer.  She is showing me her knees, how they are swollen from carrying firewood; then she asked me for water to sweep down her pain medication.  I don’t know if I have ever met someone who alone could aptly compose a coffee table book.  Her memory is incredibly articulate and her sense of humor is wry.  But most of all, she is a mountain of sacrifice and compassion.

This is why.

…

Susu saved a life.  And in doing so, she saved her own.  This is what I’ve learned true love to be, when you don’t know who saved who.

Let’s start at the beginning; Christmas morning, 1943.  This is the day Susu was born in the Rift Valley.  To make a long story short, she was ‘relocated’ to the Central Province (where we are now) during the Colonial Era, went to a Catholic school, and eventually became a teacher.  Then one day, she was ‘chosen.’

In her tribe, in most tribes actually, this is how it worked.  A man spotted an attractive woman, elders were sent to arrange the marriage, and life suddenly wasn’t yours for the planning.  “Next thing I knew,” she explains with a smile, “I lived in this grass thatched house with a man I had never spoken a word with.  Not one word.”  

“It was traumatizing,” she said.

Now, I have to mention something about Susu.  She is wildly hilarious, and a salty bird at that.  So when you show clear empathy or a certain depth of vulnerable emotion, she takes you down with laughter.

She said, “When you’re young you think you know what being married is like.  And during the day, I did know what being married looked like. I’d seen that before.”  A smile is breaking across her face.  “But then night came.  And I was like, ‘what is this thing?!”

Susu spoke endearingly of her husband’s qualities, his kindness and understanding, but she likewise admitted that she never did love him the way she knows love can be between two people.  He was an orphan and a cattle herder; gone almost every day.  Beyond this, he was nearly as quiet as their relationship prior to marriage; spend most of his life in his head.  She took care of him as a wife here is expected to, and she found great meaning in this act.

But then came the 17^th of November, a long time later; the day everything changed.

…

“I kept having the same dream, for almost three weeks.  It was so real I would wake up and touch my stomach to see.  I was pregnant in my dream.  And somehow I knew it was a baby girl.  I could feel her.  I told my friends, and at my age they would laugh at me, so hard.”

This particular November 17^th was a Sunday, a sunny one.  Susu woke up early to pull vegetables from the garden before church.

“I remember it so clearly.  I pulled carrots and filled my basket, changed into my Sunday clothes and left.  I went to church and left early to sell my produce in the market.  When I got their, I saw one of my friends stacking her potatoes. We started talking and she told me that she heard people talking about a baby girl found by the river; that the baby had been abandoned, no more than a half-day old, and she’d been taken to a clinic; no one was claiming her.”

…

“I wasn’t even thinking.  It was like I could feel her.  I just left my things and started walking.” 

A police officer and a doctor stood above a small table, displaying the baby.  She was naked, not yet cleaned from birth, crying and jolting.  The police officer and doctor raised their heads in surprise as Susu walked straight up to the baby girl and picked her up.

“I saw her laying there naked and I went straight to her.  The policeman said ‘what are you doing,’ and I said ‘she is mine.’  It was instinct.  I still can’t believe I did it.  I just tucked her beneath my sweater, and the policeman said I would need to come to the police station.”

The policeman knew this was not her child; everyone in the station knew this.  But without her, what would come of this precious life?  So they just followed procedure, as if she had collected a child that wandered off while she sold carrots to the brightly dressed dressed churchgoers.  This is how Susu saved a life.

…

She’s smiling again, clearly building up again for something in the face of my defenseless awe.  She said “Can you imagine what happened when I went home?!”

“My husband was sitting in a chair in the corner.  He said ‘where did you get that?’  And I said, ‘I did not wish to disturb you, but I have been pregnant. And just now, I went to the clinic and had the baby.  So, we have a baby girl now.”

“And, let me tell you something, he believed me.”

She is laughing so hard she is crying.  It’s like she still can’t believe it worked.  “He’d seen me bathe, and still he believed me!”

They agreed to name the baby after his mother, Njeri, meaning ‘ever happy.’

…

 For Susu, Njeri became an anchor of meaningful sacrifice.  She describes Njeri’s presence in her life beautifully in these few sentences.

“To me, Njeri is the embodiment of total peace; my utmost purpose of living.  Caring for her feels better than caring for myself.”

“I’ve spent my life working hard for her to have a great life; to have her own bed and become whatever she wishes to become.  I will die loving her.  And I am thankful for this.”

…

Now imagine this is you.  One day you are sitting in a grass thatched hut with a miracle baby from the river and a not-so-talkative man.  Njeri is four months old and you are rocking her in a chair, trying to make conversation.  And for some reason you uncage the truth.

I imagine the air was frozen in some way, handing like an icicle until it broke.  He spoke; said “well, she’s ours now. Yours and mine.”  And that was it.

…

Believe it or not reader, this brought them together.  Susu and her husband shared purpose.  But sadly, not for long.  Susu’s husband, we’ll call him Guka, died.

Susu started to cry when she told me this; the kind of cry that catches you off balance.  She describes:

“He walked to her bed and shook her hand and said ‘Njeri, you are my mother.  And I am going now.’”  Susu pauses to whisk tears from her eyelash. “and then he said ’You will be left to carry the peace.’  And that night he died.  I haven’t said those words out loud in a long time.”

…

Suddenly Susu was the sole provider.  Her income came from chopping logs, tying them to her head in unimaginable bundles, and hiking them a few miles to town; all for around forty cents per day.

But, because of Njeri and her instinct, she was not alone.

…

Njeri is now ten years old.  She is a living miracle and beautiful in every way.  I hope, in fact, she reads this someday.  This is how Susu described Njeri and all she has become today.

“One day Njeri asked me if she could separate a small portion of the farm to work herself and sell the yield for her own income, so she can buy her own handkerchiefs and cookies.  I decided to let her, and now when I go to the market with my many heavy bags of potatoes, she drags her own small sack behind.  She sells them beside me at the market and shows me the money in her pocket.  Whenever we do okay for the day, she tells me that when I get old, she’ll use her money to raise cows so that I can drink milk with every meal if I want.”

She is like Susu; hard working and selfless and adorable.  But unlike Susu, she is of a new generation.  She is encouraged to dream magnificent heights and has a huge support network in her pursuit of them.  Njeri is a student at Flying Kites Leadership Academy, and in result Susu has asked us to make a promise; a promise to care for Njeri when Susu leaves this life.

Flying Kites has humbly made this promise.

…

Today, Susu still carries firewood every day, farming when she’s not chopping.  This is why her knees are swollen and he hands are their own coarse geography.

They need a help reader.  So this week, my goal is to encourage small sacrifice for their wellbeing.  Susu insists that she would get Njeri to the potential of college, but after this, it will be beyond her.  So she’s asked simply for help opening a college savings account for this miracle child.  Susu has never had a bank account in her life.

It is my hope to surprise her, as we did Kadogo, by putting something in this account to support her inspiring sacrifice; something to signify that the future of both these beautiful people is of great value to us.

I propose a goal of $1000.  If Njeri gets into the University of Nairobi someday, this will get her one semester.

…

Saving Njeri was not an act of compassion, reader; it was an extreme act of compassion.  And while it is not likely you will find a naked baby lying on the path today, there is an immense opportunity born from this.

Empathy is the core practice and lesson for this week, week five of our fourteen week study.  Empathy is the expanding of our sympathies; an opening to another’s sorrow and pain.

How often do we grow annoyed by someone’s bad mood, instead of actively work to listen and repair?  How often to we avoid the grief of others – the coworker, the frustrating friend, or the homeless man outside the grocery store – opposed to actively alleviate suffering?

For those engaged in our quest for self-improvement, this week is solely dedicated to opening more wholly to the cries and callings all around us; to understanding people’s unhappiness and creatively formulating one small act to relieve it.  That’s it.       

…

Start with Njeri.  Tell a child left for dead that you believe in the immense potential and purpose of her life.  Give $1; it’s a symbol.

Limitless Love,

Brian

Welcome Flying Kites ‘Blue Gum House;’ a gift from my Susu and Guka, Barry and Carole.  Watching them first climb the stairs and poke their heads into this magical little world will forever shine in my frame of mind.  Thank you Grandma and Grandpa.  I love you.

Week Four: Love Your Neighbor As Yourself

Dear Reader,

I am learning to hone my craft.  While I had hoped we could meet as students of compassion in a small and achievable act of sacrifice, people don’t give to heart swelling generalities.  People give to specific, visceral stories of real people enduring unreal circumstances.  It seems we must feel pain, as if our own, to alleviate it.  And feel the tremendous joy of another to sacrifice for more of it.

So we’re switching gears.

I’ll continue to trace the wisdom of our Fourteen Weeks to a more Meaningful and Compassionate Life, but I’ll do it purely in relation to the living story in focus.  This means, against the advice of Ms. Karen Armstrong, we are going to break order of the steps.  So I advise with only more fervent passion that you buy and read her book as way of translating these stories into a more regimented personal practice.

The money raised so far from the extraordinary and wildly generous FEW is going to enter our world through this first story, and by the end of it, I hope the MANY are inspired to follow in suit.  But I’m no longer pulling teeth for this.  It’s up to you to be the actor or the spectator.

I’m happy for this turn.  And I hope you are too.  The story ahead is so entirely incredible, you will not believe it be true.  But I can promise you, with great inspiration, that it is as real as your living heart.

“Love Your Neighbor as Yourself”

We’ll call her Kadogo; the woman at the center of this story.  In Kiswahili kadogo means ‘little,’ but as you’ll come to find, our Kadogo embodies a kind strength and resolve that exceeds size all together.

She was born in 1973 in the Great Rift Valley, as the oldest of seven children.  In her tribe, children are given a name corresponding with their birth order, alternating between relatives of the mother and father.  Her five sisters and one brother all had legacy names linking to mother and the man Kadogo was told was her father.  But her name didn’t match up to either.   As she grew older and came to realize the system of her tribe, it became apparent that she had been named after a man she knew nothing of; a father her mother had never spoken of.

“I had so many questions in my heart but I didn’t ask.  I was too afraid, too ashamed.  My mother was very tough, and I knew she would be angry if I questioned her.  So I just locked the questions in my chest.  My whole life I did this,” Kadogo explained from the bench in the kitchen.  “Sometimes I felt sorry for myself.  I made up dreams of what he might have been like, my dad.  But mostly I just tried to keep moving.”

She loved school; it was a space of relief and joy.  But her family could rarely afford a full term, so she would go for as long as the percentage of payment given allowed her to attend.  Often she would be asked to leave just weeks before the exam, thus having to continuously repeat the same portions of the same primary classes.  Reader, can you guess how much a school term cost at this time?  Fifteen shillings. Fifteen cents.  She persisted until she was the only sixteen year old in sixth grade.

It was at this young age that Kadogo met her first boyfriend; we’ll call him Kamweru.  And it was at this moment that everything changed.  Kadogo’s mother learned of Kamweru, and kicked her out of the house.  Despite attempts from village elders, this is how things stayed.  And without a home, without even partial school fees, school came to an end as well.  So at seventeen, Kadogo married Kamweru.  They had four kids and at first things seemed to be okay.  Then Kamweru started drinking.

He’d be gone sometimes for four days at a time, coming home a drunk and abusive mess.  Kadogo did what she had taught herself to do; she took the blows and stored the pain in her chest.  While her husband spent the days cleaning bars in exchange for the left over beer bottoms, she would leave her children at home and sell farmer’s produce in return for vegetables for the family.

“My profit was usually just food.  When I did make a little money, I would hide it,” Kadogo said, cupping her hands like a nest for her cup.  Steam spindled as she blew, staring into a sea of it.  “It’s hard for me to tell you why I never left; it’s mostly because I had no where else to go.  I was so young, and on either side it seemed like someone was just waiting to abuse me.  I believed that if I got a full time job and made an income, I could do something.”

That’s what she did.  She got a job with a flower company called Red Shank. It was a three mile walk in the early morning, and her job was to pollinate the flowers.  This meant that from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. she would meticulously brush pollen into a can from the tiny stigma of each flower, and she would do it with a toothbrush.  Then she would carry the pollen to a pile of seeds, where she would carefully slice open each seed with a straight edge razor blade and gently insert a dot of pollen into the seed.  She did this all day, walking three miles back home to her children, for 90 shillings a day.  One dollar.

Yet she exclaims, “I was proud of that job!  I was proud to be providing for my children!”  Her chest rose with this sentence.

The experience gained from Red Shank and growing difficulty to survive on the lean wages led her to a new job with a company called P.P. Flora; a flower farm much closer to home.  She was led by a rumor that P.P. Flora paid salary according production, opposed to a flat rate. The rumor was true, but now she had to deal with roses.  Mind you, roses aren’t as loving to work with as they are to receive.

“It was tough because of the thorns and all the heavy lifting that went into making their beds.  We had to carry huge bags of sand back and forth sometimes all day.  But we did it as hard as we could push ourselves to do, because we made money according to how many beds we made.  At first it took me three days to make enough beds just to get the ninety shillings I was making in one day at Red Shank, but I got better and stronger. Even the men were amazed by how hard I could work.  I thank God for this lesson.”  Kadogo is smiling a very beautiful smile; the kind you have to tuck towards the neck of your shirt.  “It was here I met two very important people to me; two women who were in the same trouble as me, and the three of us became friends.  We met because none of us could afford to eat lunch, so we would spend the afternoon sitting in the greenhouse talking while the others ate.  I am so thankful for them whenever I think of them.  At the end of the day, the manager would often tell one of us that to keep our job, for no pay, we had to stay late and grade flowers.  So we had to do it.  But to make it better, we agreed to stick together.  We’d all stay late.  This way it would be shorter and we would have each other.  I thank God for this lesson too.” 

“When I would get home late, my husband would be asleep.  He would usually have peed himself in our bed, or sometimes worse.  I would check the kids, and then I would usually be so tired and sore I would just climb into the same bed to sleep.  If I had enough strength though, I would sleep in a chair so that he couldn’t harm me. Life was so hard.  I can barely tell you.”

“We would go many days without food, drinking only hot water until I was paid.  Because of stress and no food, I was fainting usually two, even three times per day. Sometimes I went without food for so long, I was sure I would die.  But worse was seeing my children hungry.  Can you imagine your kids asking you when they will eat next, crying, and you didn’t have an answer?  … I would make a small fire, boil a pot of water, and put grass inside so the smell would fill the house, then I would tell them that we were just waiting for the shopkeeper to bring ugali flower (cornmeal).  I would tell them again and again, until they grew tired and fell to sleep.  Then one by one, I’d lift them to their beds.”

Kadogo’s brother-in-law came to visit, and she was at such a low point she opened the pain her chest and told him everything. And he vowed to help.  Her brother-in-law will be called Nguvu.  Nguvu told Kagodo that he was going to see what he could arrange for her in the village he came from, a place called Njabini.  After quite some time, he called.  He told Kadogo that he’d sent bus fare and urged her to come to Njabini once she received it.  He said he’d take her to a children’s home where she could try to talk her way into an interview; a place called Flying Kites.

…

Long story short, I am sitting with Kadogo now, and she is as much a sister to me as anyone could be.  It’s a strange beauty the way these things happen; the way two people living impossibly different lives, who almost certainly should never meet, suddenly can’t imagine a day without one another.  I am amazed by her daily; her strength and her crystalized inner-beauty.  Our children benefit beyond measure from her loving guidance, and have learned much about themselves (as I have) by the way she bares the weight of her suffering and responsibility with nobility.

This may seem crazy, reader, but can you believe the climax has yet to come?!  Prepare for the most beautiful of twist of any story I have ever heard!

….

On our dusty road, there is a neighbor.  He is a generous old man named Thomas.  For as long as I have lived here, he brings us vegetables from his garden and honey from his beehives, and he grandfathers our kids like they are his own.  He built a tiny shop at the corner of his lot and sells a few household items for extra income.  When we run out of tea leaves, cooking fat, or sugar, we’ll buy from ‘guka,’ grandpa.

Kadogo went to Thomas’ shop to buy sugar one sunny day and they struck up small talk like many times before.  Kadogo told him that she aspires to buy land and move her children to Njabini so they can be with her, and they began to discuss the who’s and what’s of land in the area.

“That led to him asking me where I was from and I told him the name of my village.  He asked me my full name and I told him.  Then he grew very silent.  For ten minutes he was silent and would not speak, so I took the sugar and left.”

“A few days later he came over to the house and asked for me.  He was holding a locket.  He opened it carefully.  On one side there was a picture of him as a young man and on the other the picture of a young woman.  He said ‘is this your mother?’  It was.  I said ‘yes,’ and this is the day I met my father.”

“I feel so many emotions.  I love him and I think he loves me.  But he has his own family now and so do I, so we are learning to know each other.  My children don’t know of him yet.  When I move them here, I will introduce them to their grandfather, but until them I need to learn to know him for myself.”

…

This takes us to the present day, reader.  In the two years since Kadogo graced our mission, she has fulfilled the demands of a job that demand the strength and compassion she embodies.  In her climbing within the organization, she has become a central figure of our house, and her hard work has been met by a salary that allows her to aptly provide for her family.  But her children still live far from Njabini, because the investment required to move them is checked the needs of all who now rely on her income.  The distance between them makes it so she is only able to spend one week a month with her three girls and one son.  So while she has come lengths that few of us can imagine, she is closer than ever to a new chapter in life; one we can help her to reach.

It is misty in Njabini, like being suspended in a Christmas ornament.  Kadogo is making another round of tea for the two of us and I want more badly than anything to buy her a quarter acre of land so she can move her children here and introduce them to their grandfather.  I want her to cry out of happiness, in the face of all the other reasons she’s cried.  But I can’t do it alone.  In fact, I have almost nothing now.  So I need help.  As a combined act of compassion, this is my call.  Will you help me?

It is going to cost around $2200, but thanks to the active lovers of our Fourteen Weeks campaign we already have $1,450.

This means if a few give a little or an even fewer give a bit more, we’ll have enough to see the dreams of a family actualized by the end of this week.  Let the beauty of this thought take root.  We could forever change the lives of these deserving people in one day if we chose to.  How blessed are we for this luxury; this responsibility?

Contribute to this beautiful turn in whatever way you are able and inspired to see actualized.  If we exceed the amount required, grandpa Thomas needs teeth ($250), and there really is no ceiling to the way we can change a life.

Just click this:  I WISH FOR A BETTER WORLD.

…

The lesson for Week Four of our Fourteen Weeks to a More Meaningful and Compassionate Life is to “Love Your Neighbor as Yourself.”  That is all I will say about that.  They could be family.  In fact, they are.  We all are.  It’s time we started acting like it.

There are many stories like Kadogo’s in our world, some far worse, some more easily mended.  They are living all around you, right now, right here.  People needing your love!  What matters is that we slow down enough to care; that you look into them, find your place, and love them like a mother loves.

Kadogo has bravely loved, but at some point, she needed somebody; she needed small and simple acts of compassion.  That made all the difference.

Change the World Today Mighty Human,

Brian

“Flying Kites has saved my happiness and my family, and on top of this the lives of so many children.  I have traveled from hell on Earth to heaven on Earth.  I will serve this cause and these children for the rest of my life.  That is my exchange.”

~ Kadogo ~