by Ted Neill
Harmony someday hopes to meet her favorite singer, Shania Twain.
Rebecca I lost touch with. Weeks would often pass when I would not see her, only to have her surface to my great relief. My hope is that she, her brother, and her friends are in a home somewhere. The alternatives keep me awake at night.
The best plastic surgeons collaborated to repair Lazarus’ face. His head is still misshapen and always will be, but the wounds healed and there is hope that as he grows older, further surgeries might be able to help him look more normal.
Judith continues to support herself working as a seamstress and as a part-time cleaner at a girls’ school down the road from Rainbow Children’s Home where Sofie still lives. There are even days when Judith feels well enough to play goalie in a soccer game with the students. Sofie seems taller each day. She shows all the indications of growing up to be tall like her mother. Judith is eager to teach Sofie how to sew. “It is important to pass on knowledge,” she tells me while she gestures to Sofie. “After all, people are growing up.”
Miriam. Do wishes come true? In 2000 a young businessman in London received an email from a college friend working in Nairobi. The email was a list of children at a home for orphans with HIV/AIDS that needed antiretroviral therapy. He saw that one child had a more expensive regimen than any other. He signed up to sponsor her.
It was Miriam. The drug azidothymidine, otherwise known as AZT, had been one of the first to give patients with HIV hope in the eighties.
Since choosing to sponsor Miriam, his business has become highly successful, making him a millionaire before he was even forty. He visits Miriam regularly. He took her on a trip to Mombasa to revisit the city she was born in as well as a trip to London. He has pictures of the children, especially Miriam, on his walls at home—more than a few people have asked him if Miriam was his daughter.
A few years later, he ran for a seat in the national parliament and won. Now that he is a UK Member of Parliament, I like to think that the children in Africa have a voice that is heard directly by some very influential people.
That voice sounds a lot like a grandmother.
Succinct, pat, a nice bow to tie on the end of all the threads. In 2006 it was all true. But if I ended it there, the reality of the following years would be obscured. With few services available for students with dyslexia, Miriam struggled mightily in high school. As of this writing, in 2018, she is working while also taking college classes. She is still determined to reach a point where she can “give back” and take care of others the way people have supported her, but even now I have an email from her in my inbox indicating she has to visit the doctor because of some a persistent chest infection. It’s especially worrisome since two other members of her age cohort at Rainbow have passed away from illnesses this year, illnesses that would normally be treatable in higher resource settings even with compromised immune systems. Most of the grown children have become internet savvy and so I’ve been witness to their grieving real time in their posts and messages.
But Miriam inspires me daily with her persistence and resilience. She has been through traumas that dwarf my own and yet she still endures. Her dream is to be a counsellor so she may use her own experience to help others. I also know it would be a role well suited for her and her talents, including her incisive ability to read people and her talent for verbal expression. We speak weekly on Skype and I hope that with proceeds from this book we can make her dream a reality.
Singing has also been a gateway for many of the young adults now “graduated” from Rainbow to travel the world, performing for a variety of venues. To say that I am proud of them is an understatement. This very year I met one of the young women who inspired the “Harmony” story in these pages while I was in Washington DC. She has a burgeoning singing career and frequently speaks out for people living with HIV/AIDS. I got to see this dazzling, radiant woman perform her own original songs at a fundraiser full of DCs most influential. For her to be able to sing and even profess her HIV status to a room of strangers was, in her own words, transformational. The next day she traveled to New York City where she met Jay Z, Neo, Nicki Minaj, Alicia Keys, Rihanna, and Beyoncé while also being featured in a series of interviews and articles as a success story. When I contemplate the hills and valleys of her journey, I feel a sense of vertigo on a nearly cosmic scale. Her proximity to fame far exceeds mine at this point, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Social media allows me to see how the children’s lives are unfolding like the lives of many young adults: with a cast of boyfriends, girlfriends, bosses, teachers, rivals—mixed in with a series of concerts, coffee houses, first jobs, first loves, and first days at university. I can self-praise on this one point—I had pointed out to Father McLeod that once Rainbow had ARVs they had to start thinking differently—they were a home with growing children, not a hospice. To his credit, he responded. The orphanage works hard to reintegrate children with relatives and society, as growing up in an orphanage can lead to isolation and stigma. This was the direction the field was going, while I was still working at CARE, with a major shift from residential care to community care. As a colleague once said to me: that kid in the hut might not have a Gameboy like the kid at the fanciest orphanage, but the kid in the hut has something else—love, belonging, roots.
This has led to unexpected costs, as the expenses of raising a child into a teenager and young adult through secondary and tertiary education are considerable, which is why proceeds from this novel will go towards the further education of not only Miriam but other children of Rainbow too.
A further update: Judith eventually became successful enough in her sewing business that she was able to support herself and Sophie, who was able to move back in with her mother. Sophie, tall like Judith now, is now at university studying fashion and design and most recently has been blowing up my phone with her thoughts on the costume design of Black Panther. Her Instagram feed is constantly updating with her burgeoning sense of fashion.
The specter of HIV hovers in their lives. So does rape and sexual assault. Aside from the recent deaths, almost every single young adult has a story of rejection after disclosing their HIV status to someone they were interested in dating. It disgusts me to report this but too many of the young women graduated from Rainbow have experienced sexual assault and date rape, as Kenya still suffers from a rape culture and a toxic sense of masculinity.3 Professionally the grown children face tough odds as well. Without as many family connections as children raised in intact families, they have struggled to find jobs in a limited market where sexism, tribalism, and discrimination around HIV status are still prevalent and “who you know” still plays an outsized role in securing entry-level positions. Some of them also experience memory problems and cognitive difficulties akin to early onset dementia, which has been documented as a side effect of long term ARV use.
And ultimately, there is the uncertain future they feel looming. When Josephine remembered my birthday recently, she asked me how old I was. I told her thirty-eight. She replied, “I hope I reach thirty-eight someday.”
Then she went on to invite me to Snapchat, because . . . well, life goes on.
As I watch their hopes and dreams playing out in their status updates, tweets, and videos, they often express the same determination and optimism I found so inspiring in children like Alexis. Sarah, in her twenties now, who was a teenager when I was at the orphanage, recently posted the following on her Facebook profile: “Nothing is impossible. The word itself says ‘I’m possible.’”
So in the final analysis there is no tidy ending. The children who have survived face life, with all its peaks and valleys ahead of them. They have suffered. Some of them are suffering right now and they will all suffer in the future. But they will experience joy, wonder, and exhilaration as well. That is life, and the fact that we all have it ahead of us, feels like a triumph.
~ A Debt of Gratitude ~
A note of gratitude to friends and family who not onl
y supported me through my own journey but also through the crafting of this book. Thank you to early readers, Linda, Ra, JJ, Ed, Kathy, Jack, Ruby, Tara, Dean who helped me to believe that there was merit in sharing these stories.
Special thanks to Helene Gayle, MD MPH, a Global-Health-Gender-Equity-Crusader-SHERO. Her leadership, mentorship, and support over the years has been invaluable. I know if I can accomplish a fraction of the things she has accomplished in her life and career, I will be able to consider my own life well spent.
Thank you to all my friends in the recovery community who continue to support, nurture, teach me, and check me when I most need it.
Thank you to those on the Rainbow Children’s Home staff, the donors, and the directors and all supporters like them, who endeavor to do what they can to help those in need.
Thank you, especially, to my editors and friends Bethany Gower and Sara Kenley who insisted on nurturing and polishing this work, free of charge, because they believed in the project and because they are awesome. Also, to Agata Broncel at Bukovero Designs who continues to craft transcendent covers that go so far beyond what I could ever request or even imagine.
And of course, deepest most profound thanks go to my brothers and sisters of Rainbow Children’s Home. Thank you for letting me into your lives and your hearts, and for trusting me with your stories. Thank you for your support in how I have represented them here. It’s been a joy of my life to come alongside you and watch you all grow. It is a journey I hope we can continue, together, the rest of our days.
~ Thank You for Reading ~
Thanks so much for reading and sharing our journey. There is a companion piece to this book. It is lighter read, a young adult novel called Jamhuri, Njambi & Fighting Zombies. It is a piece I wrote for the gremlins whom I read to at bedtime each night at Rainbow Children’s Home. The kids wanted a story with characters that looked like them and lived in a place they could recognize. The story is fun and zany, just like the gremlins, and has been the genesis of an ongoing series that I hope to continue.
There are two Kenyan organizations not mentioned in the pages of this book that I have worked with for many years that I wanted to endorse here. I support their visions, their missions, and how they accomplish them.
Little Rock Early Childhood Development Center in Kibera: http://littlerockkenya.org/newsite/ Little Rock was founded in 2003 in order to fill a gap in services for children with special needs in the poorest communities in Kenya. Little Rock provides crucial services through trained staff and volunteers in an inclusive, accessible environment. Their work is nothing short of inspiring. Places like Little Rock are all too rare in Kenya. They are committed to supporting children with developmental, neurological, and physical difficulties. Little Rock is one of the few places where a child with learning difficulties, like Miriam, can find help.
Sauti Kuu Foundation: http://sautikuufoundation.org/en/startseite-en/ Sauti Kuu’s goal is to create a platform for disadvantaged children and young people worldwide that allows them to uncover their strengths and realize their full potential to live independent successful lives. Sauti Kuu works with children and youth in rural regions to enable them to develop realistic and sustainable socio-economic structures. They utilize locally available resources that will guarantee financial independence. In the process, the Sauti Kuu team fosters a spirit of empowerment, helping young people to realize that they do not have to be victims of their social backgrounds or their environments.
Finally, your honest reviews wherever books are sold or discussed online really matter. They help bring credibility to independently published writers like myself and provide potential readers with information that helps them discover new stories like this one.
If you enjoyed this book and would like to more about Ted Neill, his Belong Blog, and the social justice organizations he supports, visit TENEBRAYPRESS.COM. To contact the author, you can send an email to [email protected]
All quoted works reprinted with permission
Thornton Wilder’s “THE ANGEL THAT TROUBLED THE WATERS”
From The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II
Edited by A. Tappan Wilder Copyright ©1928,1998 by The Wilder Family, LLC Published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc. Reprinted by arrangement with The Wilder Family LLC and The Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc. All rights reserved.
Carole Cadwalladr’s, Jason Russell: Kony2012 and the Fight for Truth, Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2017
Notes
1 The US and South Sudan governments are the only United Nations member countries not to ratify the CRC.
2 This is no longer the case today, as the privacy of the children, of the institution Rainbow Children’s Home is based on, is well protected.
3 This is true of my own country and culture as well, but there is diminishing impunity for offenders in the US, while Kenya still has a long way to come to catch up.