Two Years of Wonder - A Memoir

Chapter 1: Ted & Rainbow Children's Home

While living at Rainbow Children's Home and even the years afterwards while in graduate school studying global health, despite my efforts, I couldn't write the book about the children or my experiences with them in Kenya. It was not a question of writer's block. I wrote plenty. But I had no handle on the material. It was overwhelming. In the States I had worked with children who had access to antiretroviral treatment (ARVs); their prognoses were generally hopeful. I had worked with risk groups that were relatively small. I was not ready for the horrors of sub-Saharan Africa's generalized epidemic, where millions of adults were dying, leaving a generation of children with the physical, emotional, and mental scars of abandonment. There was so much need among the children we cared for at Rainbow and our outreach program Eleza Familia (Lift a Family) that I did not have time to be a journalist and chase down every story of interest that I came across. Nor did I have an editor or mentor to coach me through the issues, political, professional, and otherwise. After living with the children for two years, I was hardly objective either. And frankly I was in the way. The character of me in my stories, my own needs for recognition, for praise, my own narcissism and self-righteousness skewed everything. I was not objective about the children and I was hardly objective about myself and the hero I thought I was.

How did Sebastian Junger do it?

Then in 2006 I came across Binyavanga Wainaina's article How to Write about Africa, in a 2005 edition of Granta magazine. Wainaina is one of Kenya's best known journalists and authors, a winner of the Caine Prize for African Literature and a brave advocate for gay rights in Kenya and beyond. His essay skewered the hackneyed tropes, clichés, and self-serving narratives white authors had been writing about Africa—for centuries. It was a long and ignoble tradition stretching to include Karen Blixen to Kuki Gallmann and Aiden Hartley (whose book Zanzibar Chest was one of my favorites). Wainaina shone a glaring spotlight on how these works, even written decades apart, fell back on the same sweeping characterizations of Africans, inevitably portraying them as stereotypes and caricatures, at once as insulting as they were infantilizing. Africa was either a sweltering war torn tragic-scape of starving figures and mass graves or a misty Garden of Eden populated by noble savages, imperiled children, and majestic beasts. But in either case, these settings were to serve as backdrops to the heroic white protagonists who parachuted in and, after an initial period of culture shock, would shed their naiveté and triumph over adversity, recognizing the siren call of fate that called to them . . . to save Africa.

Wainaina's essay was eloquent, witty and—most importantly—completely right.

What a mirror he had held up to me. I looked at my pieces, drafts of book chapters, long form pieces, even short articles that I had written over the years. Each smacked of the very clichés and peddled the same tropes Wainaina's presented. My ego was knocked down a peg. Africa would be just fine without me, fine without another book on vulnerable children and a privileged, white, liberal expat come to save them. I set the writing aside to contribute in less self-aggrandizing ways.

After two years at the orphanage, I went to Emory's School of Public Health and earned my Masters in Global Health, with a focus on child psychosocial development. I landed a job at the development agency, CARE, based in Atlanta. I worked on children's issues throughout the world, traveling all over Africa and Asia. I was another cog in the international social work machine. It was thankfully, and finally, less about me and more about children. I thought I had finally escaped the egotistical, fame monster that I had almost become.

In 2011 when Greg Mortenson was accused of feeding the public lies about his adventures, for the sake of his cause, I saw myself—in his good works and bad. I saw in myself the same neediness, the yearning to be relevant, to make a difference that would earn the admiration of others stateside—a home where a sensitive idealistic man can often feel undervalued, invisible.