Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, And Hope In An African Slum

With a committee of parents set up to oversee the Kibera School for Girls, Jessica and Kennedy head back to Wesleyan for Kennedy’s sophomore year. Their budget for the school is so tight they must limit the amount of times the girls can sharpen their pencils in a day. Kennedy answers his phone at all hours of the night to address business in Kibera.

They brainstorm ways that they can expand the school and provide more services to the community. They start applying for as many grants and awards as they can find available. They win a $50,000 Newman’s Own Foundation grant, an Echoing Green Fellowship, and a Dell Social Innovation Competition. With this momentum, they spend the next summer in Kibera.

When Kennedy must return to Wesleyan for the fall semester, Jessica decides to stay in Kibera without him. She lives in Olympic near the SHOFCO office. One evening she closely escapes a break-in to her apartment. When she wakes to hear perpetrators outside, she calls George who quickly shows up and scares them away.

Jessica finds her place within the community without Kennedy: “As the months pass, people greet me more often as I pass, calling me shemeji, meaning ‘daughter of here’ or ‘sister in law’” (293). The girls are thriving at school and scoring well on national exams.

One of the girls at the school becomes extremely sick, and Jessica helps her get medical care. The girls have AIDS, and the medicine they get from the hospital turns out to be fake, a placebo. This is one of many reasons why Kennedy and Jessica work to build a medical clinic, as well as a community center, for the girls. They need more than education to thrive; they need access to safe medical care. When a 4-year-old student is raped, and they hear stories of more students being raped at home, they start a safe haven house, where the girls can live and study in safety. When the parents can’t get the perpetrator in jail because of a corrupt system, Kennedy and Jessica start the SHOFCO Gender Development Committee to organize help for victims and their families, offering assistance with medical care and police reports. Their willingness to adapt to the needs of the community and come up with meaningful solutions brings them even closer: “This is something I love about Kennedy; his willingness to share and collaborate—to find great people and bring them together around a cause” (307). 

Kennedy returns to Kenya for his winter break and takes Jessica on a vacation to the beach. During their weekend away, he proposes, and she says yes.

SHOFCO continues gaining recognition. Kennedy is invited to the Clinton Global Initiative. Kennedy graduates from Wesleyan, with his brother Hillary, sister Liz and friend George coming to visit from Kibera. Kennedy gives a moving speech during graduation. Jessica and Kennedy get married shortly after graduation while Kennedy’s family is still in town. Kennedy recalls the moving words Jessica spoke in her wedding vows: “Loving you, Kennedy, has taught me that nothing is impossible if you believe it enough” (318). Her family jokes about how this is the fourth wedding they have had between all the surprise weddings in Kenya: “George ceremoniously gave Jessica’s dad the rope that should go around a cow’s neck, saying that he’d thoughtfully left the cow at home” (318).

The success of SHOFCO has grown the organization to an entire sprawling compound of buildings. A community center, water tower, multiple clinics, an expanded school, and a gender violence office is all a part of the growth. At the launch of Kennedy’s Urban Network, an organization that educates and informs citizens, he speaks to the crowd, “‘Alone there is nothing we can do, but together we are powerful,’ he intones, and the crowd goes wild” (322).

In 2014, Kennedy and Jessica open their second girls’ school in Nairobi’s second largest slum. They continue to fight for peace in the community and for an end to intratribal violence, using nonviolent communication and community organizing as their tools.

Jessica ends their story by describing how she finally feels like she is no longer an outsider in Kenya and that she belongs in the community of Kibera: “An old man I’d never met followed me as I walked out and told my visitor, ‘You know she may not look like us, but she is one of us. She is married here’” (324).