Continuing Kenyan journey to help others
Posted: Thursday, October 08, 2009 12:18 PM
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On Assignment
By Yonatan Pomrenze, NBC News Producer
NAIROBI, Kenya – Anena Hansen, a 32-year-old writer from New Hampshire, first came to Kenya last year for what was supposed to be a two-week volunteering stint just outside Nairobi. But she found the work she was doing with HIV-positive women so rewarding – she stayed.
"I didn’t have to have great medical skills, and I didn’t have to throw money at the situation," Hansen said. But she found that "just by being there and caring about them and interacting with them, these women who were very marginalized and shunned in this culture were feeling better because of the emotional psychological support."
She was hooked and found a job working with Africa Mission Services, an organization dedicated to community development among the Maasai tribe in South-West Kenya.
Africa Mission Services focuses on building infrastructure sorely lacking among the Maasai. A medical clinic built by the non-governmental organization has treated over 3,000 patients this year, and more than 1,000 students attend their two elementary schools.
Hansen is working on raising the funds (most funding comes from private donations) to build a secondary school and maternity ward for the clinic, while traveling to the Maasai community to implement an HIV prevention and treatment program.
VIDEO: Two-week vacation turns into mission of hope
But Hansen also wanted to do more for the women she worked with when she first came to Kenya. So she moved to Mlolongo, a truck-stop town on Nairobi’s outskirts which one resident described as a "center of prostitution for the whole of East Africa."
In the age of social-networking, it’s interesting how I found Hansen. I usually work out of NBC’s Moscow bureau, but got a last-minute assignment to help cover U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Nairobi. I decided to try to extend my trip by a few days and checked couchsurfing.org, a Web site that connects travelers who want to meet or stay with locals when they travel.
The idea is clearly an amazing tool for budget travelers, but as a journalist, I find it to be an invaluable way to meet people on the ground and get a more varied picture of a place than I might otherwise get in the State Department bubble.
Hansen’s profile mentioned the volunteer work she is involved in, so the day after Clinton and all the other foreign journalists left, I found myself in a car, navigating unfinished highways and waist-high potholes to go and see it firsthand.
Helping from the ground up
On the day I arrived, Hansen was holding a meeting in her home with local residents. By the end of the meeting, they had formed the Women’s Empowerment Development Agency (WEDA), a community-based organization with the goal of creating a women’s health and counseling center in Mlolongo with an emphasis on helping the commercial sex workers in town.
"We want to empower them by giving them counseling, by showing them alternative ways other than prostitution," said Mary Rainwater, chairwoman of WEDA and head of the local neighborhood council.
Rainwater moved back to Kenya three years ago after living in the U.S. for 25 years. She is one of the 12 Kenyans who make up the majority of WEDA’s 14-person founding committee.
Hansen hopes that the center will provide much more than education about HIV prevention and awareness. The plan is to provide vocational training, teach money management, provide micro-lending and support teenage girls who wish to complete their education.
Hosting volunteers
Meetings like the one I attended have become routine in Hansen’s house, which has also become a mini-headquarters for short-term volunteers who come to Kenya on programs similar to the one that first brought Hansen. Most of the volunteers I met found Hansen through International Volunteer HQ, a program that matches up volunteers to the type of work and region of the world they wish to work in.
Ten volunteers lived in Hansen’s house this past summer, mostly college students from the U.S. The volunteers worked at the orphanage in Mlolongo and at a nearby medical clinic.
"We get to do a bunch of different stuff," said Stephanie Savala, a 21-year-old senior at University of Nebraska at Lincoln. But she said that "the most tremendous experience was to actually be able to help deliver a baby."
The volunteers live on a fairly bare-bones level by Western-standards. The house has running water for just one week out of every five or six. Showering is a rare occurrence, flushing the toilet is rationed, and the electricity is fickle.
But the house is luxurious compared to the homes of the HIV-positive women that Hansen took me to visit. Most live in single rooms or shacks, with corrugated tin roofs and walls, but no bathrooms, running water or appliances to speak of. Still, their biggest challenge is not only poverty, but the stigmas against HIV that make alleviating poverty even harder.
‘He might beat me’
Violet Nduku, 23, said when she first found out she was HIV-positive, a medical worker told her, "You have to tell your husband. I tell him, ‘No, because I am scared he might beat me.’"
Nduku said people will tell her children to stay away from HIV-positive people and she spoke about how some people will refuse to buy things from people who are HIV-positive.
It’s attitudes like these that Hansen hopes WEDA’s community center will change. The group has approached the Kenyan government and other women’s rights groups for a grant to be able to rent a facility, which Hansen said is key to getting the project off the ground. "We can start meetings and offer a venue for support groups, which means this thing can go somewhere."
While the social and bureaucratic obstacles to success are still huge, Hansen isn’t fazed. "Education and empowerment are the most effective tools against the spread of HIV," she said.
For more information on WEDA and Anena Hansen's projects in Kenya, please visit the Web site: www.wedakenya.org
