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Mwikali's Gift: Tribecans Send Help and Hope to Kenya
By Carl Glassman
On Dec. 10, 2004, in a dry and dusty Kenyan village so remote that
it does not exist on maps, Mwikali Musyoni, 32, bled to death giving
birth to her sixth child. Her passing might have been like countless
others in Africa and developing countries around the world, where disease,
malnutrition and inadequate medical care commonly take young lives.
But out of Mwikali's death has sprung the promise of new life for the
1,000 people of her community.
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Worlds away, in the Tribeca preschool where her brother Robert
Malii, 49, has taught for 18 years, parents were touched by the
death.
"It was so crushing, the absurdity of having this happen
in this day and age," said Ronnie Moskowitz, the director
of Washington Market School, who helped galvanize a movement to
aid the village. "We thought, 'Now we can start to make a
difference.'"
At first, the goals were to help the children who were left motherless
and to fund Malii's flight back to the Kenyan village where his
parents, grandmother, and large extended family still live. Finding
contributors was easy.
"Everybody who I called said, 'How much? How soon?'"
said Karen Brodsky, one of three parents at the school who spearheaded
the effort. "I thought, 'This is unbelievable.' It makes
you realize how important Robert is to everybody. People feel
this incredible love for him."
Malii grew up in a two-room round house with his father, his father's
two wives, and their 21 children. He slept on the dirt floor among
the goats and sheep, and was often hungry. He got his first pair
of shoes at age 22.
For several years Malii traveled among villages, teaching about
gardening, hygiene and birth control before coming to New York
in 1984 with his wife, Virginia, and baby daughter, Lucy. (Their
second daughter, Annie,
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was born in New York. She
now lives in the family village.) As a student at Borough of Manhattan
Community College, one of his teachers was Ronnie Moskowitz, who
picked him to be a student teacher at the school. He later earned
a master's degree in education, graduating with honors.
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Over the years, Malii touched the lives of hundreds of local
children entering Washington Market for their first taste of school.
So after his sister's death, some Tribeca parents wanted to help
his six nieces and nephews.
They asked the teacher what they could do, and he told them about
the village's crying needs.
Twelve years ago the Kenyan government claimed the land of Malii's
previous village for a game preserve and forced its people into
the newly created village of Usalama, in a far-flung arid plain.
There was almost no infrastructure to help them survive.
Like so many villages in sub-Saharan Africa, Usalama is decimated
by AIDS. According to UNICEF, more than a third of the 350 children
in primary school have lost one or both parents, most to AIDS-related
illnesses.
The lack of easily available clean water contributes to a high
death rate among the village's children. Rain is
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scarce and the closest potable water is a muddy stream 30 minutes away
on foot. Villagers, usually women and children, spend hours each day toting
water for bathing, cooking and washing. There is no water for irrigation.
"If the rain fails in December there's no crops, so people start
starving," Malii stated matter-of-factly. Last December, the rain
failed, and many villages subsist on corn sent from the U.S..
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Brodsky, along with Monique El-Faizy and Oliver Phillips, a parent
couple at Washington Market School, decided to try to help Usalama
tackle its water problem. 
"If there is one single thing that can make a difference
in a community's life it is clean water," said Phillips,
a public relations official for UNICEF who has visited Usalama
twice. Phillips noted that 4,000 children die each day worldwide
for lack of clean water.
The group formed Mwikali's Gift, a nonprofit organization that
hopes to raise the estimated $30,000 for a well in the village
and additional funds for other development projects in years to
come.
"It's a gift from us to them," Brodsky said, explaining
the group's name. "But it also is a gift to us, to have this
link to another community."
"Our lives have already been enriched," added El-Faizy,
a mother of two. "And our children's lives have been enriched
by it, too."
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As a newly formed non-profit, the group has not yet formally started
fundraising, but prospects for bringing water to the village look
promising. The effort captured the interest of Engineers Without
Borders, an organization that matches professional and student engineers
with projects in underdeveloped communities. In addition to bringing
drilling know-how to Usalama, Engineers Without Borders can assess
the community's other infrastructure needs, potentially leading
to other vital projects.
Easy access to clean water is almost unthinkable in the
village, said Malii, who returned to Usalama in August to
explain to the villagers the efforts being made on their
behalf.
"It's like a good dream that you wake up from and say,
'I wish it was true.'"
The villagers had heard promises before that had gone unkept,
and they were skeptical. Before he arrived, Malii's family
told him of rumors that he was in this for himself, maybe
looking to skim some money and build a house. So he spent
many of his days in Usalama speaking to villagers, sometimes
more than a hundred at a time, and winning their trust.
"I told them how this started and what it's about.
I said, 'It's your organization, not Robert's. From now
on if you hear someone say it's Robert's, you say, "No,
it's ours." So if it goes wrong you're not destroying
Robert, you're destroying yourself. It will help your kids,
it will help everyone who lives here now.'"
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Malii helped the villagers set up an administrative structure for
different areas of community life, with committees for water, orphans,
the school, and emerging needs.
The villagers did not have to wait for the well to begin benefiting
from their newfound relationship with Malii's Tribeca school. Many
of Usalama's children, their clothes filthy and ragged, needed uniforms
to go to school. The uniforms could be made for just $8 apiece,
but that is a fortune for most families there.
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Here was a project the Washington
Market School community could tackle right away, and with
the children's involvement. Some kids sold books, artworks
or lemonade. Others put on puppet shows at home or gave up
treats to save the money. In two weeks, there was enough money
to buy uniforms for the village's children.
During Malii's visit in August he contracted the job, for
426 uniforms, with a local seamstress. In 30 days they were
done.
The fittings alone were cause for celebration. The entire
village turned out, and children danced. On the day he handed
out the uniforms, Malii said, "You can't explain it in
words."
"There was pride in the children's eyes, joy and hope,"
Malii recounted. "They were happy, unbelievably happy.
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They woke up early
and no kid was late. When they got the uniforms they hugged
them and ran into the classroom to put them on."
A few days later, Malii recalled, he saw that his nine-year-old
niece, Mbula, a daughter of his late sister Mwikali, had not
yet tried on her uniform. The girl was now the caretaker of
her baby brother, whom she kept strapped to her back.
The uniform remained in a plastic bag, tied tightly shut,
and Malii asked the child why she hadn't taken it out.
"I don't want it to ever get old," she told him.
"I said, 'You can iron it so it doesn't get all wrinkled,'"
he recalled. "But she said, 'No, it is very precious.'"
The founders of Mwikali's Gift hope that their small nonprofit
group can be a model for other schools looking to provide
precious resources to poor communities. The key, they say,
is the personal bridge between the schools that are affluent
enough to support a cause and the communities in need, whether
in Kenya, Bangladesh, Appalachia or New Orleans.
"The reason people are mobilizing around this is because
of the personal connection," said El-Faizy, a reporter
for the Daily News.
Though plenty of work lies ahead, El-Faizy said she is amazed
by how much the group has already accomplished.
"For years I've been saying I should be involved in something
and now that we're doing it, it's shameful how easy it is,"
she said. "It takes so little to transform somebody else's
life."
For more information on Mwikali's Gift, write to mwikalisgift@nyc.rr.com.
The group is currently looking for a pro bono lawyer and an
accountant who are familiar with the laws of giving abroad.
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