Hope Runs

by Claire Diaz-Ortiz

  Back to water, I thought. Water that the Kenyans barely drank anyway.

  As long as nothing else remotely interesting is happening, the cheerers can be counted on to sit manning the water station for five hours as boys, girls, and Lara and I run the loops. They refill the water dutifully, and Edwin, in his floor-length purple down jacket—regardless of the weather—takes his job particularly seriously.

  “I give the cups,” he says, chin held high.

  “Edwin, you are ridiculous,” I respond in turn.

  “I have drunk,” he says, referencing the water he sips far more than he passes out. Given the constant wars to force water drinking, Edwin is the most hydrated Kenyan I know.

  “That was very good English, Edwin.”

  He smiles, his belly sticking out in pride.

  On days when there are cookies or oranges or popcorn to give out, such items cannot be left anywhere near the cheerers unless Lara or I am around.

  “More popcorn for me?” station manager Edwin yells as the runners come by every five kilometers.

  “No! For runners!” we pant back.

  A week before the marathon, a fever coming on, Lara is perched on her bed with her head out the window, the only place with reception. The man in London is saying he cannot possibly manage to help all the people asking for reductions in marathon fees.

  “That’s eighty dollars per Kenyan and four hundred dollars per American!” Lara says into the phone. And then, “I see.” As she furiously shakes her head, it doesn’t look like she sees at all.

  Sprightly Charles, eight, dances by the window in his turquoise pants with laundry soap in hand.

  “I will kill you,” he sings congenially and then erupts into giggles.

  And I think for the millionth time that these children have taken my heart.

  “The discount they gave is laughable,” Lara says as she hangs up the phone. “And we have another problem.”

  That night the teens who have been training for weeks sit in a circle as Lara and I hold the contracts they have to fill out for participation in the race. “You are too young,” we have to say to a handful of them, including Sammy. It’s awful to repeat the words the London man had bellowed at Lara, and we feel even more awful knowing that we simply hadn’t thought to look up the rules many months ago. We created this problem, and we know it.

  Sammy, whose stick-thin legs and stunted height haven’t changed much since I first met him a year earlier, would surely have been the smallest teen to ever cross the finish line. He seems to take the news in stride. He’s still on a high from shooting a few videos for Runner’s World magazine that they put on their website. More importantly, in the eyes of the community, his prowess with the video camera has proclaimed him a professional, and he has been granted access to more than one local wedding, standing on stage in the church and sticking the camera in the bride’s and groom’s faces as they say their vows. When he finds out that he is too young to run the marathon after all, he pouts but immediately opts for recording the event instead.

  On the morning we leave for the marathon, I wake up to find Lara making coffee while James, the shy running captain, lurks awkwardly outside the kitchen window.

  “What’s he doing?” I ask Lara.

  “He’s nervous,” she says.

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “He doesn’t want to talk.”

  James had been turned out on the streets at a young age, and only by convincing Imani to take him in had he saved his future. His earnestness made his poor English that much more endearing. When he first heard that Runner’s World magazine was coming to write about Imani, he told Lara with excitement, “If one day I see the children of Imani in these pages, I will not be able to hide my teeth.” Although James is stockier than most Kenyan runners and not as tall as he could have been, his dedication is unmatched, and he is more excited than any other for the race ahead.

  By the time we pile into the vans for the marathon the day before the race, half of Imani seems to hate us. By allowing only teenagers to train for the marathon, we inevitably left out dozens of younger, smaller children who might have wanted to run the marathon but simply aren’t old enough to do so. For many children, the impetus to train for the marathon may have been less about running than it was about the notion of an organized and supervised activity that comes with the promise of a thrilling trip built in. I had hundreds of sports teams and after-school opportunities to choose from as a child; the Imani kids have none. Understandably, then, it does seem unfair to smaller children that they don’t have the chance to participate, and we hate that in giving something to some, we are inevitably creating disappointment for others.

  Over the months, one of the most surprising things Lara and I have come to understand about working in an orphanage where any commodity is so valued—whether a field trip or a treasured plastic bag—is that the act of giving is fraught with complications.

  At first we were shocked by what ends up being “giveable”—and I don’t just mean how the children always root through our trash bags. Time with one of us alone is an incredibly precious resource. One day Lara came into the apartment and burst into tears. She had been drawing with the children, she says, and found herself overwhelmed by how desperate the four small girls were for the briefest of her attentions. “Roola, look I make! Look I draw!” They had clawed at one another to score her glance.

  In Kenya, the practice of giving had become one of complete dread for us, and there were few things I had started to look forward to less than personally giving out things. Of course I want the children to have running shoes, and shirts, and shorts, and equipment, but I don’t want to handle the guilt and attendant blame of not giving everyone wonderful—and equally wonderful—items. Especially as the value system dictating different degrees of wonderfulness continues to elude Lara and me.

  In a home of 170 kids, the squeakiest wheel gets the attention. No matter how egalitarian we try to be, when the resources are limited, there is inevitably a food chain that leaves the most enterprising of the kids closest to the desired resources. Many of the children ended up at Imani because they were adept at looking out for their best interests. And as we saw, the bright ones didn’t stop doing this just because they were now living in the relative lap of luxury of the orphanage. When we gave children new shoes, the smart ones pushed their luck and asked for nicer ones. When we gave them an aisle seat on the bus to the race, some children didn’t accept our first offer and instead angled for a window. Although this surely annoyed me at times, I respected it, and I recognized that this behavior was hardly new. This is the story of successful humans everywhere.

  I have also learned to question the very notion that I am supposed to gain pleasure at all from giving out world resources. One could spend a lifetime wondering why my American passport has given me the authority to pass out running shoes to Kenyans.

  After months in Africa, I am starting to come full circle with the giving—and perhaps am finally finding a balance in it all. At the first level, it seems that you give of yourself because you want to help. When we started the running program, this is what Lara and I thought. We were running because we wanted to help the children.

  On the next level, you realize that what you are giving is mostly just helping you and that you want to help because it makes you feel good. In our case, we saw that we were learning more from the experience of living with these kids than they were learning from us. Our lives were changing more than theirs were.

  On the third level—when you are mired in the mess so much that you can’t disentangle yourself from a needy population—you realize it doesn’t have much to do with want. You simply need to help, whether you want to or not. When I came to Africa, I wanted to give shoes. Then I saw how hard giving was. Now I am learning that giving (whether shoes or schooling or money or mosquito nets or health clinics) is an important responsibility, and it’s something that I have the responsibility to learn to do well. My feeli
ngs about it don’t need to be part of the equation.

  And so we faced a decision of whether we should bring any children to cheer on the runners at the race. We once again were pitted as the purveyor of opportunity for some and thus the denier of opportunity for many others. There was nothing we wanted less than making one hundred kids stay at the orphanage while seventy of their peers came on a fancy bus to watch the older kids run a marathon, but it was a simple problem of economics. We did not have the money for more. And so the question remained: do we still take some? Did taking some children to cheer give them a greater chance of one day running that marathon themselves?

  In the cold orphanage apartment of a Kenyan June, we went in circles on these issues too many times to count. Although there were occasions in Africa when we gave everyone nothing rather than giving a few people something, we decided that there were times when passing limited resources to smaller numbers of participants was a good idea, even though it was hardly fair. We took the children who had most consistently completed running practice, even after marathon chances had passed (or were never possible if they were young), and we hoped that this was one of those times.

  Eunice, the cherished orphanage manager with a secret love for Desperate Housewives, comes with us when we set out with the eighteen runners. By the time the two vans pull onto the road, I am on a sweaty vinyl seat next to Mwaniki, the stick-thin poet with the sub-personalities of aspiring model and future car salesman. A couple years older than his sidekick Sammy, Mwaniki says his greatest concern, prerace, is having short enough shorts at the race to make him look like a “true” runner.

  “Me, I like the short shorts,” he had explained to Lara earlier in the week.

  Given that we had far too many donated women’s running shorts that none of the Kenyan girls were allowed to wear (the elders made them run in knee-length school skirts), we were happy to oblige Mwaniki’s fashion concerns.

  Mwaniki makes life hysterical yet complex. One time he convened what we thought was a meeting thanking us for training the marathoners and then launched into a well-rehearsed presentation of the flaws in the marathon shirts the runners had been given.

  “Exhibit one,” he began, numbering his points to ensure that we noted all the particulars of the shirts’ failings.

  “This is just unacceptable, and I ask you on behalf of us fine marathoners to please consider our proposal for better-quality shirts,” he finally concluded as Lara and I looked on in wonder.

  Mwaniki and Lara have a hysterical rapport and are constantly awarding each other the prize for biggest troublemaker. “Mwaniki, you slay me,” Lara is fond of saying, while Mwaniki retorts back, “Me? I do not slay.”

  Within ten minutes of leaving the green fields surrounding Imani, we enter Nyeri town, rumored to be the fifth-largest city in the country, but which always seemed to me on par with a roaring Western town in an old movie. “So this is like the equivalent of Miami—the fifth-largest city in the country,” we had told the first batch of Hope Runs volunteers who came that summer, as we toured them through the shacks on their first days in Africa and showed them where to buy their produce. A few paved streets and a few larger offices stand next to the blocks and blocks of dilapidated buildings, open-air markets, and street sellers.

  An hour past Nyeri—twenty kilometers took that long on the potholed roads of the country—we arrive at the equator. Although the Imani kids have all lived their lives knowing they are an hour from the earth’s mighty equator, the global impact of this for my North American sensibilities is still exciting, and I don’t want to pass the equator without taking part in what I see as a thrilling science experiment.

  We pull the vans over to the side of the road and pay three dollars to one of the dozen science hawkers vying for our business. With no small amount of confidence, he pours water in a jug on one side of the line and it spins right. Then he walks ten feet across the line—which says “EQUATER HERE”—and pours water into the jug again. It spins left. The children are underwhelmed, but they understand from the video camera I have in hand that this is exactly the type of nonsense mzungus like.

  Mwaniki keeps talking throughout the demonstration.

  “Mwaniki, stop talking so the science man can educate you,” Lara tells him.

  “Lara, you know me—I think this is just so interesting,” Mwaniki goads her, rolling his eyes.

  “Troublemaker,” she responds.

  A year later, when Mwaniki starts a profitable little rabbit hutch on the orphanage grounds using money from Hope Runs, he explains to me that one of the greatest perks of the bunny business is that the visiting white people always want to take pictures of the thriving hutch. “Mzungus love to look at bunnies,” he says sagely.

  Apparently, mzungus also love to watch water spin down a drain.

  Several hours later we arrive in Nanyuki, a smaller town in the shadow of Mount Kenya where we are to spend the night, and Lara and I go off to pick up the race numbers and packets. “Our kids want all the gloss,” we assert when a registration woman asks if we really want all the mountains of promotional materials for each of our eighteen runners. In the meantime, the kids busy themselves with the only tourist attraction in town—an outdoor museum featuring giant-sized Bible verses printed on the ground.

  That night after we scour the town for a suitable dining venue, we eat a premarathon dinner of soda, French fries, and unidentifiable meat and then retire to our dingy hotel rooms, each one named after a different African country. As we fall asleep, Lara tells me that Joseph, twenty, said this was the first night he had spent away from the orphanage in four years.

  Malawi (the room) is not good to me and Lara that night, and when we wake up at five the next morning, we have barely slept. Although getting up is miserable, staying any longer on the dirty bed we share seems even more unappealing. Pulling on our running gear (I am wearing Lara’s old biker shorts and an oversized Hope Runs T-shirt) and then piling warm clothes on top of that, we attempt to look like energetic coaches. After requisite door pounding, the teens, emerging in pairs from their particular abodes of Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Chad, vacillate between rowdy excitement and mute anxiety. Lara and I share their feelings. We are all nervous and afraid of what’s ahead.

  After twenty minutes of milling around, we load into the two vans to head toward the race, and the struggling heaters do little to diminish the cold of the central highlands. I am reminded again of how distrustful I had been of the Kenyans when they told me it would get cold in June. Cold? In Africa? This obvious impossibility had left me laughing in the heat of March. Now, sitting in the front seat of the first van, passing out bananas and biscuits, I feel it.

  The vans soon turn out of the main town of Nanyuki, and we drive on empty roads for an hour before turning into the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, where the race is taking place. The Lewa Marathon is famous the world over for being the only marathon of its kind held on a game reserve. It’s also considered a challenge at an altitude of nearly a mile. Dirt roads are surrounded by wild, waist-high brown brush that stretches to the horizon. Occasional acacia trees dot the landscape. The teens stare out the windows, trying to spot animals, as we all listen to Kenyan radio’s Sunday morning evangelical programming.

  As we come closer to the race grounds, we begin to see throngs of Africans, entire families who had been walking since the dark middle of the night to reach the race site expo in time for the start. It is a huge business day for these sellers of small goods, crafts, food, and water, and these entrepreneurs will not be missing it. The occasional African runner, decked out entirely in a Dri-Fit sports suit, jogs along the road, warming up.

  “That one is very smart,” Mwaniki says, admiring an outfit. And then, “Is there more biscuit?”

  Having caught “Kenyan time” from the kids, we have ten minutes to spare by the time we pull into the parking lot—an appalling figure in race preparation terms. The mad dash begins to pin on numbers, go to the bathroom, and rush to th
e start line, where a cobbled mass of thousands stand shoulder to shoulder in aimless array. The kids are thrilled to see Catherine Ndereba, the famed Olympian world-record holder who is competing in the half marathon that day. Ndereba, it turns out, is from a village close to the orphanage. I shake my head at the small wonder of big Africa.

  Everyone is clearly nervous. James, the captain, is silent; Big Rhoda, the stalwart, is more affectionate than usual; and Mwaniki is engaged in an endless banter with Lara. (“Lara, look who’s here” and “Lara, look who’s there” and “Lara, look at his shorts—they are TOO short” and “Lara, you are TOO funny this early morning” and “Lara, you are looking TOO tired now to run . . .”) And then the runners ask Lara to pray. In an orphanage community in which every visitor who is a good person is considered Christian by default, it has never occurred to anyone that Lara might not love Jesus. To this day she is a Christian in Kenya by assumption—mostly because she always goes to church and bows her head when everyone else does. That morning she thanks God for the beautiful day.

  “And Lord, please remind the Kenyans to drink water,” Lara finishes.

  The race begins, but given the unorganized mass at the start line, we spend the first ten minutes running on the small brush outside of the running trail. The notion of marathon pacers—individuals who run the whole race carrying signs with their expected finish times and create masses of timely followers behind them—is absent, as is any concept of starting in relation to your pace time (if you’re running a three-hour marathon, you start in the front of the pack; if you’re running a five-hour one, you start in the back). Thus, we deal with the more annoying race problem of spending the first mile or two just sorting out who is really running this thing.

  I never start fast, and very quickly Lara and I drift toward the back of the women’s pack with some of our teenage girls nearby. Next to us plods Big Rhoda, the most dedicated of our girl runners. She’s not the fastest, but she has an unending commitment to getting the job done. During the infamous Runner’s World photo shoot strike, when many of the teens refused to run for a week after the photographer (and we) showed favoritism in photographing Sammy and Mwaniki more than the others, she had been the only secondary school girl to show up to run. She had said she would, she explained, and so she did despite the other girls’ glares.