Hope Runs

by Claire Diaz-Ortiz

  As I give her another hug, she gives me an email address written on a slip of paper. But the email address has my name in it, not hers. She tells me that whenever I get a chance, I should write her an email. She and Claire have given the kids who most liked computers their own email addresses, and if more students want them, it will be my job to make them for other people. I tell her I will. Then she gives me the email password, which reads “ILoveClaire&Lara,” and I laugh when she tells me Claire chose one she thought I could remember. I now have an email and a password and the webpage of Gmail written down all for me.

  Then I give her my last goodbyes, and the matron says that she has to lock the doors for the night, so I have to go to my dorm room. I go to bed with my heart feeling heavy.

  The next morning I wake up really early so I can watch Claire and Lara leave, and I see them just before they enter the car that takes them away. But the dormitory door is still locked, so I can’t get out of the room to say anything more to them. I see them open the car door, and they look at the building from the top to the bottom, from the right to the left, and then they get in the car quite hesitantly. I’m not sure how they feel, but from their reactions, I can see that they have found their families here. A new part of life has come and gone for them, and I am glad to have been a part of it.

  Claire

  Chapter 10

  Leaving Kenya, and leaving Sammy, is one of the hardest things I have ever done.

  That doesn’t mean our life in an orphanage wasn’t free of annoyances, of course. The water turned off reliably a few days a week. The shower always threatened to electrocute us. The children never stopped knocking on our door. But in the midst of it all, we had found a home where we felt happy, useful, and wildly loved.

  My relationship with Sammy in particular was a shock. I loved all the children dearly, and there were many days when I wanted nothing more than to gather them all up in my skirts and take them with me, wherever I went next on my journey in life. But from the moment I met Sammy, I knew there was something different. Our relationship had always been distinctive, and even in an orphanage where Lara and I felt constant pressure to divide resources of attention equally among children, it had become both impossible to do so and hard to hide that we weren’t doing it. Few children spent much time in our apartment (aside from the kitchen, where they ruined pots and pans making the “popcorns” and dreaded glucose concoctions alongside me). Sammy was a regular exception and could often be found on our computers doing photo and video editing.

  Our commonalities were always astounding to me, and day after day I saw pieces of myself in him. His sarcastic sense of humor, his incessant drive to make a life for himself, and his ability to always think outside the box (admittedly in often crafty ways) in order to find new opportunities were things I identified with. It was with Sammy that I truly understood for the first time how parents of adopted children never feel a sense of something “missing” from the equation. Our bond was deep and strong.

  One day in the weeks before we left Kenya, we were sitting in the living room of the orphanage apartment with Sammy. He had been a bit distant since the marathon—he was still angry he couldn’t run, we knew—and wasn’t spending all his free time with us anymore. But he still came by frequently, and we sought him out regularly to try to get him past his anger. That afternoon he was creating a video montage of some footage Lara and I had taken when we had gone on safari the month before. He was combining close shots of the lions we had seen with dramatically cheesy music, and horrific visions of bad YouTube videos to come danced in my mind. We began talking about school and what he wanted to become in life, and I felt compelled to say something bolder than I perhaps should have.

  “Promise me you will work hard, Sammy, so that we can help to change your life. Because we will always be here, trying to do just that.”

  It was an emotional statement—for me—although I don’t know if it registered for Sammy, who I imagined was a bit immune to things adults had told him over the years that never came true. One of the challenges of living with the children was knowing that it was never your place to make grand statements about how much you cared for them or how you could help them. I knew I should never make promises to these children that I didn’t know I could keep, and saying this to Sammy veered into that realm. And yet somehow I felt I could make it true. I had changed since that first lunch at Imani, the day I had looked in that orphanage mirror and asked God to keep my eyes wide open for the journey ahead. I really felt that the journey I had started that day—and the changes I had seen so far in my life—were just the beginning. Even though we would soon be leaving Imani—Lara was going back to school, I was thinking about doing the same, and we both knew we couldn’t grow Hope Runs from the orphanage’s ground-floor apartment—we saw our leaving as the start of the next chapter of our work with Imani, not the end.

  We leave the orphanage in the early hours of a Monday morning—the children still locked inside their dorm rooms—and Lara and I barely speak during the long drive to the airport. We are exhausted, emotional, and overwhelmed by everything that has happened since we first stopped to stay that night at the orphanage all that time ago.

  As the plane lifts off from Nairobi that day, I know that somehow, in a land of tiny children, I have grown up.

  First comes the notion that, at Imani, I realized a greater interest in becoming responsible for someone else. I was single, yes, but I already had a desire to become a mother and had learned immensely about what that means by spending the year practicing that role with dozens of little ones. In terms of Sammy, though, this is complicated. While my parents said they were not in a position to adopt Sammy, and I know I am too close in age to pursue such a legal arrangement, the wheels in my head haven’t stopped turning.

  On the professional side, of course, there has also been a lot of growing up. When Lara and I began receiving recognition for our work with Hope Runs, it started to open doors, and I began to ponder the possibility of returning to graduate school for a business degree.

  By the time we land back in the United States, I am decided.

  I spend two months in California, running two more marathons, and then head back to Mexico, where I work for Hope Runs from afar, study for the GMAT exam for business school, and complete my business school applications. My top choice by far is Oxford University, where the Skoll Foundation has a scholarship for social entrepreneurs that provides a fully funded MBA—even living and travel expenses are included in the phenomenal package. It is, in my research, the absolute best I can find, and despite the dozen applications I turn in, the Oxford scholarship is what I’m angling for from day one.

  In the wee hours of one Mexican night, I have my first interview for Oxford. Skype doesn’t work, so I spend a fortune on a faulty landline. Miscalculating the time zone, I call an hour late. It is abysmal, and I am hardly hopeful for a positive outcome.

  But when the email comes that I have been accepted to the program—no word yet on the scholarship—I think I have a chance at getting it. That same night in Mexico I had been searching the web and had come upon a three-week cruise of Antarctica on sale for nine hundred dollars. I had always dreamed of visiting the continent, and when the good news of Oxford comes in, I go for it. I ask my mother to go with me, and a few weeks later we board the ship. From our tiny stateroom, on a crackling phone line, I have the phone interview with Oxford that will determine my scholarship.

  The ship’s three-week tour ends in Buenos Aires, a place I lived for four months before Lara and I went on our around-the-world trip, and I’m eager to see the city again, so I decide to stay for two weeks in the midst of the blisteringly hot January summer.

  I am in Buenos Aires when I hear that I have been granted the scholarship at Oxford, and I feel a kind of luck I have not known before. I still have nine months before the program starts and plan to spend the bulk of it in Kenya, where I hope to pass some of the time at a language school to improve my po
or Swahili. By the time I make it back to Africa, however, I will find that my life has flipped again.

  Sammy

  Chapter 11

  It has been a few months since Claire and Lara left, and yet we still can’t believe they are really gone, and we all expect to see them around every corner. We are still running together with a coach they found for us, and we still remember them in our prayers at fellowship.

  I have returned to be a part of the running family. Practices are kept up, the coach keeps training us hard, and the team has become closer. We support and encourage each other; when one person stops trying, we help them on. I know this program has worked because we are now organizing it ourselves with the funds Claire and Lara have raised.

  As a Form Two sophomore, I am starting to get more and more serious about my career and about what my future will look like. Who am I going to be? What am I going to do? I think about these questions all the time.

  It is also time for me to start choosing some of my classes. I have always wanted to be a lawyer, so I choose history. I have spent years watching injustices happen to children, and I am tired of seeing kids angry, hungry, and miserable and not being able to help them.

  Practicing law to assist women and children can help, I know. I am also interested in being a computer engineer, so I choose physics for that. I know that Kenya is becoming one of the leading technology hubs in East Africa, and I want to be a part of that world. It excites me to think about helping advance my country in that way.

  Teaching also interests me. After being with kids in and around Sunday school, I think, If I can have kids confide in me, if I can have kids understand me when I’m still young, what about when I get older? I could help them grow and become more intelligent. No matter what, I know that my future career will have something to do with children. I am sick and tired of seeing kids sorrowful, and of being sorrowful myself, and I want to make sure that no other kids go through what I went through.

  I become fixated on studying. And then, as my grades start going up, I start improving even more. I begin waking up earlier in the morning to study. Someone had told us that 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. is when your brain is the sharpest and it’s hardest to forget things, and I find it’s true. By the end of my sophomore year, I am third in my class and I cannot believe it. Ahead of me are two girls who are absolutely brilliant. And I am right behind them! I start rejoicing and thank God for giving me this opportunity to have high grades, and I ask him to help me take advantage of the knowledge my teachers are passing on to me.

  Around this time, I have another friend I am close to named Grace. She joined Imani several years before, and I like how sweet and funny she is. She loves being around kids—helping them do their homework, helping them wash their clothes, giving them advice, or just doing anything.

  One day as we are talking, she tells me that she would love to be a children’s lawyer. I am surprised and glad that I am not the only person worried about the lives of children around us. When I ask more about her ambitions, she talks to me about many of the same things I have been thinking. In her life, as in mine, she has become sick of seeing how bad some parents treat their children. I can understand.

  I start getting even more interested in children’s injustices and how those who have gone through hard times as young kids have managed to come through them. I see a lot of these children around me every day, and it inspires me to know these children are able to survive like they do.

  One afternoon a year later, I am coming back from school when I see a familiar person up ahead. She is white and tall with curly hair. When I come closer, I can’t believe my eyes. It is Lara! Lara is back! Although we have seen Claire and Lara a few times since they stopped living with us more than a year before, it has been over six months since we last had a visit from one of them, and we are all so happy.

  I think I am more excited than everyone else, however. It is Lara, my big sister! She is back!

  I begin running to her and then give her the biggest hug, all the while trying to look like the “big man” that I am supposed to be, since I am in high school. She says that she is just going to be here for a short time, and she starts greeting everyone. As Kenyans do, we begin to tell her she has gotten a little rounder.

  “I see you’ve got a little bit bigger, Lara. Nice and plump,” I say with a smile.

  She looks at me with the most evil eyes like she wants to devour me and says, “No, Sammy. That is not nice.”

  “But that is the best compliment you could ever give to a person!” I say.

  She tells me, “No. No it’s not.”

  “Yes it is!” I argue. “Skinny isn’t good! The plumper, the better!”

  “In America, it’s considered mean,” Lara tells me. “Zip it, Sammy.”

  Who knew? Even after living with Lara and Claire, I never knew that. We all will never fully understand cultural differences, I think.

  Later Lara calls me to the orphanage apartment that she is staying in, and she starts asking me questions about everything: about school, about friends. I explain I have gotten some new friends, especially my new best friend, Simon. I tell her all about my life and about how much we miss her. I tell her that the orphanage has shut down the computer program she and Claire started for the primary and secondary school students, but the running program is going great.

  Then she takes out her video camera and starts recording me, asking me about how I am doing in school and how my grades are. She begins asking really specific questions about my classes, and they seem kind of funny to me. I tell her about the science program, which is okay, and about some of the problems we are having with the lab for the chemistry classes. I tell her about my great grades in history and how much I like it. She says that she is really proud of me, and then she asks me a question that sticks with me. She asks if I would like to change schools.

  I tell her, “Yes, definitely! If I could go to a better school, I would!”

  In Kenya, there are district schools, provincial schools, and national schools, and their resources and prestige go in that order. My school is a district school, and it isn’t good; it certainly doesn’t have all the teachers or desks or supplies that it needs. However, I used to not go to school, so I am glad to be there and we do learn a lot.

  As we keep recording the video, Lara tells me that Claire will watch it and that I should wave to Claire, so I go ahead and make silly faces.

  That night many thoughts run through my mind. I can’t understand why Lara would ask me if I want to switch schools, and I start to wonder if I could ever have the chance to go to a provincial or even a national school.

  That night I study hard and do all my homework.

  One Wednesday shortly after Lara leaves, when I am done with all my duties, the manager, Eunice, approaches me. She asks how I am doing, and I tell her how happy I am to have spent time with Lara. I ask a question about her Bible study group and then she says something strange: “Do you know anything about where your birth certificate might be?”

  That’s when I know something is definitely up. I tell her I can talk to my aunt in Nyeri, but then she says, “No, no, I’ll talk to her myself.”

  I am so excited and start imagining what it might mean to go to a better school. A few minutes later she says something even stranger. She asks me how I would feel about living out of the country. I honestly can’t believe my ears. I tell her I have only seen a plane one time in my life, but it was on the other side of a big fence and we couldn’t get close to it.

  I start to dream of what it might be like to go to Uganda or Tanzania for school. There was a matron at Imani who had a son who went to school in Uganda, and I thought that was the most amazing thing that could ever happen to someone. I wonder if I’d prefer Uganda or Tanzania, and then I even ask myself where I would want to go to school. We always watch Nigerian movies in the dining hall, so I wonder about West Africa and think how fun it would be to learn French. But then I stop wondering, because these are
crazy thoughts to me.

  Later that day Eunice sends my best friend Simon to tell me I need to go to her office. As I walk in, she tells me to take a seat, and I do so nervously, not knowing what is going to happen. She asks me when my birthday is, and I tell her it is December 24. All the children at Imani who don’t know their birthday say it is December 24—a day before the Christmas holidays, when there is always meat to eat. This had always worked well for me.

  “No, Sammy,” she says. “You are wrong. It’s December 23.”

  I am shocked. How could I have not been told my birthday was a different day? So many thoughts are running quickly through my mind at that moment. Why are we talking about my birthday? Why did Eunice talk to my aunt? What is going on? I ask her to be frank with me and tell me what is really taking place. That’s when she comes clean with me. She tells me to relax and breaks the news.

  She says that if all goes well, I will have the chance to finish my high school studies in the United States. There is a scholarship that Lara and Claire have found that would pay for many things, and they would pay for or fund-raise the rest. At first I am dumbfounded. I simply cannot believe what she is saying and have no idea what to make of it. There is a strange moment when I start to hear the sounds of birds and the manager’s voice more clearly than I have ever heard them before. I start thinking back on my life and then thinking toward what it could be in the future. I know clearly that my life is about to change.

  Eunice tells me that she will be giving me some essays I have to write, but I am too dazed to understand. I simply don’t know what to make of any of this.

  As soon as I leave her office, I go directly to my older brother, Muriithi, and then I call a family meeting with my cousins Wahito and Njeri. When I tell them of the development, they burst with joy. I am confused—if anyone should be joyous it should be me, but I don’t feel that way. How can they all be jumping up and down if I am going to go away and leave everything behind? My family, my friends, and even my home country?