I haven’t realized the reality that my host mother is basically a single mother who works a hard job in a chicken factory to provide for her family. She has four boys in the house, including me, and worries about how to provide for everyone. She washes her sons’ clothes not because she has time or because they are too young to do it themselves but because she doesn’t want them to ruin their clothes, as she is so worried about not having the money to pay for new ones. She works hard, but sometimes her kids don’t do well in school and she has to go in to talk to their teachers. She is trying so hard to do everything, and her boys don’t always help her. I realize I have to learn to understand her and to look at things from her perspective.
Little by little, it works. I start coming home earlier so that we have time to talk after dinner. Sometimes we talk for hours, and I look at the clock and don’t know where the time has gone. Through these talks, I get to understand her pains—how hard it is for her as a mother that her kids don’t always treat her well or listen to her, and why she feels she always has to yell to be heard. I start to see that if I hadn’t opened my mind to her problems and seen whatever was going through her head, I would never have grown close to her.
That is when I find a friend in Capu and a woman who really cares about me. Since she is black like me, she jokes that I am the son she carried in her belly who was accidentally born in Kenya!
I realize that sometimes we need to open up to people, understand their pains, and see what they’re going through in order to get to know them better and truly become friends. If it wasn’t for Lara and Claire visiting me and opening my mind, I would not have had a wonderful experience in Ecuador.
Ecuador opens my eyes to the real kindness and humanity of strangers. It isn’t the first time in my life I have seen this, but it is a time when I see this kindness come from people who don’t know my story. In Ecuador, they see me as a foreigner—a rich one on a fancy American program—and yet they still give of themselves to support me. In many ways, they look at me like I looked at Claire and Lara all those years ago in Kenya. I meet people who don’t know me but want to help me. People with whom I want to be friends, and people who want to invite me into their families. I meet friends who will stay with me my whole life.
In Ecuador, I open my mind to a new world.
Claire
Chapter 15
The decision to bring Sammy to the United States was not made lightly, and it didn’t come without a host of real concerns. Given Sammy’s incredibly successful transition to the United States, thankfully most of those concerns never come to fruition. One, however, never goes away.
From the beginning, I worried about some of the negative long-term consequences for him, culturally and psychologically, of the objectively wonderful opportunity of leaving a Kenyan orphanage to come to a US boarding school. I never wanted him to feel he had to hide his past, nor did I want him distancing himself too far from the concerns of his peers at home in Kenya. And so, the year Sammy first started at MCI, I told him about a wonderful program for US high school graduates that I believed might be a way to try to bridge the two different worlds he had lived in. Sammy leaped on the idea, and by the time he graduated from high school, he was thrilled to start a year serving as a volunteer in a poor community in Ecuador with a program called Global Citizen Year.
Lara and I had long discussed the fact that Sammy would face a time in life when he would have to move from being someone who has been helped for so long to someone who is providing that help to others, and his time with Global Citizen Year in Ecuador helps him do just that.
When we visit him there, where he lives in a rural community with his host family, enjoying relationships with international friends who share his interest in helping the world, I know it is right.
And then there is the question of the next step. His dream is to attend a US college, but this proves a trickier beast. Without state residency, all twenty-nine colleges he applies to are incredibly pricey, and even with the scholarships he is afforded, he is staring down six figures in loans. Without the guarantee of a US work visa after graduation, this is a terrifying burden to take on, and not a wise gamble.
He wants to think about it, he says. And more importantly, he needs to spend some time back in Kenya first, as he has visited only once in his years away. Lara and I tell him we love him and will always support him wherever he is. We want him to find the country that he is best fit to live in long term, and the best school for him to reach his dreams.
But letting him go is one of the hardest things that happens to me.
In the end, my subconscious overrides, and I make a logistical error that seems to mean something somewhere. At the airport in Quito, he can’t get on the plane because I booked him a flight on the wrong day. For the thousandth time that year, the Global Citizen Year staff generously overlooks our scrambling, unpracticed mothering from thousands of miles away, and they step in and help Sammy negotiate this new twist.
“It’s like you don’t want me back in Kenya!” He laughs into the cell phone from Quito as we frantically solve the nightmare I created. I have booked thousands of flights over the years and serve as my family’s de facto travel agent. I have never done this.
I cringe at his words. And so I turn a joke into something serious, and I say again what Lara and I have always said, and what we mean so fiercely it makes me weep.
“Sammy, I want you to be wherever you want to be in the world. Kenya, the United States, Ecuador—it doesn’t matter to me where you want to live your life. I simply want you to be where you—and God—want you to be. But wherever it is, I want for you a life that is one million times better than the one you knew as a child. That is my dream, and that’s the dream I fight for each day.”
He’ll come back, he says. And he gets on the plane.
Sammy
Chapter 16
I write the last words of this story on a plane in the clouds. After a year in Ecuador and more than four years away from Kenya, I am going home. At least for a time.
My stay in Ecuador has changed me, and as I look back on what I have done and what I want to do, I know that this experience was a moment like no other.
In Ecuador, I found many mothers. People who wanted the best for me and who sacrificed some of their time to see that I took the next step. During the year, I often walked around with my Ecuadorian host family as they talked about their family. They would introduce me to relatives and tell me, “This is my aunt” or “This is my uncle.” When they did this, I felt how badly I wanted that. I wanted to have a mother next to me and a father by my side.
But for me, that is not possible in the traditional way.
With time, I grew close to my host mother, and I understood that she didn’t look at me like a rich American or a poor orphan, but she looked at me as one of her sons. As part of this role, she helped me realize everything that Claire and Lara have been for me over the last seven years and what a special relationship we have.
When people ask me who Claire and Lara are, I don’t know what to say. “Guardian. Aunt. Mother. Big sister. I don’t know,” I tell them. They’re just my family. They’re my friends. They are Claire and Lara. They are the people who brought me from the dust and gave me a life.
In Ecuador, I found a sense of ownership of who I am and what I represent. Before I arrived, I was scared of having my goals and ideas rejected as impossible. When I was accepted to Global Citizen Year, I didn’t know whether people would accept me as a young African male coming to volunteer. I worried they would think I was doing something negative or that someone like me couldn’t help.
Then when Global Citizen Year told me I would be volunteering in an Afro-Ecuadorian community, it brought out all my worst fears. I feared rejection simply because I too was African. I wasn’t a common gringo, a white person with blue eyes and blonde hair; therefore, I wasn’t the type who volunteered and helped people. I was scared to be an African among Africans. In the end, when I r
ealized I could really help people just by being myself and that my presence there actually changed what people think of twenty-first-century Africans, I found a feeling of ownership. And that is why I am so proud of and happy for what I have done.
Ecuador also helped me think about where I would be had I not made the journey across the ocean years ago. The Sammy who left Maine had, in many ways, moved beyond his past. He had gone to high school, he had overcome prejudice, he had gotten good grades, he had worked hard to help his peers at home. He was an MVP and a team captain in two sports. The Sammy who came to Ecuador, and who is leaving Ecuador now, is a Sammy I have much higher expectations for.
My future goals are simple. First, I want to go to college. College for me is yet another second chance in life. The experiences I have there will not only transform who I am but also help me to give back and use my own education to help children who are less fortunate. I am sick and tired of seeing so many people ride around in nice cars and lead a great life when there are still children on the streets with nowhere to go, and children who still sleep in trash cans. In my life, I want to be able to give those children a second chance, a third chance, a fourth chance—just like I have been given.
Another goal for me is to rebuild my relationship with my biological family in Kenya. Having my sister, my brother, my aunt, and my cousins near is something I miss. During all the years I have been gone, it has been hard to keep in contact, and this has saddened me. There have been times I have sat down and cried. When we do talk, it is often about money, sadly. I know the situations they are in and I’ve gone through them myself, so I understand. But I am a student and I cannot provide. Yet.
When I think of my little sister Bethi, I feel the huge weight of leaving her alone at her weakest. My father died when she was a day old, and my mother left when she was four. Now she is fifteen, and I have seen her only a few times in a dozen years. I think to myself that I will do everything I can for her, just like Claire and Lara have done for me. Even though my aunt has taken good care of her throughout the years, I want to make sure to be there for her in the future. At the very least, I owe her that.
And that is a vow I have taken.
Most of all, I am motivated to succeed as a thank-you to all those who have helped me throughout my life. The list is long, since my life has been filled with people who have showed me endless kindness—bathing me, clothing me, feeding me, loving me. I owe these people my success in life. First, there was my mother’s friend, the one who saw me, my brother, and my sister on the street and decided to call our extended family. Then there was my aunt Lydia Njeri, who took us in when no one else would. Then there was Imani Children’s Home. And then there were Claire and Lara, who provided me with a new life. Later, at MCI, Global Citizen Year, and Think Kindness, so many others came forward to help me. All these people have sacrificed of themselves to get me where I am today, and I know I now stand on their shoulders. I take all of them and all of their expectations back to Kenya with me.
I look out the plane, and I watch for the red dirt road.
Photo Gallery
Acknowledgments
Claire
Books are behemoths, and no one writes one alone. Here are some of the people who graciously helped on this one.
To all the incredible adults who have worked tirelessly to improve the lives of the orphanage’s children: the Very Reverend, Eunice, Francis, Cucu, Prisca, Priscilla, Virginia, Eve, Zach, Paul and Stephanie, Brian and Katie T., Brian W., Jonathan and Jessica, Michael and Emilee, Kelly, Renee, and all the elders and administrators at the orphanage over the years.
To the troublemakers, the crazy ones, the ones who taught me about parenting when mothering seemed the furthest thing from my mind—you are too many to count. A few: Chula, Mwaniki, Rhoda (Big and Little), Faith, Mwai, James, Hannah Banana, Simon, Caroline, Jane, Ephantus, and Edwin. Oh, Edwin.
To the 2006 blog readers—the originals—who made me believe someone might ever want to hear any part of this strange story.
To Biz Stone and my many amazing colleagues at Twitter over the years. My, the places we’ve gone.
To the Otero Girls, for being the best cheerleaders a two-dollar check can buy.
To Andrea, Twila, Lindsay, Janelle, Cheryl, Jessica, and the entire Revell team, for finding a home and shaping this book into what it could be. And to Esther, a force.
To Byrd, an incredible advocate and kindhearted one.
To Don, for taking on one more thing in a huge season.
To all who read the many drafts of this text and provided critical commentary: Mom, Dad, Lara, Louis, José, and Amalia.
To everyone who has opened their hearts and homes to take in Sammy: Team MCI (Clint and Declan, among others), Team GCY (Abby, Eileen, Maria, and more), Team Reno (including Brian’s entire family), Melanie, Frank, Gabby, Will, Dad, Mom, and many more.
To Lara, who sparked this journey and made it worthwhile. When we are old and gray, I will think of us on a dingy street corner in Phnom Penh at five in the morning, desperately in search of spotty wireless three minutes before a deadline.
To Sammy, as you find your future, may you remember this past.
To José, whom I found along the way. Our improbable tour is just beginning.
To baby Díaz-Ortiz, for whom we’ve waited for so long. Please don’t come a week early, so Mamá can launch this book.
Sammy
During the long writing process, I have had so many people give of their time to make this book a success. I would like to thank everyone who contributed to seeing this book in print, but I would like to particularly thank the following people for their help on it and their support in my life.
To my sister Bethi, for being a constant motivator during the process (in absentia). Striving for the best for you gives me encouragement every day. And to Muriithi.
Given everything that has happened in my life, I always remember that things happen for a reason and that God has a plan. I also believe there are two sides to every story and that my mother would not have left us if she did not have a concrete reason for doing so. One day I hope to know that reason. Until that happens, I know I will never be truly at peace.
To the children’s home, its sponsors, and its management. I want to thank you for how you changed my life. To the founder, the managers, and the matrons (current and former), for being caring mothers and fathers to me. You taught me more than I can fully express. Thank you.
To Global Citizen Year and its inspiring founder, Abby Falik, who gave me help, resources, and time while I was in the program and also writing this book. Thank you. Further thanks to the Global Citizen Year Ecuador Program, its director, Eileen, the entire 2013 cohort, and its partners, the Experiment in International Living.
To Marilene and Miriam, for everything you did to help me. To Maria Christina and Olga, for time and help during the writing process. To Canaan, for peer feedback, critiques, and essential help on chapter outlines.
To Think Kindness and its founder, Brian Williams, my other big brother. Thank you for brotherly advice and a whole lot of kindness over the years.
Thank you to Declan, for giving me new perspectives each and every day with intelligent words and kind direction.
Ultimately, this book would not have been a reality without the major help and support of the “Sammy family,” which includes Claire and José Díaz-Ortiz, Lara Vogel, Louis Dorval, baby Oscar Dorval, and soon-to-be baby Díaz-Ortiz. Claire, you are like the backbone of this book, an editor and fine-tuner of the highest degree. Thank you. Lara, Louis, and José, thank you for your encouragements and edits as well during this process. Throughout this book—and the last eight years—you have been there to help me when I needed it, to direct me as a parent should when things were not perfect, and to celebrate with me when all was well.
Thank you all.
About Hope Runs
Hope Runs is a nonprofit organization still operating in Kenya today, serving the needs of the
orphanage where Sammy grew up. It currently provides in-orphanage athletic programming and college scholarships to orphanage graduates who successfully complete secondary school and seek to pursue a university education. Many of the children featured in this book have gone on to graduate from a university using such funds. Proceeds from this book go to support the ongoing work of Hope Runs.
To learn more about Hope Runs or to make a tax-deductible donation, go to www.HopeRuns.org.
About the Authors
Claire Díaz-Ortiz is an author, speaker, and technology innovator who has been named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. Claire was an early employee at Twitter, where she was hired to lead social innovation, and where she still works today.
In Claire’s work, she has been called everything from “the woman who got the pope on Twitter” (Wired) and “Twitter’s pontiff recruitment chief” (Washington Post) to a “force for good” (Forbes) and “one of the most generous people in social media” (Fast Company).
Claire is the author of several books, including Twitter for Good: Change the World One Tweet at a Time and Greater Expectations: Succeed (and Stay Sane) in an On-Demand, All-Access, Always-On Age. She is a frequent international speaker on social media, business, and innovation and writes a popular business blog at www.ClaireDiazOrtiz.com. She is also a LinkedIn Influencer, one of several hundred global leaders chosen to provide original content for the LinkedIn platform.
Claire holds an MBA from Oxford University, where she was a Skoll Foundation Scholar for Social Entrepreneurship, and has a BA and an MA in anthropology from Stanford University.
She is the cofounder of Hope Runs, a nonprofit organization operating in AIDS orphanages in Kenya. She has appeared widely in major television and print news sources such as CNN, BBC, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fortune, Forbes, Wired, and many others.
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