Following presidents here and there, then and now

One thing I had to give up to come to Kenya is living in the U.S. during the presidential campaign. Today I feel like I’m really missing out on some of the excitement and action of it all. I’m feeling nostalgic for my college days and remember fondly the day of the New Hampshire primary election in 1992. I had been volunteering that fall at the national headquarters of the Paul Tsongas campaign, and this was a man who was a rising star. On N.H. primary day, I think I skipped my classes and hitched a ride with a TV reporter I found at the headquarters up to Manchester. There I hung out most of the day at the restaurant where the Tsongas end-of-the-day party was going to take place. It turns out it was the party for the day’s victor, so it was a lot of fun to be there in person to see the candidate make his victory speech.

Up to that point, the victor in New Hampshire had always gone on to win the nomination – that was the pattern. Well, history took a new turn, and the man who came in second that day in New Hampshire, who until shortly before then was a real unknown, had the name of Bill Clinton. He declared himself the “comeback kid” that night. A few months later, Tsongas dropped out of the race (because a close friend had stolen campaign money and left him unable to compete in the New York primary), and a few years later, he died when his cancer recurred. In an ironic twist, his widow, Niki, whom I met that victorious night in N.H., now holds the seat in Congress that her husband once held due to a special election that was held last year.

But now my aspirations rest on another presidential race – or the consequences of it. Here in Kenya, where the disputed results of the presidential vote have caused violent unrest and a humanitarian crisis across the country, I’ve returned to the work of my former employer, Action by Churches Together (ACT) International and have started to provide my communications services to the local ACT members in this crisis.

In December, shortly after moving to Kenya, I was worried that nothing would materialize in the new year, when I felt I would be ready to get involved in solid and meaningful work again. Well, I guess I’m in the right place at the right time. It seems this crisis will be good for me (as bad as that sounds) and that it will satisfy at least some of what I wanted to get by moving here.

I’ve been hired for 7 to 10 days by one of the ACT members in Kenya – Church World Service – but am being made available to all other ACT members here to gather information to write feature articles and take photos for them. So Church World Service wants to send me from east to west in Kenya to gather the stories of what is happening and how ACT is responding to the crisis. In the next several days, they want to fly me to Mombasa and to Kisumu and nearby areas in the western part of the country where the worst of the violence has occurred.

Besides that, in becoming involved with these members, I am learning what it is like in the field, as they call places like Kenya in Geneva. I wanted to get some experience of working in a developing country to round out my resume after having worked at the national level (at the ELCA) and at the international level (in Geneva). I knew life in these countries wasn’t as calm, peaceful, efficient and smooth as it is in Geneva or Chicago. I wanted to experience the difficulties of gathering information with low-speed Internet connections and in getting around to various places on bad roads. I wanted to see how coordination among organizations worked – or didn’t (something we complained about in Geneva).

I am getting all of this, and am getting to do exciting work in the midst and at the height of a national disaster too! This travel I will do will be like standing on that shore in Banda Aceh in Indonesia where the first waves of that tsunami, as high as the tall trees behind me, first hit. I know this sounds kind of sick, but for a news junkie and someone who has followed and been involved in human misery, from hunger to disasters, for a good many years now, this is the stuff that gets me excited. To me, “good” news is not the opposite of the day’s murder or about the corrupt politician. The “good” news or story for me is the one that is the most human or that contains the most drama, and in these sorts of situations, there is a lot of stuff that makes for “good,” interesting stories to tell.

In conclusion, I’ll say your response for you to save you the trouble: Stay safe. I know. When I travel to these hotspots, I know I will be in good hands, the hands of people who know the areas. I know they would be in big trouble with their donors in Europe or North America (not to mention a Western government or two) if something were to happen to me.