Conference in Nairobi

I have spent most of this last week in Nairobi at a youth leadership conference, called African Youth Leadership Forum (AYLF). I left on Tuesday and got back on Saturday. I really enjoyed the conference. There were many students and young adults from different east African countries, including Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, and even the DRC. It featured many speakers and the focus was on fostering leadership based on the teachings of Jesus. Some high-up people spoke including the CEO of the Daily Monitor (an east African newspaper) and two people from Cornerstone (the organization I’m interning with) as well. It was a great time to get to know different people from different parts of east Africa. I have friends from multiple countries, and yes I was the only American there (with the exception of Tim Kreutter who is the head of Cornerstone and one of the conference organizers). Many of them are college students or recently college students. Most of them are interested in being in some sort of leadership context whether in politics, business, etc. On Thursday night we had a dance which some of the pictures are from.

On Thursday morning we went to the Kenyan National Prayer Breakfast. This is an annual breakfast for Christians to pray for the country of Kenya. There were many elite people there including the president of Kenya and several parliament members. As part of the service there were speeches from the president, the same CEO who spoke at our conference, the Kenyan bishop, and Senator Coon (I will be embarrassed if this is spelled wrong) of Delaware. I sat with two Kenyan bankers and two other people from Nigeria as we ate breakfast and then did the prayer service. After this there was an open-mike discussion with at least several hundred if not a thousand people about the Kenyan elections. A little context the last elections in 2008 resulted in ethnic violence, and this is the first election year since. I could go into more detail but won’t here. The discussion was about how to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen in the upcoming elections. It was interesting seeing what Kenyans are talking about and concerned about. The focus on the conversation was between the following themes: basing one’s votes on their position as opposed to ethnicity, being okay with differences of opinions and having one’s candidate loose, and empowering the youth. The last one may not make that much sense but the basic gist is that Kenya has a very high youth unemployment rate, I believe over half, and that was a significant factor in the post-election violence. At the end the young adults all came to the front, myself included, and made an individual pledge to what we were going to do for our respective communities. We, by which I mean us youth from the conference, went to a lunch run by different leaders. I met a few elite people including parliament members of Nigeria and South Sudan and the former vice president of the DRC. I really enjoyed it.  

Random side note, Dr. Robinson knows everyone! The student from the DRC goes to UCBC, the school Dr. Robinson helped found, and he even knew Senator Coon, who spoke at the prayer breakfast and another speaker there as well.

On Friday after the conference I briefly visited Debbi Omondi, a fellow student at Wheaton from Nairobi. This was right before I left to go back to Kampala.

We rode a bus from Kampala to Nairobi, a 13-15 hour bus ride. The length and bumpiness took a little time to get used to. The second one was hard because it was at night, and I am not used to the bumpiness to sleep. I did manage to get about 3 hours, really 1.5 hours and then 1.5 hours. I would only wake up a few times in these periods.

Now I am back in Kampala and recharging, both physically and socially. At some point this week, I will head out to the school where I will spend the rest of my HNGR internship. There I will be staying with the head teacher who is in his twenties and lives right next to (by which I mean like 50 feet) from the classes.

Quick note on the pictures: The first picture is a group photo of everybody in the conference. It was chaotic when taken and so people were walking in and out and may have been looking at another camera. The next three pictures are of people are from the dance on Thursday night. The next picture requires a little story. At one point people from each country went up and sang the national anthem. So for example, all the Ugandans, a group of about twenty or thirty, got up and sang the national anthem. I was the only person from the U.S., so I had to sing it by myself, a capella mind you. I quickly realized that I didn’t actually know the words and that I couldn’t sing (I have known the second for a long time), but it was still fun. The next two pictures are from the prayer breakfast. The first is of Geoffrey and me at the entrance to the hotel where the conference was held. He’s from Burundi, and I got to know him both at the conference and because I sat next to him on the 15-hour bus ride there. The second was taken during the open-mike, trying to get a sense of what it looked like. The prayer breakfast was in the same room, though they did not allow cameras, so I have no pictures from that. The last picture is of me with Debbi taken right before I left on the bus to Kampala.