By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

I came to Kenya partly to help make a PBS documentary about empowering women as a way to lift families and communities — men included — out of poverty. And I promptly met a prostitute-turned-businesswoman who epitomizes that theme.

Jane Ngoiri is a 38-year-old single mom who grew up in a slum and dropped out of school after the eighth grade. She married at age 18, but when she was pregnant with her second child, her husband informally took a second wife (polygamy is common for Christians here as well as Muslims), and she was nudged out. Jane soon found herself with small children, no home and no money.

To survive, she sold her body for the next five years. It was a perilous existence in Mathare, a collection of dangerous slums in Nairobi. The area, a warren of winding, muddy alleys, is consumed by crime and despair.

Regular jobs are rare, and many men self-medicate in ways that perpetuate self-destructive cycles of hopelessness. Social workers estimate that one-third of the slum’s men get drunk every night — spending about $1.50 an evening, which could otherwise finance their children’s education. Poverty becomes self-replicating.

Then in 1999, Jane joined an antipoverty organization called Jamii Bora, which means “good families” in Swahili. The group, founded by 50 street beggars with the help of a Swedish woman, Ingrid Munro, who still lives in Nairobi, became Kenya’s largest microfinance organization, with more than 300,000 members. But it also runs entrepreneurship training, a sobriety campaign to reduce alcoholism, and a housing program to help slum-dwellers move to the suburbs.

In Jamii Bora, Jane was pushed to save for the future, to lean forward. There is growing evidence that the most powerful element of microfinance is not microlending, but microsavings, and that’s how Jamii Bora starts: it encourages members to save small amounts, perhaps just 50 cents a week. Then members are coached to use those savings, coupled with loans and training, to start tiny businesses.

Jane learned to sew, left prostitution and used her savings and a small loan to buy a sewing machine. She began buying secondhand wedding gowns and bridesmaid dresses for about $7 each, and then cutting them up to make two or three smaller dresses.

Jane’s business flourished, and she used her profits to buy a small home in a safe suburb and to keep her children in school. Her eldest daughter, Caroline, became the first child in the family to graduate from high school and is now taking computer classes.

The intellectual star of the family is Anthony, the second child, who is ranked No. 1 in his class of 138 pupils at a good boarding school with much richer students. Anthony, a star soccer player even though he has no soccer shoes, hopes to go to college and become an engineer. He told me that when he gets his first paycheck, he’s going to buy something beautiful for his mom — and his eyes glistened as he spoke.

Another child, Cynthia, a seventh grader, has just been chosen by teachers to become head girl of her school next year, a tribute to her grades and leadership. Jane hopes to send Cynthia, who dreams of being a lawyer, to a good boarding school as well, but it’s difficult to see how she will pay all these tuition costs.

Jane’s family at their new home, celebrating the ninth birthday of the youngest child, Moses, not pictured. From left in the center row, Caroline, the eldest daughter, the first in the family to graduate from high school; Cynthia, scheduled to become “head girl” at her school next year; Anthony, first in his class at his boarding school; and Jane.   

Careful research by Professor Esther Duflo of M.I.T. and other economists suggests that microfinance can chip away at poverty but is not a panacea. You see that in Jane’s life.

After I finished my interviews, catastrophe struck. Cynthia’s big toe was mangled in a traffic accident, and ultimately it was amputated — a disfigurement in a country where people routinely wear sandals. Jane devoted every scrap of savings to medical costs — leaving Anthony unable to return to school.

Our documentary team took up a collection, and Anthony is now back in class. But the crisis was a reminder of how fragile the family’s gains are. Jane’s life reflects the lesson of mountains of data: overcoming poverty is a tumultuous and uncertain task, but it can be done.

There’s a tendency these days to give up on poverty, to dismiss it as a sad but inevitable feature of humanity, particularly at a time when we have deep economic problems of our own. But if a former prostitute in a Nairobi slum can build a dressmaking business, buy a home in the suburbs and produce over-achievers like Caroline, Anthony and Cynthia, then it’s worth remembering that sheer grit, and a helping hand, can sometimes blaze trails where none seem possible.

If readers want to help by sending Jane old bridesmaid dresses to boost her sewing business, I have information about how to do so on my blog.

Yesterday started like a pretty normal day for anyone like me who lives in NYC – busy, rushing around, trying to get a cab to go downtown for a meeting, frustrated because it was one of those ever inconvenient shift changes that I am forever trying to understand the scheduling of when you start to wonder if you’ll ever actually be able to get one, or if it’s to be like this old comedy routine I remember hearing on a scratched record as a kid during summers up at Maine’s Penobscot Bay; a schtick that came from a series called “Bert & I” featuring some laconic old time “down easters” trying to figure directions to Millinocket for a passing through tourist and eventually settling on the answer that “come to think of it, you can’t get there from here.”

I did finally flag one down and my driver told me that it’d be tough to get me downtown because of the checkpoints and traffic around ground zero. After a bit of cab silence he murmured lightly “what a day that was,” shaking his head slightly. I asked him where he was that day, it was that moment when you decide whether you want to break through the normal passenger/driver professional relationship, talking about 9/11 does that though for New Yorkers all the time and something about his quiet tone made sure we did. He said he was driving that day, had just picked up a fare around Lincoln Center and was heading across town. His passenger got a call, a plane had hit the North Tower, it must be an terrible accident. He turned on his radio and when second one hit they both knew it was something more awful, the reality hitting them and everyone else. He dropped his fare at home and took the cab back to the garage as they were being called to do, and so that he could go be with his own family, it took hours to get a few blocks. As we drove and talked more about the day and 1 World Trade Center was visible ahead of us most of the time, rising above the skyline. You can see from all over the city now as it makes it’s progress skyward, rising above the skyline as the tallest building in lower Manhattan, but it feels different when you are on your way towards it, when you know it’s your destination. With his accent, I did in spite of myself wonder if maybe he was Muslim and how things may have been more difficult for him and his family at that time and since, but it felt good not to ask that question…we were were two New Yorkers talking, sharing a human experience that nothing like that should enter into…how obviously ridiculous it is that it ever has. He talked about how pleased he was that the new construction is now moving so swiftly. He didn’t want to dwell on the go-to conversation about frustration with the delays. “I remember afterwards, after it happened, I remember I would always think to myself that the America I know, the one I came to, we would build those towers back…and make them even taller!” His use of the word “we” was so proud, beautiful and poignant, it stayed with me all day. And he spoke of friend who was was killed in the attack, like so many here who have those stories to share.

We got down next to the site where the memorial will be opening tomorrow. We’ve all seen the pictures, it seems that it will be beautiful, the tiered pools in the two footprints, the empty space and the cascading water falling down like the towers, but a beautiful flow without that terrible violent end, more eternal seeming, and all of it surrounded by the names. Memorials are an important part of our culture. They provide solace, a destination for the grieving of those affected and a departure point for future generations of learning. But there is something in me which feels at a loss when thinking about it. Another memorial, names inscribed on a wall, our tasking our collective remembrance and it’s lessons that will lead to change to the water, bronze and stone. And I find myself wishing more for, or for more of, the living kind of remembrances. For quite a while after 9/11 there was such a feeling of community in this country, and empathy around the world. CNN is on in the background as I write this and I hear the ubiquitous calls for that manner of community we had briefly following the attacks to be resurrected, for rising above the current political strife in this country to find our better selves both here at home as well as abroad. I remember more than one friend from a foreign country in September of 2001 saying “we are all Americans today,” just as many as us here said “today we are all Egyptians” in February of this year. It seems like a Yogi Berra-ism, but it is these human stories that connect us as humans, and it’s obvious that many of us wish these feelings would endure. That what these events and these stories teach us, what we learn deep down in our bones and feel so deeply to our core, that this would all stay with us, inform our lives, our days and our policies going forward, both as countries and as humans. I’ve spent the last two years working on an organization born of a different human struggle, but the same human struggle, and thinking about the ways that we can stay engaged in a tough fight for change, how to not just raise the flag for a short time only to be forgotten with the next turn of the news cycle, it’s something I and my colleagues think a lot about. That news cycle lives in the media, but it lives in us all as well. We all have to move on from tragedy, we have lives to live and the hundreds of little things that go into doing that on a daily basis. But to be forever changed by an experience is not impossible, it does happen.

As I got out of that cab yesterday, I tipped as usual, maybe a little more than usual, and we exchanged very genuine wishes of luck and “you take care,” but more than anything, I wish I had reached forward through that partition and extended a hand to shake, or more than that maybe given his shoulder a squeeze. It seems like such a minor thing to think about afterwards, but I remember wishing that the connection we developed in that short ride had ended with that little physical connection as well, it just seems like it would have been right. And just in general, I wish I did that kind of thing more often, alive in the moment and in that connection with another person. So I guess for 9/11, what I’ve been thinking about since then more than the stone memorials, more than the ceremonies and speeches, all of which we need in different ways, it would be nice if it were a day where we reached through those partitions in our lives that keep us separated, a day where we did one thing for someone else, no matter how small, no matter where we are in the world or in our lives. It’s something that will happen naturally in a hundred small acts of kindness and community down at the memorial tomorrow as it does every year, but it would be incredible if that were the enduring legacy of that day, and if that could last even longer than the plaques inscribed with the names, if we made the day synonymous with the best we are all capable of and not a remembrance of the worst, with each one of those acts representing one of the tiny ripples of hope that Robert Kennedy referred to, “and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” I have no idea what each one of those ripples is, I don’t think it matters, maybe carry a neighbors groceries up the stairs, pick up a piece of garbage, hold a door, tell someone you love them. Maybe that would be the best memorial we could give to those who’s lives were cut short that day in September, and maybe in time that day would turn into a way of life. I like to believe, in fact at some level I know, we can get there from here.
-Hunter

We’re really excited to announce the new campaign, the Musician Coalition.

In partnership with our friends from Invisible Children, we are inviting bands and fans to team up to fundraise for some very needed programs in Central Africa that are utilizing radio to amplify peace. Here’s how it works:

1. Artists create a Team Page and set a fundraising goal.

2. Fans can donate directly towards that goal OR create a fundraising page to recruit their friends to raise money.

Our goals are big this year, but we are confident that you will help us pull off some impressive stuff in the coming months. We’re helping to build more radio stations and to provide songs and content that will help Amplify Peace. Thanks for the support guys.