Shoe4Africa Builds a Hospital

Toby Tanser

Blogmaster's Note: This blog post followed from an email sent out by Flyer Toby Tanser, Founder and CEO of Shoe4Africa, announcing that the hospital project that he had been working on since March 2008 was finally about to happen.  Here's Toby's story behind it all.

March 17^th, 2008

It was a day that started like many others.  I was staying in a large colonial house rented by the Rosa Management team in Eldoret.  At 6 am I was accompanying my friend, a fellow coach by the name of Claudio Berardelli, on a training run.  We were sitting in a black pickup Toyota following a slew of fine athletes and catching up on the last couple of months of gossip.

Like me Claudio had been living in Eldoret when the political violence had erupted on December 29^th the previous year.  He laughed as he told me how he had pulled a large refrigerator in front of his front door and waited for the police to escort him to the airport to fly back to Italy.  He had bought the fridge as a gift to one of the runners he coached, then found out the man did not have electricity in his home.

When I say fine athletes we were following Martin Lel who was about to beat Sammy Wanjiru in the London Marathon, James Kwambai and Duncan Kibet who were about to run 2:04’s in Rotterdam, Robert Cheruiyot who was about to win Boston, again… and about twenty others whose PR’s were all inside the 2:10 barrier.  Luckily as I said, I was in the passenger seat, not in a pair of running shoes.

Martin Lel

Eldoret is that kind of town.  Eliud Kipchoge, David Rudisha, Kip Keino, Eunice Sum, Ezekiel Kemboi – you name them, they have a house here.  I once was at a race when a thief tried to steal a pair of sunglasses from a fila display table.  About three hundred of the world’s best athletes shouted out “RUN!  We’ll give you a ten second start.”  Things didn’t end up well for that chap.

Two hours later we were in the kitchen drinking coffee as athletes drifted in and out of the kitchen.  Janeth Jepkosgei, who was then the reigning world champion in the 800m, arrived for a massage.  Claudio was directing everything, being a part of everything and I decided to wander outside for some fresh air and to finish my coffee.  I had one of the Rosa camp drivers at my disposal.  So I took the white land cruiser and asked the driver to take me to a certain place.  I figured I needed to visit this site to better understand an event that had happened, on January 1^st 2008.

Pulling back the calendar:  On January 1^st I was seated in a large room with five Kenyan ladies playing cards in the village of Iten.  Like Eldoret this village has been made famous by the huge number of International athletes who train and live here.  It is 20-miles away from Eldoret and was originally made famous by an Irish priest called Brother Colm O’Connell.  When I first came to Kenya in 1995 I lived in the next house to the Brother, and thus started my affiliation with Iten.

Three days earlier Kenya had erupted into a mini-Rwanda as the incumbent President Mwau Kibaki had retained his seat in the general elections against the popular new comer, Raila Odinga.  The country was literally in flames as killings, lootings and arson made the country look as if it was a stage set of the movie Blood Diamond.

As we played cards the TV blasted out religious songs.  On the hour a newsreel would play.  The news was not being updated, the country had virtually shut down hence we were getting repeat news from yesterday, still we kept the television on as it was our form of communication.  We did not have access to the Internet.  The old TV cracked into action, a terrible story was being told.  Just outside of Eldoret a church had been set on fire, numbers were not known, but it was guesstimated about fifty women and children were being burned inside, trapped there by an unruly mob.

The story from that day until March 17^th had been quite a ride.  These are times I cannot forget.  The images were and are still very painful.  Amazingly Kenyans, unlike myself, don’t complain; they cope.  On January 11^th I was at a funeral, all that was left of the body was one burned foot.  He was an Olympic athlete. Called Lucas Sang.  The tradition is when the sun goes down the body is lain into the ground yet as this happened most of the well-wishers started to disappear quickly, there was a rumor that the “other tribe” were going to attack by firing arrows into the dark.  Nobody wished to be hanging around.  The athlete I came with, Solomon Busendich, was nowhere to be found.  So I started walking.  As I did a group of children ran up to me and asked if I was the ‘shoe-person’.  They told me they were frightened to return to school.  Schools, not just churches, were being burned.  They asked me to do something.

I almost laughed, I was trying to do something by keeping my head down.  The KLM people had provided a plane to evacuate all foreigners, Dutch people first, and almost everyone foreigner was gone.  I had stayed, in fact I reasoned with the police who came with the army and armed trucks to take the foreigners to the airport that my ticket should be given to Lucia Kimani.  Lucia was a Kenyan, now Bosnian by marriage, and she was from the ‘wrong’ tribe.  She was also keeping her head down.  The Army refused to take her, it was endanger all other passengers as the mob vastly outnumbered the convoy and if the convoy was stopped and she was discovered it would mean a riot.

However the little kids, who had tagged along for a couple of miles when I had walked over the bush fields, haunted me.  So I did something.  I called up all my friends from all corners of Kenya.  Athletes who could represent the 42 tribes of Kenya.  I got the first ever Kenyan who traveled to the Olympics back in the 1950’s as a distance runner.  I got the first ever medalist for Kenya, and I got both the Gold & Silver medalists from the ’68 steeplechase’; the glorious games where Kenyans burst onto the scenes as global athletes.

I had current Olympic champions, world champions, major marathon winners and we all marched together through an unsuspecting village with 600-schoolgirls behind waiving olive branches and a couple of hundred boys following them.  To lead the parade I chose two men from the fighting tribes – Douglas Wakiihuri, a Kikuyu, and Luke Kibet, a Kalenjin.  The significance was at that time Kenya had two World Champions in the marathon distance, these men.  They represented Kenya, not a tribe.  Douglas, a legend in marathon, bravely marched in a village where he was enemy number one.  But the great respect for the athletes made this a total day of peace.  It was series of peace events that I held through Kenya from then till the end of the year.

Peace March
World Marathon Champs Douglas (Kikuyu) and Luke (Kalenjin) Hold the Flag

But back to the 17^th.  I told the driver, “Let’s go to the burned Church.”

As we approached the area we received the hostility of the locals.  Several men came to the car with sticks and told us to turn around.  To get there we had to travel along some dirt roads through barren farm fields.  All the houses we saw had been torched.  The iron sheets ripped off the remains.  Anything of value had been looted.  We pressed on and then a man came running from the bushes straight towards us.  My driver recognized his facial features to be from the ‘other tribe’.  We waited for him and we found an escort.

Not much had been cleared up since the fire had ripped this building to the ground.  In the area the size of two tennis courts the charred foundations of the church still remained. Withered flowers were laid at what had been the entrance of the building.  Our guide started to paint the setting and describe the scene.  Walking onto the remains my eyes were drawn to a small rainbow colored shoe, perhaps the size for a five year old child.  The toe box of the shoe was burned completely through, and the remains of what looked like a shin bone lay on the ground adjoined to the shoe.  If you moved any piece of debris there was another scary reminder of a life that once was living.  I thought about the fear that must have gripped each and every one of the people in their last moments; herded in, then burned to death in mass murder.  My thought was broken as our guide drew my attention.

Olympic Champion John Ngugi (kikuyu) and Former World Record Holder Ben Jipcho, (Kalenjin)
Talking to the Local kids about Peace and Hand out Prizes. 
Jipcho was Wounded in the Political Clashes When he was Shot in the Leg.

“You see this headscarf, the blue cloth, look,” he pointed down with his hand, “that was the Sister who was pushed into this church in a wheelchair, can you imagine?  In a wheel chair.”  He split the words as if replaying them for himself still in disbelief, “She was over the age of eighty years.  You know the youngest to die was three months old?” 

He could not stop himself, he broke down in tears as he spoke, there was no way anyone could handle a travesty like this to their small community; loud sobs drowned his words.  His eyes were as wet as the rain and his arms trembled as his hands drew attention to the monstrosities he talked about.  As he talked he kept on looking at a singular scrap of cloth on the ground, then averting his eyes.

We were trying to comfort this man, but where does comfort come from in the face of such pain?  As Andrew talked the man knelt down on one leg, resting his forearms on his knees and picked up that piece of burned cloth and he placed in his jacket breast pocket.  To whom it used to belong he obviously knew, it was a private moment that brought yet more tears.

Those pieces of burnt cloth made it easy to identify people as the typical rural Kenyan’s wardrobe was not an extensive one.  Our guide continued dabbing his eyes with a worn handkerchief.

“I was away with the other men, we were guarding another area.  We did not return till near the end.”  He looked at me, “If you want to ask anything about how it happened then ask that women over there, she was there when it happened.”  I was lost in a trance, numbed by the horrors.  But his next words shook me awake, “She was inside, inside when it burned.”

I could have sworn we were alone in this barren field, yet sure enough a woman was grieving in what have must been the far corner near the church’s altar.  I walked over and asked her as gently as I could if she could explain what happened on the day.

I am face to face looking at a robust woman.  If I would guess her age I would say twenty-six years old to twenty-nine. We are both standing meters away from the un-marked scuffed ashes of where her three year old daughter died.  What must she be feeling?  I thought about all and everything that had ever happened to me crushed into a vortex of one event; nothing measured up.  My mind was lost for a scope of descriptive thought.

The ashes of her daughter are lost in chaos of charcoal, slabs of structural destruct, and scraps of many lives once lived.  I see a rainbow shoe, burned.  I see a red dress, burned.  A bicycle tire, burned.

It was an event that caught the attention of the world’s media.  Numbers fluctuate from a grisly thirty-six up to fifty women and children burned alive in a church just outside of Eldoret town, Kenya.  The church was set alight after being doused and soaked in petrol by what we can only presume as a drunken and unruly mob, its windows and main door stuffed with the very mattresses the villagers has slept upon the night before yet. 

Grace

Grace moved slowly with stooped shoulders, not from age or labor, but from a definite yoke of sorrow.  Even before she spoke you could tell she carried the heaviest of chains round her neck. She had chestnut forlorn eyes; her shirt was tattered and smelled as if she had not washed for quite some time.  Her toes were well calloused and showed the signs of miles upon miles of barefoot walking.  Her English was good, hinting at a completed education.  She was living about ten kilometers away, at an internally displaced person’s camp with about 20,000-others, in white raggedy canvas tents, with no possessions save a bundle of unwashed clothes.  She was now all alone in this world.  She had nowhere to turn for sympathy, every single neighbor was suffering, every eye had cried with a trembling heart.  When she needed a shoulder to lean on all her friends sat likewise, with a human spirit that had severely tested the limits of worldly understanding.  She shared her hour of need with hundreds of thousands of others.

“It was near noon.  We had already left our houses as they had been attacked and burned down two days before.  No one was safe, nowhere was safe.  The men had banded together to try and protect the area from the Kalenjin attacks and were away, far away looking for ways to protect us.  We had dragged our mattresses (from the burning houses) with few possessions to the grounds just outside of the church to sleep on and that is where we were living; by the church’s walls.  Suddenly, as we sat talking, we heard screams and cries.  Coming from a distance was a huge mob; it looked well over a thousand people.  Screaming, screaming and yelling.  It was men, men and women.  As they got closer we all ran for shelter in the church as they began firing arrows as if to herd us into the building, and they were yelling, screaming at us.  It was horrible.  Arrows are used for killing here, and they are tipped with the poison. They had machetes and were throwing stones, anything at us.  We are only women and children.  Outnumbered and offering absolutely no resistance, only crying and fearing.  When we were inside they took our mattresses and they blocked the entrance, they blocked the windows too.  Then we smelled the fuel.”  She stopped talking and reflected, as if trying to connect some dots that did not make sense.  “Yes. They had come with that purpose as there was no fuel where we were.  The church was then set alight.”

Burned Shoes of a Deceased at the Site

“We were screeching and crying, and soon smoke filled the air.  It was terrible, confusion. I was so frightened.  Everyone did not know what on earth was happening, and people were starting to catch fire… the roof fell in on us.  As the mattresses started to burn down some of the boys tried to climb through the windows.  Some ran for the doorway as the mattresses were now leaving space, but they were firing arrows at us.  I too ran, and somehow managed to get outside.  But as soon as I got outside I realized that my child Miriam was still inside, caught inside.  I had hoped she had before me.” 

“There was crazy confusion, a man now was standing near the entrance yelling at people to stop, stop and ‘Things had gone too far, let the people get out of the church’ he cried.  I wrapped a blanket around my head, for the smoke was so thick, and ran quickly back inside the church.  My mind was desperate, Get my daughter get my daughter. Imagine I was lucky and found her, Miriam, standing right where I had left her, near the altar.”  For the first time Grace’s unblinking eyes left mine and she turned her head, I presume to where that Altar had been. 

“I grabbed her hand and ran for my very life to escape pulling her behind me.  At the entrance an old woman caught me; she must have been confused by the fire as she sat on the ground near the flames.  She held tight to my skirt, so tight she was tearing the material, so I picked up Miriam, who was small, she was only three years old, and I threw her as far out onto the grass as I could, to safety so as I could then free myself from this old woman who had become something crazy.  But the people there,” and here for the first time Grace lost her composure, “the mob who were our neighbors, our very neighbors, they picked up my baby and threw her back into the fire, to burn.”

The image of a little helpless three year old girl who knew games instead of politics, who laughed and learned instead of arguing and fighting, was easy to conjure up as I stood there listening to Grace’s woeful tale.  I started to feel faint and dizzy, my throat felt as if I was about to throw up as the facial features of little Miriam formed in my imagination.  Grace continued talking telling me in a biblical sense, ‘There was a reason for this happening’, she was completely and totally convinced of this, repeating herself,

’There’s a meaning for this happening’.  Where she got her faith there was no telling but she was convinced of the fact.  As she continued tears fell but she did not bother to wipe her face anymore, I guess the tears had never stopped falling since that day and would never ever dry up,

“The worst is they are our friends, our best, best friends, the ones who did this.”  She had recognized the killers, and just hours before the results of the election was announced those people had been friendly neighbors sharing stories, food, and seats at that church.

I left Grace standing all alone.  Suffering in a stage that she would never recover from in this lifetime or the next; how can you ever recuperate from watching your child burn alive when seconds before you felt her little racing heartbeat thump as she was clasped to your breast…   

As I hugged Grace and said goodbye it was like embracing an old withered lifeless tree.  Turning away that simple phrase, ‘There is a meaning for this’ came back to me.  It was only the second time in my life someone had made this statement in the face of a horrible event.  Maybe I overthought the phrase as I looking for a distraction.  It was a bizarre statement to make.  I felt the utmost pity and saw absolutely no reason to associate this terrible act with any reasons of any happening.

I can’t forget the first time I had heard the phrase; it was around eight years before this day, on the night of the millennium two days after one of the biggest moments in my life, in Zanzibar, Tanzania. 

With a cracked skull I was seated on a wooden chair on the roof deck at 11:30 pm waiting for the millennium to pass.  I had not eaten a single pain killer, it had taken me two days to get antibiotics.  I was in a very bad state physically and mentally.

I gazed out to the ink-black rippling sea, the dancing moonlight catching the wave tops, I thought, I’m bleeding into Africa, and soon I will just run out of blood, hope & energy, and just die here.  I saw no way how I was going to even return to Europe and I felt I was deteriorating fast.  Having no health insurance and only a bus ticket to take me back to Nairobi in a week’s time I realized that time was running out.  Since the attack I felt weaker and weaker and could now barely walk.

As the lights of life twinkled afar in the beautiful city of Dar Es Salaam over the Sea I was thinking it is fast about to be a brand new century, my life has dramatically changed from one cusp to the next; even if I do survive I will probably be an invalid for the rest of my living life.

I was dismal company.  I excused myself to go to the bathroom.  Secretly I just wanted to lie down by myself.  I went instead to the living room where I lay on the hard floor.  But resting my head on the ground brought just as much pain as I had sitting out in the clean air on the deck, there was no relief.  There was no escape.  How much more pain could I endure, why me, why me...  that was my only question.  If I had the energy I would have cried.

I was disturbed by my pitying as the good doctor came down the stairs, presumably to check on me.  He didn’t seem surprised to find me on his living room floor.  He spoke with a reassuring soft tone as he entered the room, walked past me as if it was ordinary to find a visitor lying on your floor, and stood in front of a large portrait.

“Baba has brought you to me.  It is fate, it is the story,” Gaurang said speaking of the Indian God in whom he believed and based his faith upon.  He gazed at that blue painting.

“All things happen for a reason.”  Then he turned, and he looked at me.

“There is a meaning for this... you will find out.” 

Going back to the town of Eldoret I wanted to help but was unsure how.  I thought about a fund to rebuild the church, it would not cost much as the building was constructed of corrugated iron, wooden posts and structures, boards and mud.  However I knew the act would be misconstrued; I had already been criticized for buying a bicycle for a boy who was caught in the fire.  He had escaped through one of the church’s burning windows, only then to be set upon by men who beat him to a pulp.  When I met him his hands and ankles were totally covered in burn scars, his wish was a bicycle though it would be months before he would be able to learn to ride it.  The people who had seen me wheel the new bike into the hospital were curious, and then when finding out my purpose asked me as I made my exit,

“Hey, are you going to buy bicycles too for our children stuck in Kikuyu land?  What about those kids, why are you not helping them?”  It was futile to try and explain I had no tribal barriers; I saw a kid who had been through hell and wanted a bicycle that was all.  But I became labeled a bad man. A sympathizer of the wrong tribe.

I was in a conundrum of what I could do, almost as if to ease my own consciousness for the sins of hearing this saga.  Andrew, my driver, dropped me in town and I walked slowly and chose to stop at the first café I came to for a cup of coffee, coincidentally it was owned by Moses Tanui.

Moses was the first man to break the hour for the half marathon, was a world champion in both the half marathon and 10,000m and had won the 100^th Boston Marathon.  I had trained with him at that time, 1996, and we’d remained close friends ever since.

I sat down in the café gardens under the shade of an overgrown tree whose branches, flowering with green leaves, almost covered the tabletop and ordered a cup of black coffee.  It was a popular spot for athletes to gather and I had not sat there but five minutes when I was joined by friends.  Pieter Langerhorst, who had been my ‘boss’ when I had represented the Saucony brand dropped a proposal on the table, I am not sure whether he was actually being serious or not, but he asked me whether I wanted to take on a project.  As the proposal lay on the table he continued to talk about other matters.

The written proposal was for a multi-million dollar children’s public teaching hospital to be built in Eldoret. If I somehow elevated the chair I sat on above the building height and looked back in the direction of the burned church I would first come across the proposed site for this project.

The moment seemed too right; I read the opening lines, ‘A project for a proposal to build what could be the largest public children’s hospital in sub-Saharan Africa.'

Many thoughts flashed through my mind, a healing center, a building where people came regardless of their tribal affiliation, a place where hope thrived and one cradled and cherished life. 

The Hospital -- Under Construction

I don’t know why I said yes to this project because I really did not have the qualifications to say yes.  I hadn’t fund-raised before; I had no experience with medical centers apart from being a patient.  I did not have wealth and I already had a lot going on in life.  Basically before that proposal was placed on the table the building of a hospital was the last thought in my mind.  Yet reading there was no public children’s hospital in East & Central Africa made me realize that if I said no the chances are there wasn’t another person, standing in line, who would be saying yes.  Sometimes life throws you a challenge and I realized the only failure on that day would be to not at least try.

-Toby Tanser, CEO/Founder, Shoe4Africa