Tabitha Atieno Festo was a nurse who turned $26 from a UNC-CH student into a thriving medical clinic./Courtesy of BRENDA SIZEMORE
When he was a college student, Rye Barcott spent part of a summer in Africa studying ethnic violence. As he was leaving the continent, he gave $26 to a poor widow who lived in a slum in Nairobi, Kenya.
The woman, then 34 years old with three children, was a nurse with passion, vision and business sense. She turned the $26 into a medical clinic that now serves more than 40,000 people a year in the Kibera slum.
This is a true story. It shows how sometimes the people closest to a problem have the best chance at finding a solution. It shows, as Barcott says, that while opportunity is not universal, talent is.
Barcott, a 2001 UNC-Chapel Hill graduate who lives in Charlotte, tells the woman’s story in his new book, “It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine’s Path to Peace.” He will talk about the book Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Quail Ridge Books on Wade Avenue in Raleigh.
Barcott was an ROTC student who eventually served five years in the Marines. Before his senior year in Chapel Hill, he did research for his honors thesis by living for five weeks in Kibera, often described as the largest slum in Africa.
Barcott, now 32, spent most of his time talking with young men his age. But eventually he was confronted by a woman, Tabitha Atieno Festo, who wanted to know why he had not asked her about her problems.
Barcott had reason to trust her. As much as he tried to adapt, he stood out. He was a middle-class white college student from the United States living in a dangerous place: 200,000 poor people jammed into an area the size of New York’s Central Park, most of them living in 10-foot-by-10-foot tin-roof shacks with no plumbing and pervasive garbage.
Festo warned Barcott that she had overheard a group of thugs plotting against him. Barcott adjusted his routines and walking routes to avoid them.
“It really established an initial and early trust,” Barcott said this week from California, where he was promoting his book.
Festo had an idea. If she had a small amount of money, she could make more money buying and selling vegetables in Nairobi.
Barcott had made it a practice not to give away money in Kibera, in part to protect his own safety. But he was impressed by Festo and her knowledge of the economics of the local vegetable market.
He gave her $26 and headed back to the United States to begin Officer Candidates School.
A year later he returned to Kibera. He ran into Festo, who led him by the hand to her shack. Next door, she had established what a sign called the “Rye Medical Clinic.”
Barcott was stunned. Festo had parlayed the $26 into a small 24-hour clinic that delivered babies, attended to machete wounds (from fights) and treated malaria and infectious diseases.
Barcott, Festo and their colleague Salim Mohamed co-founded Carolina for Kibera, which, in addition to health care, uses sports to promote youth leadership and ethnic and gender cooperation.
The Rye Clinic was re-named the Tabitha Clinic after her death in 2004 of HIV-related complications. It is now in a three-story building built by local residents and employs two physicians. It gets support from UNC and Duke hospitals and from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As he launched Carolina for Kibera with his two Kenyan colleagues, Barcott also began his five-year stint in the Marines, which included serving in Iraq, Bosnia and the Horn of Africa. Barcott writes about these two missions – as warrior and peacemaker – and how he was attracted to each.
Not all of Carolina for Kibera’s efforts have succeeded. The key, Barcott said this week, is to put a little bit of resources into the right hands. He didn’t always choose the right hands.
He writes of the frustrations in trying to fight corruption and ethnic violence. In his book, there are heroes and villains. Of the heroes, none shines brighter than Tabitha Festo. She had drive and intelligence, but above all, Barcott said, she had integrity.
Yet, as Barcott points out, Festo never thought of herself as special. If given the chance, she thought, there were many others like her who could succeed. If given the chance.
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