This summer, while standing in the middle of the Kibera slum of Nairobi with the other ONE Moms, I felt a disconnect. As I was walking on waste and trash, past 10×10 after 10×10, smiling at the small children repeating “How are you?” I wondered how I could ever translate what I was witnessing into words. I needed a concrete action — I wanted to walk in their shoes, if only for a day. Imagine my enthusiasm when Rye Barcott, co-founder of Carolina for Kibera and author of “It Happened On The Way to War: A Marines Path To Peace,” announced the launch of Power of 26, a 26-day challenge to show people what life is like for the estimated 1 billion people that live in urban slums globally.

Only three days after my trip with the ONE moms, I had my family geared up and signed up to begin #powerof26! Every evening, we received a new email informing us of the next day’s challenge. From washing our clothes by hand, cleaning up trash in our community, sleeping in the smallest room of the house, to sharing Kenya chai with our neighbors, we were getting a small glimpse of what life is like for those living on less than $1 a day.

Our family discussions were incredible and have continued long past completing the challenge — and YES we made it the entire 26 days!! We blogged, tweeted, and posted on facebook. My kids are quick to point out that we only did one challenge per day where those in Kibera experience them all everyday. That may have been the most powerful realization.

Sleeping in the smallest room of the house

Chai tea challenge with my son Henry

Carolina for Kibera has now created a new opportunity called Kibera For a Day. Participants can create their own custom challenge to complete in a 24-hour period. By visiting www.powerof26.org you can register and customize three out of 26 challenges to complete in one day. Be creative and reach out to your circles. My high school daughter has started a ONE club at her school that is organizing a 26-day challenge just right for their group. The possibilities are limitless. My family’s eyes were opened and I know yours will be too!

-Rachel Fox, ONE Mom

“Sacrificing for success” -– that was Tabitha’s motto.

I was thinking about those words today as I walked into Kibera, the largest slum in Africa (think Central Park, N.Y., with 1 million people living in squalor).

We were in Kibera to see the slum and meet a few people in particular: Rye Barcott, co-founder of Carolina for Kabera and author of “It Happened On the Way to War,” and Mercy, a single mom living in the slum.

The first stop was Carolina for Kibera (CFK), the organization Rye co-founded when he was a marine-in-training. He started it because he wanted to do something to help young people in Kibera, Kenya. While visiting Kibera on a break from boot camp, he had given $26 dollars to Tabitha Atieno Festo, a widowed mother of three, after she told him she would use the money to buy and sell vegetables. Six months later, Tabitha had saved $130 and used it to open a four-room health clinic, her life dream.

Having just celebrated its tenth anniversary, the clinic is called the Tabitha Medical Clinic and is part of Carolina for Kibera, the organization Rye and Tabitha co-founded with Salim Mohamed. It is housed in a new open-air facility with the latest in digital technology and serves 40,000 people every year.

“This new clinic was built by hand, by the hands of the community,” said Rye as he led us through Kibera to see the site of Tabitha’s original clinic. “During the violence around the election when the clinic was partially built, thugs came to try to loot the clinic. Residents in the community surrounded it and created a human wall to protect it.”

We were on our way back to the new clinic when Rye leaned down and took his shoes off. By way of explanation, he told us that CFK had just started a new campaign, called the Power of 26 in honor of the original $26, to give people a way to experience aspects of life in the slum. Today’s challenge was to walk barefoot. So with that our small group — Ginny Brooks, Tabitha’s son Kevin, and I — all took off our shoes and walked the rest of the walk with Rye, an experience we won’t soon forget.

After cleaning up, five of us ONEMoms walked back through Kibera to visit Mercy, who has a leadership role in CFK’s program for girls, Binti Pamoja, or in English, the daughters united.

Mercy lives with her four-year-old daughter Nicole in a six-by-eight room where she works as a hair stylist when she is not at CFK. Mercy’s mother, also a hairdresser, died when Mercy was 15, leaving Mercy to care for her 10-year-old sister.

“My mother’s salon was called Salon Mercy and when I open my own salon, I want to name it Salon Nicole after my daughter too,” said Mercy. “I want my daughter to have a better life, to be a doctor.”

Mercy went on to describe how her young daughter carefully lets bugs go free and takes care of friends if they ever get a scratch.

To the ONE Moms, Mercy was one of us, wanting the very best for her daughter and doing whatever was needed to give it to her.

Daily Action: Today we’re meeting with entrepreneurs in Karen, Kenya who are leading in building their communities’ economies and providing opportunities to others. Check out ONE’s report “Africa’s Future is Female” to learn more about how women are leading a revolution on the continent. Then, using hashtag #ONEMoms, tell @ONECampaign one thing that surprised you. Or leave a comment on our Facebook page.

-Emily McKhann, the Motherhood Blog

So, welcome to the ONE’s DC office. What brings you here today?
We’re working with the ONE Campaign to use “It Happened on the Way to War” to reach out to high schools and colleges to send the message about the power of participatory development, and how others can use this approach to spark change in other communities that they’re connected to.

Umm…participatory development?
The concept is really simple and not often embraced. It means that change has to happen within communities. You have to work with local leaders and take a long-term approach to systemic change. This came out of anthropology, which is what I studied in college. In the military, you wrestle with this a great deal, and part of that has to do with the difficulty of a short-term deployment.

It’s not often you see a Marine start their own development NGO. How did you balance both worlds? Don’t they oppose each other?
The key was that I wasn’t calling the shots for the organization [Carolina for Kibera]. I was a volunteer for it — I played a role in fund raising and leadership, but the organization itself was led by a team of Kenyans. The larger question is how to reconcile these two worlds when the experience is all about waging peace while fighting war. It’s not easy. The experience at times clashed in both my head and heart, and what I found was that at certain points, there were tremendous revelations where the two worlds intersected.

We read your op-ed in Military.com. In the midst of an economic crisis, you’re urging the government not to abandon our development and diplomatic commitments overseas. Is it hard to get your fellow men and women in uniform to adopt that viewpoint?
What’s striking is that all of my peers recognize the unbreakable connection between security and development. They’ve seen it firsthand. They realize that making errant cuts to our diplomacy efforts…long term efforts..undermines our national security.

After college, you spent some time in the slums of Kenya before joining the Marines with the mission to better understand ethnic violence. What was your personal approach in learning the local language, customs, politics and economics.
My mom was an anthropologist and she gave me the middle name Mead after after Margaret Mead. There’s a famous Margaret Mead quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” This approach was what I learned from my mom. If you’re going to understand a culture or place, you’ve got to immerse yourself in it. I was nowhere near fluent and barely conversational by the time I first arrived in Kibera, but it was enough to make initial contacts, and folks were really welcoming in part because of my attempts to speak their language.

Were there any tactics from your time at the Marines you were able to apply to your nonprofit, Carolina for Kibera? And vice versa?
Tons. The book is largely about it, so you’ll have to read the book to find out!

Any last remarks for our ONE members?
Be a doer. Being a doer doesn’t mean starting a nonprofit or serving in the military. It’s also about building within organizations, too. Get out there and take a risk and plunge yourself in a community different from your own.

Last week, Carolina for Kibera was thrilled to host Dr. Jill Biden as she and her family arrived to take a tour of Kibera, East Africa’s largest slum. On her visit, she toured CFK’s Binti Pamoja (“Daughters United”), a reproductive health, women’s rights, and leadership development center. Using drama, dance, creative writing and peer education, the program creates safe spaces for girls in the slum to explore issues that affect them, including HIV/AIDS, drug abuse, rape and sexual health. Graduates of the program are then trained to lead their own community groups, expanding the reach of the program to over 700 girls.

Aliyah Wanjira, a Binti alumni leader, then showed Dr. Biden her home in Gatwekera village and shared with her the role that Binti Pamoja played in developing her confidence and equipping her to be a leader and role model for girls in Kibera.

Hear more from Dr. Biden about her journey in the video below:

-Leann Bankoski, Executive Director, Carolina For Kibera, Inc.

Photos courtesy of USAID/Kenya – M. Peru

College students work together — with others on their campus and across the country — to learn about global poverty and preventable disease, and to achieve change on behalf of the world’s poorest people through advocacy, action and awareness-raising.

During the school year, students earn points and recognition for their schools by participating in different actions and monthly challenges, including advocating for important legislation, educating people on campus about challenges to international development, and raising the visibility of ONE and the issues we champion. The schools accumulating the most points in monthly challenges and throughout the season are eligible for exciting prizes and national recognition for their efforts in the fight against global poverty.

The 2009-2010 ONE Campus Challenge title goes to the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor! ONE at UMich has been hard at work since September – gathering petition signatures, recruiting new members, lobbying their Members of Congress, educating their peers, and mobilizing the entire Ann Arbor community in ONE’s mission.

For their Top 10 advocacy project, ONE at UMich chose to focus on maternal and child health, where they demonstrated some simple programs being implemented on the ground that are saving thousands of lives. In addition to a phenomenal giant Africa map petition, they also successfully logged 78 calls to Congress, 78 handwritten letters to Michigan Senators Levin and Stabenow, and an astounding 789 letters to Congress signed by UMich students.

For their efforts, ONE at UMich will receive $10,000 in their name to give to the ONE Partner Organization of their choice. UMich has chosen Carolina for Kibera, a small nonprofit in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya – the largest slum in East Africa. University of Michigan Campus Leader Stephanie Parrish visited Carolina for Kibera as a student participant in Summer 2009 on the first-ever ONE Campus Challenge Trip to Africa.

The University of Michigan is very deserving of this honor. The ONE Campus Challenge Team would like to thank the U of M group for all of their tireless work advocating for the world’s poorest people; we are very much looking forward to what ONE at UMich will accomplish in next year’s ONE Campus Challenge!

Congrats, Wolverines!!

PS– If you have had a chance yet, be sure to check out UMich’s video:

The recent post-election violence in Kenya has stunned nonprofit organizations fighting to end poverty in the country, including Carolina for Kibera (CFK), an international NGO with institutional roots at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a partner organization of the ONE Campaign. Our work with youth at CFK centers on promoting ethnic reconciliation through sports, fighting gender-based discrimination, and providing primary health care in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. The past month in Kibera has been frightening, and we are heartbroken to see the hard work of our young CFK staff and volunteers, as well as that of many other community-based organizations in Kibera, unravel so quickly at the hands of feuding politicians.

People of Kenya’s six major ethnic groups live together in Kibera – east Africa’s largest slum with nearly 1 million residents. Although ethnic divisiveness is no stranger to Kenyan politics, no one anticipated the level of violence that has engulfed Kibera and much of Kenya. Swaths of Kibera have been burned to the ground. Many of our staff and volunteers have had their homes looted and burned. Our office and community medical clinic are located in the thick of the ethnic fighting in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, and are two of the few structures left standing. CFK member Fatuma Roba, 23, is a Digital Diarist for UNICEF Radio and Voices of Youth. Ms. Roba reported on the situation from Kibera for on Jan. 2 and Jan. 11.

We at CFK sensed in mid-January that the situation was likely to get worse before it got better. Security felt tenuous at best. Then yesterday, on Jan. 29, Kenyan parliamentary member Mugabe Were, 39, was gunned down and killed in Kibera. Mr. Were was a member of the opposition party and vocal supporter of CFK. When word of Mr. Were’s death spread throughout the slum, violence erupted yet again.

The violence reminds us that development depends on good governance, local leadership, and effective security. Our own effectiveness, as CFK, also depends on our ability to read and respond to events, and that is why we are currently concentrating on a short-term feeding program and emergency medical assistance to meet the immediate needs of our friends and neighbors in Kibera. Additionally, we are reaching out to local media outlets and radio stations to promote messages of peace in Kenya’s many languages.

CFK fervently calls upon all Kenyan politicians and national leaders across Africa and the globe to put an end to the terror that has left nearly 1,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands more displaced in Kenya. We at CFK support the message of Sen. Barack Obama printed in Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper on Jan. 23: “Kenya has come too far to throw away decades of progress in a storm of violence.”

There is an urgent need for humanitarian assistance in Kibera and around the country. The displaced Kenyans need food, water, and shelter. We at CFK are committed to providing these basic necessities in collaboration with other ONE Campaign partner organizations like CARE and UNICEF so that the healing process can begin.

Rye Barcott
CFK President + Founder

Emily Reynolds Pierce
CFK Vice President

Photos of Kibera by Bri O’Donnell, January 2008.