“You don’t have to see the whole staircase to take the first step.” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

After 2 ½ years behind a Zoom screen, it felt surreal to be back in Kenya. As we threaded through snarled traffic, I watched the city of Nairobi come to life. We passed brightly painted shipping containers with men sitting in barber chairs, women frying breakfast on outdoor burners mere inches from our vehicle, and children in crisp uniforms giggling on their walk to school. A thin layer of red dust kicked up by the rich color of Kenya’s earth blanketed almost everything, including my shoes. 

Kenyan alumni gathered in Nairobi for a two-day training with the AFC team, learning skills that have prepared them to serve as facilitators of our new grassroots workshops in Kenya.

I felt like I had finally arrived. Even though I’d already been in Kenya for a few days, our team had hit the ground running and I hadn’t yet had the chance to leave the hotel. By this point we’d held a 2-day Facilitator training program—an important step in the process for 16 Kenyan alumni to explore becoming leaders with AFC. Then, we’d launched the pilot of our first AFC Mizizi (meaning roots in Swahili) Workshop, designed to offer tools for emotional healing to a group of survivors and caregivers in Nairobi. Finally, we spent many hours incorporating the focus group’s feedback in order to prepare to deliver it again the next morning in Kariobangi, one of Nairobi’s most under-resourced communities. 

We had been working toward this moment for more than three years.

Philip Odiyo Ouma, Kenyan Program Lead, facilitates the pilot of A Fresh Chapter’s Mizizi Workshop in Kariobangi, Nairobi.

Back in 2019, AFC partnered with Philip Odiyo Ouma (a psycho-oncologist from Nairobi) and set a vision to build a scalable, sustainable, evidence-informed psychosocial support model for Africa. This model would focus on healing the emotional scars of cancer in a culturally relevant way while empowering African survivors and caregivers to mobilize as leaders. COVID only served to accelerate our efforts as we worked virtually with Kenyan alumni to evolve AFC’s model to ensure that we were creating programming FOR Africans delivered BY Africans. We were determined to equip people with the tools they needed to rebuild and redefine their lives as well as the confidence to share their cancer stories as a way to raise awareness and dispel stigma. 

In 2021, we launched our first 10-week virtual Ignite Experience for the Kenyan context and saw how much it impacted the lives of our participants. We immediately began talking about how we could develop a ½ day onsite workshop that would bring our tools and concepts to people in Kenya’s under-resourced communities, where in some cases people have no access to electricity or running water and where cancer is seen as a death sentence. Although limited support programs do exist in Kenya, many people don’t have the resources to travel to where they are offered. NGOs almost never visit these communities, and rarely (if ever) consider how to translate content into one of the many tribal languages spoken in Kenya. 

Millicent, an alumna of the 10-week Kenya Ignite program and the 2-day Facilitator Leadership Program, brought together her community of survivors and caregivers in Kariobangi to participate in the very first Mizizi Workshop.

As I heard the gravel crunching below our tires, I looked around and saw that we had arrived at a building that had no walls, no floors, and only corrugated metal sheets to shelter us from the rain. As I stepped out of the vehicle, I shivered in the morning chill and took in the sight of Millicent – our facilitator-in-training who had brought us into her community – and another alumna making tea and breakfast in giant vats over propane burners.

Throughout the morning, I watched as our team of facilitators incorporated the training they had received while delivering the content they had helped adapt to a group of 35-40 people impacted by cancer. They translated much of it into Kiswahili so that if someone didn’t speak English, they could know this content was developed just for them. 

As I watched the exchange between participants and facilitators unfold, I was deeply humbled and near tears. It felt surreal to witness people in a different culture and a different language learning AFC concepts from local alumni, who had been so deeply impacted by our programming that they had become AFC facilitators. 

Mizizi facilitators gather after launching a workshop in Kiambu. “This is a big thing,” said Tony, a facilitator. “And I’m part of it. I think we’re going to do amazing things in this community and for the global community at large. And I’m really proud of myself.”

Afterward, as we sat in a circle and the facilitators gave each other feedback (an AFC practice that is not common in the Kenyan context), I was reminded of the tension and delicate dance that exists between adapting programming to a new culture while also inviting people from that culture to become part of our organization. 

AFC is learning so much about how to best serve Kenyans impacted by cancer while empowering them with the leadership tools and personal growth opportunities to change their lives and the lives of others. This desire to make a deep and sustainable impact in other countries has been a guiding principle for me as AFC has transformed from a volunteer travel organization to a global organization that builds cross-cultural connections and drives meaningful change. 

Challenges arise, and we like to say, we are “building the plane as we fly it”. No doubt our vision to expand our impact across Africa will bring challenges as yet unimagined. But, we are committed to this work and grateful to our donors and corporate partners at Eli Lilly & Company and Bristol Myers Squibb who help make it possible. If you’d like to explore how you can be a part of scaling the AFC model across Africa, learn more here. We’d love to involve you in this vision.