The Lubetkin Legacy

Violet: Kenya AA

One thing you can say about Kenya, it’s always possible to get a good cup of coffee here. Kenya AA is without a doubt the finest coffee in the world. Violet’s office is just around the corner from the Bulbul Coffee Bar on Kenyatta Avenue, and she sometimes goes there with colleagues from work to enjoy the pastries as well as the coffee — the NGO employs four local staff — or sometimes she meets up with one of her cousins for a pizza. Having longed for Kenyan food during her time in England, she now finds herself missing the varied tastes of London.

Her new job is challenging, especially as she is left almost entirely to her own devices. The woman who interviewed her in London, Maria Allinda, she soon realises knows much less about Africa than she does and is happy to let her take decisions on a day-to-day basis about where the NGO’s resources should be focused. She spends her first month visiting enterprises in and around Nairobi, familiarising herself with the work that is already being done.

She meets women who humble her with their energy and optimism — women like Grace Amolo and Nouma Mwangi who set up a poultry farm on the eastern outskirts, and built a school in their community; women like Scholastica Nalo, a widow who supported four children with a small tailoring business, and has now taken on two apprentices.

Another group of women in Nyanza need funds to buy coffee bushes and lease land in an area where cholera has wiped out many breadwinners. Cholera, although easily treatable now, is still endemic in Kenya because of poverty and poor infrastructure, another consequence of the relentless corruption that sucks the blood out of a country and injects poison instead. Just like mosquitoes spreading their disease, she thinks. Didn’t that mad old lady who lived next door in London say something about cholera in Kenya? She smiles, remembering the crummy flat she left behind and her eccentric neighbours, and wonders: What happened to the cherry trees?

One day, her work takes her out to the coastal island of Lamu where a cooperative of local women has opened a thatch-roofed guest house near a popular resort. The long stretch of beach with its white sand and clusters of palm trees is idyllic; you can hear the swell and surge of the great Indian Ocean and the calls of the fishermen returning in their dhows at dusk with their catch. But you only have to go half a kilometre inland to encounter the poverty. Two of the women who started the cooperative are widows of fishermen lost at sea. They have deep-set wrinkled eyes from squinting against the sun, and lean muscular bodies like her Grandma Njoki. Before they received the grant to start the cooperative, they had worked as prostitutes in an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa that was destroyed in a bomb blast in 2002. They came back to Lamu with their savings and started their own guest house. Gradually other women from the island came to join them; there are seven of them now. Then in 2011 two British tourists were kidnapped by Somali pirates from a remote resort a few miles up the coast, and tourism in the area slumped. But the guest house was close enough to Lamu Old Town to feel safe, and gradually business picked up again.

She approves an extension to their grant for a further year, and sitting on the train from Mombasa back to Nairobi she ponders on how little she really knows about Kenya, and what a lucky and sheltered life she has led.