Carolina for Kibera founder Rye Barcott talks about his nonprofit and his memoir "It Happened On the Way to War"

One area [is] where Kibera really helped inform my military experience, and where the military could really learn from effective non-governmental (NGO) or community-based organizations. [In] the military, one of our greatest challenges is our lack of continuity. When we go on deployment and we’re there for six to twelve months, it's a completely foreign environment, and by the time you really understand what’s going on and who’s who, you’re leaving. Also, our ability to listen to others, to evaluate local priorities and then to create a strategy for both providing security and enabling development so that we can transition out of a place like Iraq or Afghanistan – we don’t do this. As I was fumbling along in Kibera as a college student, I was also learning the skill of listening. It was something that I think helped me tremendously in a context like Iraq.

At a certain level, these two experiences are incompatible with each other. One is an instrument of violence, and the other is trying to prevent violence. I think some readers actually have found some frustrations with the lack of resolution around that. Even though these two worlds inform each other, there still is this lingering incompatibility, at least as I see it. But I think that’s part of the reality.

Many people in humanitarian and development work have long been saying that projects need to be more locally focused, but little action seems to have followed. Why has Carolina for Kibera succeeded, where it has, at letting locals lead the way? What are the challenges of trying to support that leadership model?

We wrestle with the balance every day in our organizations, and we tilt back and forth between the amount of involvement and influence our small team in the United States has on the organization as it operates on a day to day basis in Kibera. It’s challenging because in the US, we’re still generating most of the resources for the organizations, so there’s a natural power dynamic that comes along with that, and which is exacerbated when you are in extremely resource-deprived settings such as Kibera. What we navigate is a gigantic chasm of cultures and expectations and resources and knowledge, and between the United States, Chapel Hill, and our team immediately on the ground in Kenya.

First, our current ED in Kenya has a vision of diversifying the revenue so that half or more of the resources are raised in Kenya by 2015. The second is to do a better job at nurturing and developing the leadership within the organization so that in four to five years, we’ve got a medical doctor who grew up and was part of Carolina for Kibera [working in our clinic]. We’re not that far away; we’ve got a couple members of CfK who are in medical school now.

The third piece, which is really the most challenging, is the communication across cultural lines. I don’t think there’s really any easy way around this other than taking a long view. The infrastructure hasn’t improved in Kibera; the real changes we’ve seen are in the lives of individuals.

Jina Moore is a Monitor correspondent.

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