ONE Mom from Wheaton Spends a Week in Kenya

Wheaton author Shayne Moore is, by definition, a stay-at-home mom.

On this particular August morning, she is savoring a quiet moment on her front porch after getting her three kids off to school, sharing the universal sigh of both relief and longing many moms share in the aftermath of three months of perpetual motion created by children in the throes of summer vacation.

But Moore is also taking a moment to reflect on her recent trip to Africa, where she was one of ten mommy bloggers to spend a week in Kenya, through ONE, the grassroots advocacy organization originated by Bono and other campaigners to fight extreme poverty and preventable disease.

And as crazy as it sounds, Moore found a special place in her heart for Kibera, one of the largest slums in Nairobi where 2.5 million people are living in some of the most dire circumstances on earth.

“You’re walking through the slums and there’s a two year-old holding a newborn—no adult in sight,” Moore said. “Baby chicks that have just hatched sitting next to a person that is clearly going to die of AIDS in the very near future. Life and death is all packed into this crazy place. There’s reggae music pounding and there’s produce stands and you’re hiking over rivers that are not actually rivers; they’re sewage ditches.”

And yet, if given the chance, Moore says she would go back.

“It hooked me,” she explains. “I think it was such an exaggeration of humanity all in one place.”

Moore, whose book, Global Soccer Mom, outlines her journey as a globally minded mother who lobbies for life-saving health aids and funding for sub-Saharan Africa from her home phone and computer, was part of an effort by ONE to mobilize stay-at-home moms to get involved in a deeper way.

For the entire week, July 23-30, the 10 women toured health clinics, visited early learning programs, talked with women who were entrepreneurs and farmers throughout Kenya.

While there, they were joined by David Muir, anchor of ABC World News weekend edition, who was on his way to Somalia to cover the famine affecting the horn of Africa. The three-minute spot was aired both on ABC World News and Good Morning America.

‘It’s their home’ 

While with Carolina for Kibera, a nongovernmental organization that is an entity of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Moore learned a lot about the difference between catalyzing change as opposed to escaping poverty.

“Our western minds, we come to these slums, and we think, ‘We’ve got to get them out of there. We’ve got to get them in decent living. They’re living like animals,’” Moore said. “Our brains can’t handle that they live in a garbage pile, with raw sewage running through their front yard with 10 people in a room, 10 x 10.

"But you get to talking to the people who have grown up there. It’s their home. They don’t want to leave. It’s all they’ve ever known,” says Moore. 

Effective organizations like Carolina for Kibera, says Moore, take out the Western ideologies of how people should live.

“If this is their home, then this is their home,” Moore simply explains. “But they still deserve clean water and access to education and medical care.”

HIV: ‘Real life falling all around you’

The day Moore shadowed a home-based HIV counselor in the Kasumu area, near Lake Victoria, Moore visited with a husband and wife who were about to get tested for HIV. They showed her their mud hut with a grass roof and a mud floor. 

“The counselor was excellent,” Moore recalled. “He talked [with the couple] a long time, educating about HIV, touching base with them and what’s going on with their lives and their kids.”

Then, it was time to administer the test.

“It’s just a prick to the finger,” Moore described. “You wait 10 minutes, like a pregnancy test. Then it says plus or negative.”

“We already knew the wife was HIV positive,” Moore said, but the husband thought he might be negative.

But when the test came back, the results were clear: he, like his wife, had contracted HIV.

“He was very stoic,” Moore remembered.

The counselor talked to him about the next steps: the half-hour walk he would have to take to get to the clinic to get his medication and some more counseling.

Once the counselor left, Moore stayed with the husband, who began showing the house that he built, and his garden. When he calls out to his dog, Moore remembered laughing out loud when his mutt turned out to be named Qaddafi; he laughed too.

Suddenly, his eyes become serious, looks Moore straight in the face and says, “Who will take care of my children when I die?”

It is a moment that will live in Moore’s memory forever. 

“I’m in rural, rural Africa with a stranger,” she said. “But it’s life falling down all around you. And he’s asking me, because I happen to be the closest person standing there when that went through his head.

“It just humbles you when you see that stuff first hand. That’s his life. He’s a real person and he has a wife and kids and he’s trying to do life like everyone else on the planet,” she said.

Forging the next step

Now Moore is back to “doing life,” too. She is a wife, a mother and a friend, but she has seen a part of the world that touches her sensibility as a global thinker. 

“I always knew I was not a policy expert, and I’m not a politician,” she said.

Going to Africa has deepened her understanding, and her passion for educating others and telling the stories is reignited.

“Speaking specifically to my demographic, there’s no excuse not to be a global thinker,” Moore offered. “We have to know what is going on with our counterparts in other parts of the world. It really does matter. I don’t want to shame people into that—but I’m not going to shut up about it either.”