The Mitzvot

Williams's son Justin does the best impression of TW

A myriad of thoughts are swirling around my head today.
In just over 48 hours we leave Kenya for the UK and then down for a long stint in South Africa. My head is full of Anthony, who we’ve been trying so hard to help get himself back to using his carpentry skills to earn more money to get his daughter through school; I’m wondering why is Dennis not back from the funeral upcountry where his brother was washed away in a nearby river and they never found his body; I cant get the woman I saw yesterday out of my head – her body strewn across the pavement, her bones and muddy rags forming the hopeless shape she cast on the dirty ground; my head buzzing with the amazing impact study report that was published yesterday evening on the past year of our work, which leaves me breathless; I’m thrilled as I read Purity’s email (Head of Kenya), to all our trainers. It is written with the confidence and courage of the lioness that she is. She is taking charge of her bench of new trainers, like a Pride of lions, as Jane and I move on to the next country. I’m also aware of the personal joys and pains of friends and family…those who come in close and those who choose to stay distant. All these are in my head today.

Dagoretti 6 after their 3 day training - Anthony second from right & Dennis second from left

Over breakfast Jane and I spoke again about the subject of ‘robustness’. Are we any more robust for spending the larger part of our year here in Kenya? It doesn’t feel like it. We are so aware of our fragility in the midst of so much fragility, suffering and hardship. On one side people tell us ‘we are doing amazing things and want us home to keep us safe’. On the other side I have the words of a friend in Rwanda who spoke to me a while ago about the ongoing suffering of Rwandans, many who lost between 20- 50 members of their family in the genocide – “Trevor, depression is a luxury of the West. We have to just get up each day to survive. We don’t have time for that kind of indulgence”. That feels like robustness to me.






And yet every day we remind each other of one of our greatest discoveries over these months in Africa. The word ‘Mitzvot’. I found the word through the writings of the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Hershcel. I knew of the word "Bar-Mitzvah" – ‘becoming a child of the commandments’. Yet until this past year I hadn’t heard of Mitzvot. The Mitzvot are the singular, ‘commands’, literally the little actions we do every day that put the world back to how it was meant to be; the individual, small acts of kindness, courage and humanity that restore our tiny patch of the world. It’s the little things like, our guard, who had Malaria last night and still had to look after us through another Nairobi night and all we could give him was 6 paracetemol; Or the café we had breakfast in this morning where a waiter came up with the badge that just said ‘Trainee” on it and we told him that his name could not possibly be “Trainee” and that we wanted to know what it really was. “It is Washington” he proudly tells us. We were happy to give him this “badge” of a human identity.

There are so many levels of human compassion and kindness hidden within this one photo - Lunch at Bridget's house

The little things. A thousand things every day that makes the world around us a little like it was meant to be. I’ve come to the conclusion that the faith I knew so much about for so many years is worthless unless it is a day full of the Mitzvot. I’m even sure that when Jesus said ‘if you love me you will obey me’, he didn’t mean at all that if you love me you’d live in an obsequious fear of getting it wrong all the time. I’m now convinced that what he meant was “if you’re on my team then you'll look at the day like I do…looking for the opportunity to do a thousand little Mitzvots"

Some faces are just a joy to train!

So are we more robust? Is our life more robust? Are our emotions more robust? Or our faith, whatever shape that now takes, more robust? I still don’t know the answer to the ‘robust’ question. But I know that we have fallen in love with the word Mitzvot, it has made sense of our days here. And that feels enough for now.


- TW

The Empathy Revolution!

Whilst packing up to leave Kenya in a weeks time, I found myself re-discovering a book that has spent the past 6 months sitting sleepily on the tiny table in our Nairobi home that we call 'the library'.

I gazed at the cover....'EMPATHY', it announces, A Handbook for REVOLUTION.

It took me by surprise and I tried to recall why I bought it.

The book title leaves no-one in any doubt what it's about  - A Handbook on Empathy! ... that certainly sounds heavy duty! My experience is that you shouldn't expect a handbook for anything these days; manuals are a luxury. Nowadays you're expected to intuitively know how to plumb in a washing machine, change a hoover bag or navigate your way around your terrifyingly-whizzy new Samsung mobile. Handbooks are definitely 'old school' and yet here I am looking at a vast tome that declares it can help me get my brain operating with Empathic efficiency.

So what was it all about? Inside my signed copy by Roman Krznaric I took a scanty peep and discovered that the author begins talking immediately about the radical power of Empathy to change the world and highlights 6 Habits he believes will help us all to behave with greater empathy & kindness towards our fellow human beings. He calls these The 6 Habits of Highly Empathic People.

Dipping into the book my interest grows by the minute. I catch the words by Thoreau,
"Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant"

Street life in the Southlands slum

These words resonate as I think of the months we've been here, spending each day observing the world through the eyes of those around us - seeing their poverty and suffering, battling with no sanitation or clean water, living with chronic levels of un-safety, enduring oppression by those who are meant to protect them and fighting to survive the shame associated with endemic violence, rape and deprivation.

Trevor leading a Leadership Cafe in Karen for our friends - a group of young entrepreneurs 

I recall that The Ashoka Foundation believes that every child should be taught Empathy as part of the national curriculum! It's one of their missions/goals for the foundation - the conscious teaching of empathy skills to the next generation of adults. I guess they believe that the world needs it, that there's a deficit of empathy, kindness and compassion in the world. Yes, I can certainly go along with that view.

My Handbook says we are hard-wired for empathy but, as Roman says, we need to learn how to switch on our Empathic brains...."Shifting our mental framework to recognise that empathy is at the core of human nature and that it can be expanded throughout our lives" - interesting!

My Empathy guru has caught my attention big time. I read on....
"We need to make a conscious effort to step into others people's shoes - including our 'enemies' - to acknowledge their humanity, individuality and perspective"....."Learning to foster curiosity about strangers and radical listening and taking off our emotional masks"

Baby elephants playing at the Shedrick orphanage, Nairobi 

My rendition of the babies in charcoal  - 5'x4'

Ok, that's it, I've decided. This book is certainly going into the bag that heads for the UK and then on to S.Africa in October. I'm ready to explore deeper and learn more about the EMPATHY REVOLUTION

So, what would you do?

Our friend sells the baskets her mother makes

Yesterday we were given the ultimate ‘what would you do?” challenge . One of the amazing young people who have been through the training to become a deliverer of the Leadership for Hope programme, has set up a youth arts project in their slum for musicians, acrobats & singers – they have gathered them all together, got them focused, releasing talent right, left and centre. Now they have produced a CD of their work to promote them across the vast city of Nairobi.


Like wanting your parents at the opening night of your school play, Stephen excitedly told us yesterday that we have to be at the launch party on 28th of August – 2 days before we fly back to the UK. We were thrilled, proud, excited….and then he told us where the launch party will be……the Somali Embassy in Nairobi!!!!!!! Given such an invitation, what would you do?

Masai cattle are EVERYWHERE!

It’s just one of many dilemmas we face every day. Dilemmas we didn’t face in comfortable Oxford.

Dilemmas like…….


There was a gunfight behind our house a few weeks ago, as another set of armed robbers were fighting their way towards the inside of a house. Many people are leaving the city, violent crime is up by 22% in Nairobi this year……but the people we love and work with here don’t have any choice to walk away from this daily reality. What would you do?




And then there's the man who is always trying to sell you strawberries at the roundabout. You can see they are small and past their best and were probably grown somewhere in polluted water, but if he doesn’t sell these shabby boxes he has no way of getting the bus fare home or eating much that day.
What would you do?



James the gateman wants yet another advance on his salary because he can't pay his daughters fees to finish nursing school and his family will be evicted from their home next Tuesday back in the village, because he cant pay the rent. What would you do?

Fancy a night at this local hotel?

One of your trainees from Leadership for Hope has a credible plan to start the first ever library in their slum and your tax rebate could pay for it to happen. You see it is a brilliant project, you want to encourage their entrepreneurship but don’t want to foster dependency. What would you do?



The crippled guy drags himself up to your car in the car park and you see he has shown amazing initiative making hand made greeting cards. You look at the cards and you know you wont actually send any of them, but then you look at him….What would you do?

Jason (3rd from right in blue shirt) with our other Trainers

Jason, a 70 year Kenyan tried to run a Leadership for Hope in the tough community of Kiserian. He wanted to give an opportunity to a bunch of people in the community who had lost belief in themselves, to learn that they too could pick up the pen again in their lives and write a different story. The Chief wouldn’t give them permission to use a venue without ‘some money quietly changing hands”. What would you do?


What did he do? Jason wouldn’t support the corruption, so he set up his training ‘venue’ in the car park of the place where men spend their day shoveling sand into lorries and out of lorries. After one day these 30+ laborers were longing to hear more and wondering how they had gone their whole lives without hearing these leadership principles. Jason plans to return and give them more.

Jason used his car as a training wall

The workers waiting for Jason's p.m training session to begin

We hear so many amazing stories like these each week from our trainers, now delivering Leadership for Hope across the country, that it takes my breath away.



- TW