Picard lives in a town called Homa Bay that struggles with a nearly 40-percent HIV infection rate and an unemployment rate close to 75 percent. She has met many men and women who have never been employed in their lives, she says in an e-mail interview. Most people in town don’t have running water. If they do, water –– like electricity –– is “only available when the utility companies send it,” she says. The roads aren’t paved. They’re hard-packed dirt. The area is inhabited by the Luo tribe, to which Obama’s late father belonged. A minority in Kenya, the Luos are transfixed by Obama. His victory still dominates conversations, Picard says. She says some of the public mini-buses are named Obama, and a hair-braid style that was popular decades ago when he visited Kenya is called the Obama and was “brought back in his honor.” Picard has even heard of a new ice cream brand in Nairobi –– “It is, of course, chocolate,” she writes, “but called Victory, with Obama’s face on the package.”
Robin Picard has traveled the world, served with the Peace Corps and, since April, has worked for Doctors Without Borders in Kenya, not far from where President-elect Barack Obama’s step-grandmother lives
Finding a bit of home in her travels to Kenya
10:06 AM EST on Monday, December 8, 2008
By Kate Bramson
Journal Staff Writer
Robin Picard, of Coventry, has traveled the world, served with the Peace Corps and, since April, has worked for Doctors Without Borders in Kenya, not far from where President-elect Barack Obama’s step-grandmother lives.
Picard lives in a town called Homa Bay that struggles with a nearly 40-percent HIV infection rate and an unemployment rate close to 75 percent. She has met many men and women who have never been employed in their lives, she says in an e-mail interview. Most people in town don’t have running water. If they do, water –– like electricity –– is “only available when the utility companies send it,” she says.
The roads aren’t paved. They’re hard-packed dirt.
The area is inhabited by the Luo tribe, to which Obama’s late father belonged. A minority in Kenya, the Luos are transfixed by Obama. His victory still dominates conversations, Picard says.
She says some of the public mini-buses are named Obama, and a hair-braid style that was popular decades ago when he visited Kenya is called the Obama and was “brought back in his honor.” Picard has even heard of a new ice cream brand in Nairobi –– “It is, of course, chocolate,” she writes, “but called Victory, with Obama’s face on the package.”
The children in Homa Bay, a fishing community, play on the dirt street in Picard’s neighborhood, and she has come to know them well.
One day, Picard noticed 9-year-old Frank Otieno playing in a dark blue collared shirt with three red arm patches sewn onto the top left sleeve. In bold white letters, the patches read, “Arctic. R.I. 1.”
To Picard, the shirt looked suspiciously like a Cub Scout uniform. And Arctic, R.I., would, of course, be the Arctic neighborhood in West Warwick.
The shirt looked so new Picard wondered whether some boy from her home state had joined Scouts and didn’t stick it out. Frank couldn’t say exactly where or when he got the shirt. All he remembered was that he got it from one of the second-hand clothing vendors in town, most of whom just pile their wares on the side of the street.
Picard, 48, had to photograph Frank in the shirt, she says.
“I have hundreds of funny and almost unbelievable stories and coincidences,” says this world traveler who has toured Europe, visited India and Peru and done Peace Corps work in Honduras and Guatemala. “When I first saw this shirt, I thought, ‘Here I go again. I have to photograph this or people will think it is one more story.”
Photo courtesy of Robin Picard
Rhode Islander Robin Picard was surprised to see Frank Otieno, a 9-year-old Kenyan boy, wearing a Rhode Island Cub Scout shirt, so she snapped his photograph.
Hence, her photo of a smiling Frank that was e-mailed around the globe and wended its way to The Providence Journal, where a reporter turned to the Narragansett Council of the Boy Scouts of America to find out how the shirt made its way to Kenya.
“That’s a Cub Scout uniform. I’ll be darned,” said David Anderson, the district executive for the Narragansett Council.
Looking more closely, Anderson decided it wasn’t a standard-issue Cub Scout shirt. The color isn’t quite right. Some units don’t buy the standard-issue shirts, though, so it’s possible it was worn by a local Cub Scout.
“The patches are definitely ours,” he said. “The ‘Arctic, R.I.’ is definitely ours. We produce that locally.”
Those patches looked “almost new” to him.
“That’s really wild,” Anderson said, listening to the tale of how Picard saw the shirt in Kenya on a little boy who knew nothing of Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts.
Anderson contacted local Scout units, wondering whether any had sent clothing overseas as a charity project. He knew one local boy had collected uniforms for his Eagle Scout project and sent them to Boy Scouts in Liberia as that country recovers from civil war.
In the Narragansett Council region of 11,000 to 12,000 boys in close to 400 scouting packs and troops, Anderson came up cold. No one knew of a project that sent shirts to Kenya.
But there it is, in Frank’s possession.
Frank is a happy and self-confident boy in a family of “six or seven or eight kids,” Picard says. He has both parents, which she says is “very unusual here.” His father is a driver for a local church, which is considered a pretty good job, “particularly for uneducated folks.”
Frank goes to school, but only when his family can afford the fees. Although schools are supposed to be free, Picard says they charge for everything. A three-month term costs 1,500 shillings, or about $21.
“I explained to Frank about the Cub Scouts, how the shirt came from my town and how this was all pretty incredible,” Picard writes. “I kept saying, ‘Can you imagine?’ He looked at me, very matter of fact, and said: ‘I don’t need to imagine. You just explained it to me.’ And that pretty much sums up the Kenyan response to things. Life is pretty matter-of-fact.”
As Picard’s job as a financial administrator and human-resource person with Doctors Without Borders draws to a close this week, she is packing up and preparing to travel in the region and then return to Homa Bay for a visit after the New Year with her grown daughter, Emily Harris, who lives in New Hampshire.
Picard has kept a blog about her time in Kenya, where she most recently posted about packing carved soapstone cows, angels and wise men for a crèche, to prepare them for the journey home. She has also written about the children in her Kenyan neighborhood. Her essays can be found at blog.somethingisbetterthannothing.com/.
Picard’s mother, Madelyn Picard, still lives in Coventry, where Robin –– the fifth of her six children –– was born. Madelyn Picard says she doesn’t travel much. She has been too busy raising six children and being grandmother to 10 and great-grandmother to 3.
“She wants to see the whole world before she dies,” says Madelyn about her daughter, “and I think she will.”
kbramson@projo.com
