Sylvie

In the summer of 2003, I found myself standing in a plantation in Kenya attempting to film children picking coffee.

I’d been warned for months by government officials and aid organizations that we’d never get footage proving children were being worked like animals; we’d never get permission to enter Kenya; we’d never be allowed on the plantations and if we somehow succeeded in filming, the children would run when they saw a camera for fear of losing their jobs and meager incomes.

So, once our visas were denied, we packed our gear and flew to Nairobi anyway.

The Moi government made clear their disapproval of our plans, which was not to be taken lightly. This was a government famous for violence, willing to do anything to control the press or political opposition just to keep their hands in the pockets of the Kenyan people. In the weeks before we left for Kenya, the government had put Wangari Maathai, an opposition leader who would eventually become the first Kenyan Nobel Peace Laureate, in prison and kept her there as they smeared her reputation in the press. Her crime was criticizing the government.

Arriving at Nairobi airport with my sound and camera crew, I ended up in a room with a grim looking man in uniform who was clearly in charge. Would he send us back to the States? Impound our equipment? Put us in jail?

I showed him a book of photos of children working like animals all over the world, including images of child labor in the U.S. When he finished flipping through the pages, I had one opportunity to say something, "This is not about Kenya, this is about children being exploited by multinationals" He looked at every photo in slow motion and then, after what seemed an eternity said, "Go"! 

I've never exited an airport faster. 

After a week of being tailed by a government stooge, (the Kenyan Ministry of Information required us to have a monitor with us at all times) we finally landed on a coffee plantation filled with children, working silently in 100 plus degrees. I noticed that 90% of the workers were female. Some families had three generations picking: grandma, mother and child. These children worked 16 hours a day and showed obvious signs of malnutrition and sickness from pesticide exposure. Working hungry, for lunch, they would chew a stalk of sugarcane. A foreman, with a club in his hand, controlled the field issuing orders and exploiting the young women. We passed ourselves off as coffee buyers and he ignored us after I slipped him a bribe. 

From the moment we walked onto the property we were filming. We hid the camera lens in a pair of sunglasses; the video deck was hidden in a pack of cigarettes.

Our video footage, stills and a companion report to Congress had been commissioned by the United States Department of Labor and was intended to provide Congress and the President with the information federal law requires to review trade policy. At stake for Kenya was their 'favored nations' trading status with the U.S., the largest market for their coffee. Since United States law prohibits the importation of goods made with child labor, or forced labor, our work had potentially damaging consequences for the Kenyan coffee business and government. In 2003, five multinational companies controlled 80% of the coffee import business in Kenya. Farmers were getting 35 cents a pound for coffee that would sell in grocery stores with a mark-up of five to eight thousand per cent.

After a few minutes of filming, I noticed a tall, skinny and very shy girl of about 12 years of age. Her name was Sylvie and she was working alongside her grandmother.

Sylvie Ngendo with her grandmother

My partner and cameraman, Robin Romano was shooting away and I noticed he was trying to film Sylvie’s shoeless feet. As Robin tilted his head to get the shot we both noticed that on her leg and heel Sylvie had angry wounds that were infected. These injuries are common to coffee picking as the children climb up and into the tree-like plant and the branches puncture their skin. Pesticides and a complete lack of sanitation then create the conditions for infection that will run unchecked. At the end of her work-day, Sylvie would walk home to a mud hut with no sanitation, clean water ... a hut shared with whatever animals the family owned. Her life was rising in the dark, walking to a coffee field, working until dusk and then doing it again. Never a thought given to even the possibility of going to school.

 I knew that Sylvie's wound had to be very painful even though she was smiling shyly at us. I was completely taken with this rail thin girl who didn’t understand one word of what I had to say.

 After twenty years of working together, Robin and I could share the same idea just by looking at each other. We stopped filming. I asked my son to get the medical kit out of the van. As he disappeared for the mile or so run back to the van to get the kit the teenaged girls in the field giggled and one girl yelled, “Tell Sam I’m going to take poison if he leaves” and the giggling rippled across the field as the joke spread in Kiswahili.

On his return, we spread out a tarp and Robin, who had some training in field medicine, cleaned and dressed Sylvie’s wounds with simple antibiotic cream as the entire village looked on. Sylvie grinned through the ministrations as if they weren’t hurting her but you could see that wasn’t the case. We all knew better. It amazed me how she trusted complete strangers to help her. Sylvie seemed almost embarrassed by the attention.

Preparing to leave, we were worried that the infection would get worse so we told Sylvie and her mom to meet us in the same spot, three days later. As we drove away that day, the talk was not about the filming but about Sylvie's leg and the other injuries we saw among the children. Robin had his head in a field guide trying to find more appropriate antibiotics. In this part of Kenya, there is virtually no medical care available. We had passed clinics that were either closed or stripped bare of medical supplies of any kind. Not even an aspirin.

At that time, The World Bank had forced reductions in social spending on the Moi government to guarantee repayment of loans it had made... money stolen by politicians and their friends, including the owners of this plantation, who had taken the land it was on from families who’d lived and farmed there for generations. The World Bank policy, called structural adjustment was a disaster for Kenyan children forcing millions into child labor, simply to survive.

So without any planning, our filming mission suddenly became a medical mission. We stopped at pharmacies in Nairobi to buy any medical supplies we might need. We’d make lists of what our field guide suggested and would never pass a pharmacy without stopping. We’d salt these medicines away in the back of the van. It got to be a ridiculous array and, had we the training, I used to joke we could perform a brain transplant in the field. Because this was all so unexpected, I paid cash everywhere for supplies. I became a human ATM machine and I can remember on my later budget reports to funders calling the bandages and medicines, “location expenses”. I withdrew so much money on a daily basis that the bank cut me off and I had to have funds wired.

Three days later we showed up at the coffee plantation where Sylvie was waiting for us with her smile blazing away. And so was the rest of the village, lined up for medical care, probably fifty people with maladies of all sorts; more scrapes, chiggers, cuts, a few broken bones, babies with high fevers... the full range of health issues, way more than we could possibly handle and way out of our league. Mothers, holding sick babies, would approach me and hand me a note written for them in broken English asking for medicine. These babies I sent to the hospital. $9 would open the doors to emergency treatment.

It was a bargain. Especially after looking into the face of a tiny baby burning up with fever. We continued as Dr. Bob and Nurse Len for several weeks. Sam would distribute water and nutritional biscuits to all of the children as we did our thing right in the field.

The needs of the families, their treatment by the plantation owners and the hunger and abusive conditions the children suffered blinded me with anger. I wanted this footage. I wanted the world to see the human price of our morning coffee. Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world, after oil, and its pricing and supply is controlled by multinational companies. One of these, Kraft, was a company I grew up with. I loved their American cheese slices as a boy. Another, Sara Lee, supplied my childhood with cakes and cookies I devoured. How could the companies that defined my childhood rob these children of theirs? Incomprehensible.

 We got to know these families and they trusted us. Finally, we revealed our true purpose in coming and they agreed we could film them with the real camera, not the hidden one.

On the day we were do just that, as we began to record the first shots of the day and the first ever footage of children in coffee, a gang of about a half dozen men with clubs and machetes came running down the hill towards us, clearly intending to interrupt and possibly harm the crew. Keep in mind – half of that crew is my son, the volunteer sound man. I’m thinking to myself, “What country do I move to if anything happens to Sam? Because there won’t be much point in trying to return home, his mother will kill me.”

I also notice that there isn’t time to run, which is our usual preferred method of escape. Remember the Monty Python film, The Holy Grail? The laughably inept Knight Templar would shout, “Run Away” when things took a turn for the worse. That was the extent of our escape plan as well, though the humor of it was lost on me at the time.

 As the men closed in on the crew, the stooge from the Ministry of Information unexpectedly stepped forward and whipped out his government ID, telling the men sternly they must let us do our filming as we are there on behalf of and with the permission of the Moi government...one of the biggest crocks of shit I’ve ever heard delivered with a straight face in any language. The men, with a stupefied but almost amiable grin turned immediately around and headed back up the hill where they came from. Africa is top down. Everybody has their place in the order of things and to not comply with a government official was unthinkable.

My new government friend, let's call him Daniel, turned to me and said, " My heart has been touched these days by you and your crew. That was to thank you, from the people of Kenya."

 For the next six weeks, Daniel protected us from harm and arrest all over Kenya, shot stills, recorded sound and filed his reports to his superiors every night. It’s not possible to imagine what he wrote in those government reports but he was putting himself at risk to protect us and make our work possible, and ironically his salary was paid by the Moi government.

And so that afternoon, we got the footage and stills we needed for our child labor documentary and the report to Congress. Sylvie and all of the children of that village are the same children who appear in our film, Stolen Childhoods, which has now made its way around the world. But that wouldn’t be finished and in theaters for another six years.

 But there’s more... a postscript.

 In 2003, it cost about $50 a year for a child to go to primary school in Kenya. They called it cost sharing. It was a sum that none of the poor families, earning less than a dollar a day, could pay. So their kids picked coffee instead of getting an education. Sylvie was one of those kids. Young girls were considered expendable. Why educate your daughter when, by the time she’s 13-14 years old you can marry her off and receive a valuable dowry of goats or cows? If only one child is to be educated, it would always be the the son. Rural girls were expected to work in the fields, then work at home as domestics until they were ruined, trafficked to the city for sex work or just used up. Often they would run away and take their chances on the street. Sylvie was a girl at risk, like every girl working that day.

After six weeks of filming and doctoring, we found ourselves in Sylvie’s village one last time. Suddenly an impulse took hold, a very naïve impulse, to take these children we’d come to know and change their futures, starting immediately. So we took pictures of all of the children not in school; there were about 30 of them in the first round, another 30 would be added to a wait list. Each child held a card with a number and on that card we wrote their names, ages, parents, local school.... anything necessary for keeping track of our new charges. We divided the cost of a year’s tuition and simply paid it. Every member of the crew contributed. All the more remarkable since they were making nothing to be there in the first place.

It was a wonderful day! Standing in the village, I asked for a show of hands who wanted to go to school? Every child raised their hand and so we enrolled them all and then some. We relied upon a wonderful Kenyan NGO, whose social workers made sure the kids were matched to local schools, had their fees paid, uniforms and school supplies and then we prepared to leave Kenya... satisfied that we’d done something more than just record their suffering for our film. And we left all of the medical supplies and came home to start raising funds for a mobile clinic that could go from field to field and provide some minimal health care.

And so on that day in 2003, The Kenyan Schoolhouse Program was created. In its seventeen years of operation it has educated over a thousand former child laborers, removing them from plantations and poverty and giving them a chance at a different kind of life. Poverty needn’t be the final destination for any child anywhere.

When I got home to Massachusetts, to my beautiful home on Martha’s Vineyard, I realized I was now responsible for all of those children. You can’t send a child to school for a single year. Well, you can, but it would be a terrible thing to do. The coffee children thrived, they excelled at school and so now I had tuition to raise and send to Kenya for an ever-expanding program, sometimes over a hundred children enrolled in two dozen schools at a time. I worried every minute of every day about that money and often considered myself nuts for ever starting the whole mess.

On the day before departure, we visited Sylvie at her school. We checked Sylvie’s leg one last time and it was slowly healing. As I got in the van to leave, she approached me and spoke directly to me, “ Will I ever see you again?” I thought I would die, on the spot. Her quiet affection made me choke. As we drove away, a column of cheering children ran after the van. Sylvie stood in the driveway and grew smaller and smaller out the back window. It was a movie.

 For the next three years we paid Sylvie’s school fees and expenses to keep her in elementary school. Our friends at ANPPCAN were our eyes and ears. And then we returned to visit her and our other students and see them all once again.

There’s something incredibly powerful that happens when you visit a child you sponsor at a school. The act of traveling, of making the time, of taking yourself there to see them is viewed as a great honor you are bestowing on the students and school. I found that it was very humbling to arrive at a school where a thousand children were waiting to cheer my arrival. I came to understand that just showing up conveyed an unmistakable message to the children – that they matter to you, that their lives and educations and futures have value, that you, as a representative of the many who contribute to their school fees, have come to say, “we care about you.”

I have over the years found my own way of making these children laugh. I tell them that I arrived in Kenya a white man and leave as a red man (I always am burnt like a lobster). I tell them how much I admire them... I ask them how many languages they speak- usually at least three (English, Kiswahili and their mother tongue) explaining that I can barely navigate English. If Georgia, my wife is along, I ask them how many years they think we’ve been married and they generally guess a wildly low number. When I explain we’ve been together for 4 decades, they laugh and are incredulous. I tell them she proposed to me when I was five years old. It’s really bad stand-up but it breaks the ice and then we can talk about anything and it goes on and on.

The smiling eyes of Kenyan children are unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. You want those smiles... you want to freeze them in the time a shutter opens and closes. You take those smiles with you when you leave. It is simply unforgettable.

So now, three years have passed, it’s 2006 and we have returned to Kenya. We are at the most prestigious private secondary boarding school in the country. I have signed the book and am being led to Sylvie’s classroom when suddenly she appears on the walkway alone and runs to me and embraces me as dozens of people look on. It’s a private moment in full view. I’m fighting back tears and I’ve only been minutes out of the van.

Sylvie has gained weight and lost her malnourished look. She looks beautiful in her uniform and she proudly takes me to her class where the comedy routine warms an already welcoming room. She confides that the wound on her leg never fully healed for nearly a year. She tells me she wants to become a lawyer and defend people who are thrown off their land for the benefit of the wealthy cronies of the government, exactly what happened to her family.

When you take a child out of child labor and put them into school you are educating the next generation of nurses, teachers, activists, lawyers and radicals. All of these kids wanted to make a difference. Sylvie was typical in this way. It wasn’t anger, it was more about their sisters and brothers left behind.

Leaving Sylvie for the second time in a half dozen years, I pull her aside for a private moment. I tell her that I don’t have any expectation that she’ll be perfect in all her studies. But that I do expect her to do her best and that as long as she does that, we will support her and pay her fees. Once again, a tearful departure. This young woman has a piece of my heart. She is only one of many but, somehow she embodies the striving of all the children we’ve met in Kenya.

Two years later, Sylvie finished secondary school with average grades...by then we had sponsored her for eight years.

In 2011, we returned again to Kenya to film and this time, were led to a slum outside Nairobi. Sylvie was living with her ancient grandma and she had a baby in her arms. She was all of 21. The family had little food and prospects. The slum was dreadful. She was crammed into a single tiny room with her brothers, child, mother and grandmother. They had a dish with some corn and beans, which they offered me. It was difficult to see what had become of the young woman that had dreamed of being a lawyer. This was not the ending for the movie I had imagined. It was brutally poor.

Sylvie with her oldest daughter

After pictures and a lengthy visit, as she walked me to the van, she asked me if the Kenyan Schoolhouse could help her go to hairdressing school and help her get a job so she could help feed her baby and family. Grandma would handle the day care.

When we left Sylvie, we did site visits at three hairdressing schools. Before we departed Kenya, we’d enrolled her in one of the best. Within six months, Sylvie had completed the course with flying colors and had a good job.

Time passes, life goes on. I always have an eye and ear cocked in Sylvie’s direction. I get news, I have spies. We send food, money, love.

Last week the phone rang. It was Sylvie calling from her new cell phone to say hi and tell me how she's doing.

I often get calls from former students we’ve supported and usually they are appeals for money. When a call comes from Kenya, I can be a reluctant participant. I can’t say yes to every request so I’ll try to avoid all of that by not taking the call. The idea is to let the Kenyan NGO run the show, we just want to provide the funds. But Kenyan students will find you wherever you are and they’ll keep calling until they’ve got you on the phone.

This time I picked up the phone and it was Sylvie. I asked her how she was doing and she told me she’d had another child. We chatted and the question of money never came up. I finally asked her why she called, and she said, “Because I miss you”. I felt my heart in my throat.

She then told me of a plan she’d made. She was going to leave her babies with grandma and take a job as a domestic in Lebanon. Once she’d made enough money she’d bring her children to join her. What did I think?

Years of reporting on human trafficking set off alarms. “Sylvie, this is not a good idea. Last week 50 people died in an attack in Beirut. Lebanon is even more dangerous than Kenya. For you, your work in a household will never end. In a strange country, with no family, you will be a hostage – probably unpaid, possibly abused. If they take your passport, you’ll never see your babies again. Sylvie, you need a new plan and it needs to be in Africa... so that whatever occurs, you can always come home.”

A long pause...and she says, “I think this was a bad idea. I’ll make a different plan and call you soon.”

I hung up and sat alone for a few minutes. My mind wandered back over all the years I’d known Sylvie, watching her struggle to break the cycle of poverty, prejudice and greed that has trapped hundreds of millions of children. Trying to help from thousands of miles away with good intentions and a bit of money.

This was the same girl, covered in pesticides with an infected leg I’d met almost thirteen years before. She had finished her secondary education (fewer than 5% of girls with her background do so), given birth to two little girls and become a hard-working adult professional, the provider for her family. She'll be a role model for those girls as they grow up. But always she must navigate the poverty that swallows a billion children, every second child in the world.

The arc of Sylvie’s life wasn’t perhaps as perfect as she dreamed but in helping her, we learned a great deal about each other; we built trust and affection. She is like an adopted daughter. When she called this last time, she didn’t ask for anything beyond advice. She never mentioned money, instead she wanted to know how I was, was I okay? Will I come back to Kenya? Will we ever meet again?

In our report to Congress in 2004, we described Kenya as violating international law exploiting children. Our video footage and Robin’s still photographs, shot for Stolen Childhoods, put a human face to the abusive child labor in coffee and tea production. Our film made its way around the world, with Meryl Streep signing on to narrate, calling it “an honor to do”. By the time it aired on Oprah’s daytime show, the pressure on the government of Kenya had become so great that children were banned from the coffee fields permanently. In my latest visit to Kenya, I went to a half dozen plantations and found not a single child picking coffee; they were all in school. Kraft and Sara Lee were called out for their exploitative business practices and publicly humiliated. My only regret is that their executives didn’t go to jail.

This entire journey now feels as if it happened a long time ago and in some ways that’s so, but I still carry it all inside and in some ways it’s still fresh. There’s joy and sadness mixed. No Hollywood ending. Each time I watch our film, I see a young girl with a bandage on her leg and that unforgettable shy smile. A smile that was gift to me, a chance encounter, that changed the arc of two lives, a smile that would alter the policies and practices of business and government, that convinced everyone on the plantation that day that something had to be done, to educate millions trapped in poverty just like her.

A smile like no other.