Keown: Give a little bit
In the early 1990s, Anthony Mulongo was selected by the government as one of the 18 brightest students in Kenya. His story since is one of humbling but inspiring sacrifice. Plucked from high school, he was propelled into an intensive five-year journalism program funded by his government, which wanted to produce 18 one-stop-shop journalists trained to the highest level.
Mulongo was brilliant with TV and print and, had nature taken its intended course, would today be one of the top reporters in the country. Talk with him for an hour and you know he’d be one of the best on the continent.
Instead he lives beneath a leaky roof on an acre of land in rural Mtwapa with four cows, a few hens, a vegetable patch, a donkey called George and 34 orphaned girls. Some were abandoned, some thrown away, some saw their parents starve. Some contracted HIV during childbirth but didn’t know it. All needed somebody.
Three years into his journalism career, Mulongo witnessed the tragedy of street children and was compelled to help; at work he wrote about them, after work he fed them. He spent his spare time — and all his income — building a home for the girls and today makes do with whatever funds he can muster to meet the $40,000-a-year operating costs. Mulongo, now 34, turned his back on a glittering career because he saw a great need.
They are less dramatic but there are great needs right here, right now. Some children go to elementary school with no breakfast and leave high school with no options. There are many people pouring all of themselves into meeting those needs — but how willing are the rest of us to sacrifice some of ourselves?
We can mentor someone. We can tutor someone. We can use our time, our income and our networks for more than our own comfort and advancement.
Mulongo sacrificed everything, but if we all give a little, no one has to give it all.
“If we have clothes, we all have clothes,” Mulongo told me. “If we have no clothes then we have no clothes together.” Imagine it so in our city.
Thomas Keown is a freelance writer living in Somerville.
