Tikkun Olam below the Sahara
Adam Hummel, a Canadian law student, flew to Kenya during the summer of 2008 to change the world.
But he didn’t. Not then, anyway.
He had signed up for Volunteers for Peace, an international organization that sends volunteers on organized trips to Kenya to help local communities. Hummel was told that he—along with 14 other visitors—would be placed in a small village for two weeks, helping the local population prevent cattle theft.
But when Hummel landed in Nairobi, the other volunteers weren’t there: the organization had lied to him. Save for one guide from Volunteers for Peace, he was alone. His save-the-world trip turned out to be a tour of Kenya.
Despite his disappointment, Hummel remembered a question one Kenyan had asked him on his last day in the country: “What do you want to leave behind?”
Hummel had learned during his trip about the violence that broke out following Kenya’s 2007 election. A group of tribes had claimed that the election was fraudulent, causing an intertribal war.
Inspired by his Jewish background, Hummel felt compelled to act. A past president of Hillel at York University, he had always been involved in communal work, and his belief in tikkun olam drove him to make a difference on the ground in Kenya.
He realized that if he brought young people from different tribes together and educated them about coexistence, he could relieve some of the tensions. “While there had been an end to the fighting, there was no end to the main issues”, he said. “I wanted to create a grassroots operation that could really attack these issues.”
He promised to come back and do more. Hummel started laying the groundwork for Youth Ambassadors for Peace, an organization comprised of Kenyan youth charged with making peace in the country’s villages. As part of the project, he created the Adam Hummel Coexistence Football Tournament to bring Kenyan tribes—which live in tension with each other—together through sport.
“In rural communities there isn’t much to do, and so the youth turn to drugs and alcohol,” he said. He explained that corrupt politicians incite young people to violence by exacerbating existing prejudices. Wanting to give them a better way to use their time, Hummel aimed to organize the youth into soccer teams.
After nearly a year of fundraising, with much of his support coming from the Jewish community, Hummel returned to Kenya in May 2009 to (literally) kick start the tournament. He focused on three tribes—Ka, Luo and Kisii—that had been involved in the 2007 election violence.
To recruit the teams, he worked with Korir Weldon, a youth leader whom he had met on his first trip. Weldon was able to organize soccer teams within each of the three tribes, which played each other until each tribe had a champion. These teams represented the tribes in the final tournament, and Luo won the championship.
But soccer was just the beginning for Hummel. “I really wanted to initiate and provide a forum for the youth in order to empower them,” he said. “I didn’t want to just be a Westerner coming in to solve their problems for them.”
Hummel ran the soccer tournament alongside a workshop for youth that served as training for YAP. He gathered about 25 young people from the three tribes for a five-day workshop. “I wanted to facilitate discussion, get them to speak”, Hummel said. Together they confronted stereotypes, shared values and discussed experiences from the civil war.
By the end, they had drafted a peace treaty. The treaty declared that the youth would act as role models to make Kenya a peaceful country, with a strong emphasis on the role of the individual, rather than the tribe, in that process.
“His organization has moved from success to success empowering youths from all levels,” wrote Ronnie Mdawida, a local who helped Hummel settle in when he first arrived in Kenya, in an email to New Voices. “Adam really helped the groups own the whole peace process. They have seen the fruits of coexistence in peace.” Mdawida points, for example, to the recent referendum in Kenya—where there was no violence.
The young people are still working together. Although Hummel is no longer in Kenya, the youth have returned to their villages and are spreading their message of peace. Kepha Nyambegera, a member of YAP, sees himself as a leader within his community.
With a few friends, Nyambegera re-structured his drama troupe, now called Adam’s Youth Group, in order to plan activities and projects that raise awareness of HIV/AIDS and fight youth idleness.
“Our group’s effectiveness is to make sure that we make the youths be future-oriented and not think about what happened back in the year 2007”, Nyambegera wrote in an email to New Voices. “Our future goal is to expand the group nationwide through opening various branches in Kenya, thus making the coordination work more effective in each community.”
Hummel has not stopped supporting these efforts. He is now helping fund Adam’s Poultry Project, a YAP initiative which would buy eggs for Kenyans with HIV. He is also working on the High School Peace Initiative, which has created clubs in Kenyan high schools with the same goals as YAP.
Hummel, who is still in law school, works hard to fundraise and support his charity. He hopes to garner aid for the effort from the Jewish community, and has connected with the Canadian Federation of Jewish Students (CJFS) as part of that effort. He is also working with the CFJS to send more Jewish students to Kenya with the project and hopes to attract about 20 volunteers. Those students would go to Kenya’s Rift Valley Province, where there have been fewer of these initiatives, and set up a YAP network there.
While tikkun olam continues to guide Hummel in his mission, he also finds inspiration in the Swahili saying vijana tujipange, which means “youth taking it into their own hands.” And the Kenyans appreciate Hummel’s culture as well. “They are very Christian in Kenya, and have respect for Jews,” Hummel said. “They see us as their older brother.”
Donations to YAP are welcome through paypal to youthambassdorsforpeace@gmail.com. For more information visit www.kenyapeaceproject.com.
Hailey Dilman is a first-year masters’ student at Hebrew University. She studies contemporary Jewish history and political theory.
