Great Barrington — In a Kenyan village and surrounding areas, 60 women were taught to create a filing system, use paper clips, staples and other office supplies. It revolutionized their lives and their work tracking 3,000 children orphaned by AIDS.
The person who taught these women how to manage the several-inch-thick file for each child hailed from the Berkshires. Karen W. Smith co-founded the SawaSawa Foundation with Phil Pryjma, and both are retirees with a deep urge to help struggling Africans figure out sustainable ways to live and earn, to bring them medical care and supplies, and enhance schools and education.
Smith, 62, a well-known education advocate and Great Barrington town volunteer, had gone to Ghana 17 years before and recalled some of the impoverishment she saw there: “I said to myself, if I am ever unencumbered I’m going back to Africa.”
She did go back, with tragedy as the driving force: some friends lost three children in a car accident and decided soon after to go on a mission to Ghana; then Smith’s fiancé died of brain cancer, and she went along with them on their next trip. Several years later she went to Kenya on safari, when she noticed “all these women on the side of the road, kids strapped to them, a load on their heads, and the men sitting around playing checkers. The women were doing all the work. If I’m ever going to come back, I want to help the women,” Smith told herself. Later, an Oprah episode about a Botswana woman with an abusive husband and five children — who desperately wanted to become a doctor, and succeeded — clinched it for Smith. She was going back. “It was a visceral epiphany.”
Dr. Phil Pryjma, a 67-year-old former psychiatrist and director of the St. Francis Gallery in South Lee, was lured to Africa by local friends Gordon Clark and Rob Kirkman. The men were working with refugees in the Sudan in 2010 during the conflict there. They asked him to come along, but he couldn’t get enough time off to travel so far. Those refugees later fled to Kenya, and Clark followed to work in AIDS orphanages. Pryjma said to himself, “now I have all the time in the world.” He and Berkshire Medical Center colleague Kathy Gideon, a retired art therapist, worked in an area north of Nairobi and in a Nairobi slum, setting up health clinics, doing projects at orphanages and helping create sustainable villages for surviving children. One good thing the Bush Administration did, Pryjma said, “was to deregulate the drug companies to make affordable AIDS medication, so instead of just burying children, those children were growing up and we had to find lives for them.”
Back in the Berkshires, Pryjma and Smith, who hadn’t seen each other for years, learned from local newspaper articles about each other’s work in Kenya, and decided to join forces and contain their work in one area, a compound called Dago Dala Hera in the village of Ranen. They co-founded the SawaSawa Foundation; Sawa means “good” in Swahili. The Foundation’s mission is to help strengthen a community’s infrastructure and systems, and provide needed goods and equipment. The Foundation does not want to simply drop western technologies and gadgets into the laps of people with their own traditions, say both Pryjma and Smith.
Smith is also the part-time business manager of Pryjma’s St. Francis Gallery, which is dedicated to showing the work of Berkshire County artists, and donates a percentage of all proceeds to SawaSawa. The Gallery also sells crafts made in Kenya.
Smith, Pryjma and Gideon have worked on a number of projects together. Last year, their work was snaggled by Kenyan customs’ refusal to release a shipping container packed with medical and building supplies, among other goods. Smith quickly learned the ropes of Kenyan corruption and bureaucracy, marching daily to the customs office — with two young men for protection — and going toe to toe with officials until they released the container. The container itself became a medical clinic at the orphanage, used to monitor AIDS medications for the children.
Last year was the year of the filing system. Those 60 women, until Smith showed up, had to dig through an entire file to find any basic piece of information about a child whose parents or caregiver had died of AIDS, or were also suffering from it. Smith taught the “service workers,” as they are known, how to alphabetize files by last name and reduce paper by organizing information. Sixty thousand sheets of paper were discarded from files and turned into much-needed fire starter.
Smith describes herself as a jack-of-all-trades when in Africa; one might find her atop a rippled, corrugated metal roof, making repairs, for instance. “I realized all I need is a silicone gun and I can give people a roof over their heads,” she says. Smith also finds herself tending to wounds and doing other first aid.
Pryjma and Gideon introduced a creative arts program into a primary school, working with a trained teacher who is now funded by SawaSawa. This is one of Pryjma’s passions, ever since he and Gideon brought arts and crafts to children in a Nairobi slum while waiting for a medical team to arrive. “It turned out to be the best intervention,” he said. “It was magic. The adults said it gave a spirit and joy to their children that they hadn’t seen in a long time. These people who had nothing, saw value in art.”
Gideon, who said she had worked with many different humanitarian groups and has done a “great deal of traveling,” brought basic art supplies to Dago, and organized classes at the school. She said the culture there was “very inspiring,” in that “communities help and respect each other — even the little kids help each other. It’s something we don’t have here anymore.”
Smith is going back to Ranen on January 7 for three months, with Pryjma, Gideon and other volunteers — including an EMT — joining her for a month in February. The projects this time around include making soil amendments, continuing the art program for 300 schoolchildren, creating a clean water infrastructure with a solar water pump, and working on a sound land balance program.
Smith will pack 100 solar powered lights into a suitcase, “so people don’t have to buy kerosene every night, which is very expensive.” Smith said the lights can also help neighbors, and serve as an income stream, which will help them “eventually buy a chicken and a goat.”
“The key to the castle,” Smith says, “is that if everybody has a milking cow, providing a gallon a day, not only can they feed their family, they can sell some of it.”
“We’re empowering them by giving them financial knowhow,” Smith added. “Nobody ever saves or plans there, so what I found out was if you have three hens and a cock, and you don’t eat the eggs or kill the chickens for a year, after a year you could have 250 chickens, which can buy you a cow.” Smith found a veterinarian to inoculate the chickens, and the women had to learn how to protect the chicks. The idea didn’t go over so well at first, Smith said. “They thought I was out of my mind, but then they started to get it.”
Smith is also bringing solar-powered phone chargers. Cell phones are cheap in Kenya, but it’s expensive to charge them, and one must often trek to the nearest village to do so. She will also bring medical and dental supplies, laptops for the women’s service group, and supplies for “simple and sound repairs” to homes. Much of what she is bringing, Smith says, comes from the “incredible generosity” of Berkshire locals and businesses. Southern Berkshire Volunteer Ambulance, Fairview Hospital have donated medical supplies, and dentist Bob Edwards at Delair, Edwards & Krol, donated dental supplies.
“Women drive the economy there,” Smith said, “but you can’t just help the women and children — you have to help the men — the whole village.” She said high numbers of men in the area die of AIDS due to promiscuity.
“We don’t want to do anything to destroy the fabric of the culture or their heritage, which is very strong,” Pryjma said. “Kenyans have a strong family and community system, and they live with good sound principals. The problem is the infrastructure, and the delivery of systems like healthcare. We’re trying to bring technology without causing harm. The last thing we want to do is throw gifts at them and create a consumer culture. We want to instill a spirit of creativity and self-sufficiency.”
“We weren’t sending money and things,” Gideon said of her work in Kenya. “We respected [the people] and their values. We were there finding out what would help and what they need.”
For more information about sponsoring some of the items needed by the Dago Dala Hera community, click here.
