The Lost Girls (22 page)

“So you guys like American music, huh?” I asked. “Just a sec…I'll be right back.”

I tore off in the direction of the volunteer hut, returning a couple minutes later with my pink iPod and new minispeaker, an impulse purchase I'd made on my last day in New York.

Creating a short playlist of top dance tracks, I cranked up the volume. The speaker coughed up only a few decibels of music, but that was more than enough. The boarders, upon hearing the opening strains of “Crazy in Love,” bolted up from their cross-legged positions and started rocking out.

It was joyous, unbridled pandemonium. They jumped, spun around, and waved their arms wildly to the beats of J-Lo, Jay-Z, and Christina Aguilera. The four of us were pulled into the mix by eager little hands, and we grooved together on the lawn between their dorm and the cookhouse. Noticing that something was amiss, Mama Sandra came down from the house. I was hugely relieved when, instead of making us stop, she erupted into peals of high-pitched laughter. At least we knew that we weren't corrupting the girls with inappropriate music.

Just to be a ham, I tossed in a little freestyle hip-hop choreography.

“Miss Amanda, stop! Please demonstrate this again!” shouted Naomi. “You can show me this dancing, and then I will copy it.”

Of all of the borders, Naomi was definitely the most eager to learn. Jen and I had agreed that under other circumstances, she almost certainly would have been an athlete of some kind—a track star, a soccer player, or maybe even a little gymnast.

I repeated a version of what I'd just done, and Naomi echoed the moves, performing them almost exactly as I had. Pretty soon everyone wanted in on the action. Even Barbara came over to join the group, and Irene walked her slowly through the steps I was doing.

By the time my playlist ran out, fireflies were lighting up the dusk. At the boarders' behest, I clicked repeat and we started all over again.

“Okay, guys, I think that Mama Sandra wants everyone to come to dinner,” I heard Holly say. It was almost pitch-black outside.

The boarders retreated, but only after we promised to do it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the one after that. Our nightly dance classes had officially begun.

 

A
couple days later, the four of us were holed up in Jen and Irene's hut reading when there was a knock at the door.

“Karibu!”
said Irene, using Swahili to instruct the person to enter.

There was a pause, and then Naomi cracked the door, peering inside. “Miss Amanda? You ah ready to come down now? Many students, they ah waiting.”

It was 5:45 p.m., fifteen minutes before dance class started, but Naomi looked worried that we wouldn't show. I'd assumed that the novelty of listening to the same songs and repeating similar steps might wear off, but if anything, the boarders had become more dedicated day after day. We'd moved our lessons into a classroom at Pathfinder, one of the few buildings wired for electricity. That way we could continue dancing after night fell.

Naomi waited for the four of us to put on our shoes, then led the way toward the schoolroom. She'd been right; nearly all of the boarders had already gathered. Barbara and Sandra were scraping the heavy wooden tables and chairs into a clump at the very back, while the younger girls waited.

“Habari
, ladies, thanks for showing up early,” I said, glancing around. “You've made it look like a real dance studio in here. Are you ready to get started?”

As they chorused their replies, I took my iPod out of my bag and set it on the blackboard. Even before I turned around, I knew exactly what I'd hear next.

“Shah-kee-rah! Shah-KEE-rah!” the girls shrieked, no less pumped to hear “Hips Don't Lie” emanating from the tinny speaker than if they'd been watching the singer live at Madison Square Garden. I'd played the track at least eight hundred times, but they never tired of it.

“Not yet, girls,” I said, putting on my instructor hat. “What comes before that, at the beginning of dance class?”

“The warm-up!” shouted Naomi, thrilled to know the answer.

“That's right. Okay, let's get started. Everyone stand with your feet hip distance apart, swing your arms up over your head, and take a deep breath in,” I said, guiding everyone through a series of gentle stretches and low-impact movements. “Now let it out slowly…good…and let's repeat that again.”

This warm-up—something I'd done a handful of times with the boarders—was an abridged version of one I'd done hundreds of times as a kid. When I was five, my mom had enrolled my sister and me in gymnastics, the perfect activity for two girls with enough pent-up energy to demolish her perfectly tended home.

We'd both excelled at the sport, so after we were old enough, Mom had moved us both to Houston to train under Bela Karolyi, coach to the gold-medal Olympians Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton. I thrived under the intense pressure, but when a back injury forced me out of competition, I didn't want to give up the sport altogether.

I still can't believe that at fourteen, younger than some of these boarders were now, I was hired by a local gym to teach classes. I was responsible for three sessions per day, every day, after school. My students not only listened to me, they actually looked
up
to me, something that blew my mind at the time. I continued coaching gymnastics through high school and part of college but decided to stop midway through my sophomore
year, right around the time that it dawned on me that pretty soon, I'd be entering the “real world” and I should probably start preparing for it.

While many of my friends at Florida State were partying or chilling out on the beach, I went to the university career center to research internships. Spring break of sophomore year, I skipped a trip to Cancún with my sorority sisters and flew to New York, where I managed to talk my way into a summer internship at Miramax Films. After eight weeks of watching rough cuts of movies, clipping articles out of
Variety
, and spotting celebs at the office, I knew I had to do two things after graduation: move to New York and get a job in entertainment.

Almost as soon as I crossed the stage and collected my diploma, that's exactly what I did. By the time I got hired in the city, I'd long since stricken “gymnastics instructor” from my résumé. My passion for working with kids had been neatly wrapped up and packed away along with my high school scrapbooks and old ballet shoes. In fact, I'd buried that side of myself so well that years later, when Irene had given us her whole “talents and abilities” speech, it hadn't even occurred to me that I'd once been a coach and mentor to dozens of little girls. It wasn't until my fellow volunteers and I began spending several hours every day with the boarders that I remembered the other job I'd once been pretty good at and started to think that I might have something to offer the Common Ground program after all.

During tonight's class, I wanted to try something a little different. After hitting
REPEAT
on Shakira for the eight hundred and first time, I stopped the iPod and made an announcement.

“All right, everyone, line up in the corner of the room and watch me. Don't move your feet yet, just look with your eyes,” I called out as the girls immediately moved to follow what I was doing. I explained that instead of me showing them the moves,
I wanted each one of
them
to take turns teaching the class. Jaws dropped, and they looked totally freaked out.

“It's just like follow the leader,” I said. “Everyone will start here in the corner, and one person will walk across the floor, doing whatever steps they want. It can be anything. Heavy clumps like an elephant. Lunges from side to side. Skipping on your tippy-toes. Then everyone else copies those exact same steps until we call out the next person to lead.”

Once Jen, Irene, and I demonstrated, the girls caught on quickly. I started the music, and the girls laughed hysterically as I went first, popping my head in and out in a version of the chicken strut. Naomi was up next, and she did a jazzy little walk, crossing one foot over the other and bouncing her shoulders. Then Diana went, followed by Nancy and Barbara, who got into the spirit of things, tossing in funky moves that impressed the other girls.

One by one, every student got her chance to lead. Any self-consciousness they had over being the center of attention dissolved after the first round. By their second pass, they totally had the hang of it.

The momentum and energy in the room started to build, and at some point it was impossible to tell who was the leader and who was following behind. We were moving in a big circle now, teachers and students, kicking up a chalky cloud of dust as we blew around the room like an incoming storm. The girls were shrieking and laughing, completely caught up in the moment.

It didn't seem to matter that you could no longer hear the music coming from the tiny speaker or that the electricity flickered, plunging the room into semidarkness for a few seconds at a time. Utterly empowered, the girls seemed to be creating their own music and light. Whatever had happened to them before coming to Pathfinder and whatever would come next didn't
seem to matter now. In that moment, they could let down their guard, let go—and just be little girls.

We danced like this for I don't know how long, moving in a frenzy until we were all sweaty and exhausted enough to collapse into a heap. Lifting my head to look around the room, I caught eyes with Naomi, who was completely out of breath.

She flashed me a grin, and I sent one back. I knew there was probably some teacher rule against having a favorite kid, but sue me. She definitely qualified as my “best” student.

“We ah. Doing this. Again tomorrow?” she asked, as if I might suddenly renege.

I pretended to consider the question for a while before answering.

“See ya here at six.”

 

O
ver the next several days, Jen, Holly, Irene, and I witnessed some remarkable changes within “our” girls. Many had been shy when we'd first met them, and they'd lacked a sense of cohesiveness within their ranks. But eventually, one by one, they all started to open up, to become more confident. Within the framework of the dance classes, they took risks and, for the most part, supported one another's efforts—no matter who led and who followed.

Of course, they still teased the hell out of one another. But it seemed pretty good-natured, a way of bonding rather than tearing one another down.

The four of us—who'd all become initiated as dance teachers by now—wanted to keep the progress going after we left, to leave behind something more lasting than a few routines. We put our heads together to brainstorm, but in the end, it was Jen's idea to write a play.

It might have been a lot faster to poach a script like
Alice in
Wonderland
or
Cinderella
from the Web, but we quickly ruled out that option. What would the boarders really learn from a fairy tale of a country girl transformed by magic into a princess?

Rather than adopting someone else's story, we decided to write our own original script, one featuring a powerful heroine. We wanted to show the girls that they possessed the strength to rise above adversity and make powerful changes in their world—no pretty dress or fairy godmother required. With the help of Shana Greene and a little online research, we discovered that few women in Kenya—or indeed anywhere—embodied the spirit of self-empowerment more than Wangari Maathai.

Known as the “Tree Mother of Africa,” Maathai was responsible for launching the Green Belt Movement, a massive grassroots effort to help women conserve the environment and improve their quality of life by planting trees. Her organization has assisted women in planting more than 40 million of them on their farms and school and church compounds, efforts that have reversed some of the deforestation threatening Kenya's future.

What we loved about Maathai wasn't just her groundbreaking environmental efforts but that she fought hard for what she believed in. Despite being arrested several times for her political beliefs (she was an advocate of multiparty elections and women's rights) and being beaten by the police for her attempts to protect the environment, Maathai never abandoned her convictions. It was only after decades of fighting that Maathai was finally vindicated. In 2002 she was elected to Kenya's parliament by an incredible 98 percent majority, and in 2004 she became the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

We hoped this would be the kind of role model that would strike a chord with the boarders, a real-life superwoman they
could feel proud of, if not eventually emulate. After Shana sent us several documents with background information on Maathai, the four of us spent nights after the dance classes taking turns writing our opus. Although we thought it might be tough to break down the biography into an engaging, kid-friendly script, Maathai's life was filled with both dramatic and tender moments that made for a pretty cool story with more than enough parts for all the boarders.

After a week of writing, we had our full-length play,
A Tree Grows in Kenya
(or at least one copy of it), but we'd struck out with Kitale's copy machines. None seemed capable of printing off more than a page a time, making copying the script a daunting task. Irene and Jen volunteered to hang out in the stuffy stationery shop and take turns copying and sorting eighteen scripts by hand.

“No sense in all four of us just hanging out here, watching the toner dry,” Jen said. “Why don't you and Hol go head to the grocery store or the Internet café or whatever and we'll meet you at the matatu depot around four thirty?”

“Really?” I asked. “That would be amazing. Are you sure? I really have like, six things that I need to send out, and as long as we're in town, it would be—”