A visit to Kenya became her life's work

Maybe it was the woman in her mid-30s, dying of AIDS alone and unnoticed in a rural African hospital, that tipped Suzanne Jeneby into a life of service.

Maybe it was the peculiar vibrancy of the Kenyan landscape -- where life slows down and resonates at a different level -- that freed her from a need to pursue a life of financial security.

Whatever the intangibles, Suzanne Jeneby went to Kenya on a whim as an undergraduate and never left emotionally.

"I tried to," she said. "But I couldn't."

Today, the Kent-born and -raised University of Washington graduate is one of the youngest leaders of a global non-profit organization in the world.

Jeneby, now 30, started the East African Center for the Empowerment of Women and Children in Kenya five years ago while still an undergraduate at the UW. A grass-roots community-based non-profit, the center aims to help women and children in rural Africa improve their lives through literacy, health education and economic development.

Seed funding for the center, which is in Takaungu Village about 30 miles north of Mombassa, came from a Mary Gates Leadership Award, as well as the Seattle Jaycees. The organization, which continues to rely on donations, operates on a budget of about $50,000 a year. Jeneby, who started drawing a salary only in September, pays herself $450 a month.Jeneby didn't set out to run a global non-profit. She was aiming for a career in medicine when she stumbled on her life's passion .

She was 21 years old and determined to live a life "outside the box" and unconstrained by her conventional working-class roots, when she decided to take off and travel the world.

Before she did, however, she worked as a waitress for 10 months, at two restaurants, 10 hours a day with only one day off, and scraped together $7,000 for her trip. She bought a backpack and set off solo for Europe and Africa, with the vague notion of working in a small hospital in a developing country so she could someday add that to her medical school application.

As she puts it -- "my courage took advantage of my naivete."

She wound up in Kenya at age 22 volunteering in a hospital just outside Nairobi. One afternoon, she was asked to take a woman named Regina, who was in her mid-30s and in the final stage of AIDS, outside in a wheelchair. Regina hadn't been out of the hospital for months.

When she got to the fresh air, she started rocking with the tiny life energy she had left. She was trying to launch herself out of the chair onto the ground, said Jeneby, who still gets emotional recounting the story. "She just wanted to lie down on the grass to die."

That, however, was not permitted by the hospital. Jeneby had to take her inside. When she came back the next day, she found Regina dead.

"No one had noticed," she said.

"It was deeply unnecessary for this woman to die without being recognized. I wanted to create opportunities for people like her to have a better life."

For the balance of her college years, Jeneby essentially did the market research to create a job that would make that happen.

Then she not only filled it, but in the process has also become the embodiment of her own goal: to empower women.

In her junior year at the UW, she organized a fund-raising drive through the Jaycees that brought in 2 tons of clothing and supplies as well as more than $18,000.

"That told me people really want to get involved," she said. "That inspired me."

Boeing Relief Services shipped the goods on a Kenya Airways plane that was being delivered, and a contact in Nairobi who owned a warehouse and trucks helped her move the goods around the country.

That experience became the catalyst for starting her own organization.

She did her senior thesis at the UW on the needs of a rural community in Africa, which in turn became the blueprint for the East African Center.

In Africa, many of the needs are very direct, and so are at least some of the solutions.

"In my community, 15 percent of the women can't read," she said. So she built a classroom with donations and local labor and hired a local teacher to help instruct. The center has a staff of 11 local people.

"It's very direct," she said. "It's not rocket science."

Jeneby, who also met and married her husband in Kenya, misses a few aspects of life in the United States, where she returns about once a year.

"My family, of course," she says. "And Internet access. And Home Depot."

To get to an Internet cafe from her village in Kenya, she has to walk four miles, then cross a small creek by canoe.

The West Seattle Rotary, however, has just given her organization a grant to buy satellite Internet equipment.

What she's given up in financial security, Jeneby said, she's gotten back multiple times over in a feeling of making a difference in people's lives. The center helps about 350 local residents a week.

"Change is possible in Africa," she said. "The situation is dire but not impossible, and if Americans and others from high-income countries could each get involved even just a little bit, the impact would be enormous."

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