Job Matseshe's blog

The other day on my Facebook wall, I wrote "Merry Christmas" and most of my friends told me that it was premature and way before time. But I differ with them. Reason: it’s the season of giving.

While we all have varied ways of celebrating the day or what the day actually represents, Christmas for me is when I got my first job with Mercy Corps, when I graduated from university. In short: Christmas for me is when I receive good news.

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Timothy Lusala, the founder and Programs Manager for Africa Sports and Talents Empowerment Program, a Mercy Corps partner organization. Photo: Job Matseshe/Mercy Corps

In pursuit of a mentor or a role model, most people aren’t always fortunate enough to have someone who can serve as both. Most times, the mentor is someone they look up to and have a personal connection with, whereas the role model ranges from world-changing physicists to the Laureates of yesteryears. Most would opt to have the Richard Bransons of this world as role models, which is well and good.

But l have opted to choose from home, and I believe l am blessed enough to have found one who fits the bill right here in my part of Kenya: Mr. Timothy Lusala, the founder and Programs Manager for Africa Sports and Talents Empowerment Program (A-STEP), a Mercy Corps LEAP Sports local partner located in Uasin Gishu County, Eldoret.

Mr. Lusala is one of the few people with a record of building an organization with roots entirely embedded in the community from just a dream to the size that it is today. He once said, "Those who dare not dream will never realize their full potential because every reality sprouts from a dream." These are words that l will carry with me for a long time.

The idea that he and his colleagues shared was to come up with a community-based organization that embraces sports as a way of empowering youth socially and economically. To date, A-STEP is liberating young people from social ills that plague Kenya such as drug abuse, crime, violence, poverty and prostitution.

Harvesting from his teams’ hard work model, and with financial support from Nike through Mercy Corps, Mr. Lusala has managed to empower and encourage many youths in and out of school in the Uasin Gishu and Marakwet Counties. Their priority now is in engaging the youths and others through sports for peaceful coexistence among various ethnic inhabitant communities. They also encourage equality in gender, race, age, class and tribe. This has helped A-STEP to grow by leaps and bounds and, as a result, help more and more deserving youth.

Just like the proverbial Oak tree coming forth from a small seed, Mr. Lusala has managed to cultivate his dream of helping his community to a reality. This has been all through observing community work ethics, hard work, compassion, empathy, foresight and relentlessness. All this is sometimes done at the expense of spending time with his five-member family, who is fully behind him as he continues to work wonders in his community. His personal traits and values are also contributing factors to many people appreciation of him as a role model.

This, by any standards, is no small feat. For A-STEP as an organization, the sky is the limit. In the three years that it has been in existence, it has managed to achieve substantial goals through its partnership with both Mercy Corps and Nike.

From the humble beginning of a small shanty for an office and a handful of visionaries, Mr. Lusala and his team now coordinate more than 300 youth teams also registered as self-help groups with more than 3,000 members. It is no doubt most youth would want to identify with Mr. Timothy Lusala, just to share or be part of his vision.

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Olanya Morris. Photo: Elizabeth Sung/Mercy Corps

He may be just 24 years old, but his experience with traumatic events would put him within the same levels of an individual in his late 40s. That’s Olanya Morris for you.

Dressed in worn-out blue shirt, a cut-out trouser for shorts — with plenty of holes and patches — today Olanya stands tall as he does the task of translating the local dialect to some of the Mercy Corps staff from across Africa. We are doing an interview with women from his village of Odokomit, near the northern Ugandan city of Kitgum.

While I sit patiently waiting to interview him, I can’t help but notice that he is well composed and has a fluency in both languages at hand. It’s amazing that he has a good command of Swahili, which is a foreign language to him. Olanya gets done with his translation duties and has a small laugh with his community members before turning his attention to me.

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Born and raised in an extended family had its fair bit of fun and challenges that must be credited with having given me the experience to tolerate and understand other people. In our family, we had all kinds of people: I had three brothers, two sisters and an endless cast of cousins, uncles and aunties that would come and go. This taught me — albeit in a crude way — that there can be positive competition for resources and attention. Being the last-born, attention was very paramount to my joy and happiness.

This upbringing in a "competitively hostile" setting has proved to be my asset in the peace building efforts that Mercy Corps Kenya is currently undertaking in the Rift Valley province of Kenya. Ironically, I was a trouble maker in the family — with constant arguments and fights among my siblings — but this also served as a learning experience for future tasks.

Over the last days, I have had to travel by bus miles away from my home — Kenya — to Uganda and then across Uganda, another long and gruesome bus trip to the remote northern town of Kitgum. Here it feels like I am back to my extended family that I so loved and cherished: 22 participants from across Africa are here with me to learn how writing and photography complement each other.

It has been a great experience and as we group together from 10 African countries where Mercy Corps works — Kenya, Somalia, Central African Republic, Sudan, Ethiopia, Niger, Liberia, Congo, Zimbabwe and our hosts, Uganda — I can only remember with nostalgia the days of my extended family, full of fun, love and diversity.

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