Tradition Aids Woman in Honoring Mother’s Dying Wish

By Brigid Schulte

Monday, September 17, 2007

The partygoers sat in a circle on borrowed plastic folding chairs in Revella Warega’s Chantilly townhouse and introduced themselves in Swahili, English or Luo, the dialect of Warega’s native Kenya. As the scent of Jamaican chicken wafted from the kitchen, each of the 20 or so guests deposited envelopes of money in a big round wicker basket in the middle of the room.

And then the fevered bidding began.

A friend grabbed the basket, threw in two $20 bills and upped his donation by $40. “Do I hear a raise?” he cajoled the crowd. He pushed the group to pony up at least $160 in the first round. He passed the basket from hand to hand as guests reached into their pockets for cash. Then came the second round. Another guest put in $60 and boasted he could get the total to $200. The bidding went on, round after round, with breaks for eating, drinking, chatting about home and arguing about Kenyan politics, until 2 a.m., when a final bidder, pockets empty, tossed the only thing of value he could find, a $5 calling card, into the basket now overflowing with $3,500 in cash.

Warega’s party on Sept. 8 was a harambee, or Kenyan fundraiser, a practice so common in her home country that it is Kenya’s official motto and appears on its coat of arms. It means “pulling together.” In Kenya, people hold harambees to gather the money to send a child to school, and towns hold them to raise funds to build roads or libraries.

Warega’s harambee was to help raise $12,000 to grant her mother’s dying wish.

“For the last three months, she was always asking to go home,” Warega said. “She wanted to see her children, my three brothers, that she left behind.”

Anastasia Alaro, Warega’s mother, died Sept. 3 after an eight-month battle with liver cancer. Warega couldn’t afford to take her mother home before she died. And she was so sick, Warega worried that if the journey didn’t kill her, the lack of proper medical care in Kenya would. “She had to have a procedure to drain her belly every three to four days,” Warega said. “We had to make a choice. If we took her home, she would have died within days from the fluid crushing her organs. Or she could have died here in comfort.”

And now the only thing a dutiful daughter can do is make sure her homesick mother can return home to be buried. Her mother lived in the United States little more than a year, Warega explained. She did not have enough time to feel she belonged here. If she couldn’t go home before she died, she wanted to rest in her grave there forever. “That was her last wish,” Warega said. “She really pressed that on us.”

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Kenyan-Style Fundraiser

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Nyaji Alaro, 64, speaks to the friends and family that have gathered for a fundraiser in Chantilly. He tells them about his wife who has just died, Anastasia Alaro, 51, and of her last request to be buried in Kenya. He asks the group for their help in gathering funds needed to transport himself and his wife's body back to Kenya. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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Nyaji Alaro, 64, tells friends and family about his wife who has just died, Anastasia Alaro, 51, and of her last request to be buried in Kenya. He asks the group for their help in gathering funds to transport himself and his wife's body back to Kenya. Some in the group are writing checks and putting them in envelopes. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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Mike Odera, a cousin of Nyaji Alaro, holds his son Daniel Odera, 7, and listens to Alaro talk about his wife's last request to be buried in Kenya. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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Nyaji Alaro, 64, plays with his grandson, Gabriel, 10 months old. Friends and family have gathered for a Kenyan-style fundraiser to help send Alaro's wife back to Kenya to be buried. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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Friends and family put money in envelopes for Nyaji Alaro to help him take his wife back to Kenya to be buried. From left, Muni Getachew, Mekdes Getachew and Emush Getachew. Emush flew in from Florida for the fundraiser. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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Family friend Anna Mwalagho, a singer, dancer, poet and storyteller from Maryland, sings a song to the group during the fundraiser. Mwalagho said the song is about taking heart, being strong and loving God. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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Food is served to all the guests who came to the fundraiser. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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Revella Warega and her father hold a Kenyan-style fundraiser in order to raise funds to send her mother's body back to Kenya. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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Nyaji Alaro, 64 says goodbye to Emush Getachew. Getachew flew in from Florida for the event and is leaving to catch a plane at Dulles Airport. In the doorway in the background, Revella Warega (daughter of Alaro) looks for others coming to the fundraiser who have gotten lost on their drive from Baltimore. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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So Warega needed $7,000 for the airfare for the 22-hour flight from Dulles to Nairobi for her mother’s coffin, plus airfare for herself and her father. She’ll carry her baby son on her lap. She needed more cash to pay a hearse for the five-hour drive on gravel and dirt roads to Kisumu, near the northwest border. There, they plan to have a service in the little Nyabondo Catholic mission church. Warega needed more money for the hour drive to the family’s ancestral burial ground. And she needed it fast. The flight is booked for tomorrow. The burial is set for Saturday. The embalming will last only so long.

Warega, who works as an administrative assistant for PMC at Dulles International Airport, could not pay for it all herself. Her father, as a new immigrant with an hourly wage from Office Depot, had a $5,000 limit on his credit card. And they were already staggering under the weight of more than $150,000 in unpaid medical bills for Anastasia’s care.

Warega wrote to Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) for help. She wrote to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), reminding him that his father came from the small town of Siaya, where Anastasia’s grandmother lived. She asked churches, charities and employers. Her boss and co-workers gave her a total of $1,000. Her father’s church, St. John Neumann Catholic, donated $500. “I think they’re thinking you must bear your own cross,” said Warega’s father, Nyaji Alaro.

And so Warega decided to return to her roots and hold a harambee. She put out a call to Kenyan friends. And by Saturday, they were arriving by plane from Florida, by car from Pittsburgh and New Jersey, taking over the kitchen with fat tomatoes from their gardens and making mandazi, Kenyan doughnuts. Others began dropping by from homes in Virginia, Maryland and the District. They all took their places in the circle of plastic chairs around the big round wicker basket and the photo of Warega’s mother.

Some had come from other harambees — there were three others in the area that Saturday for families trying to raise money for funeral costs. They talked about the Baltimore harambee two weeks ago, at which the Kenyan community pulled together to raise $40,000 for a widower whose young wife died and left him with a toddler and infant.

Photo: Tracy A. Woodward

Revella Warega and her father hold a Kenyan-style fundraiser in order to raise funds to send her mother's body back to Kenya.

A harambee is about so much more than money, Warega explained. It’s about people and being together. About feeling you belong. “We give thanks. We pray. We eat. We chat chat chat chat. We eat some more,” Warega said. “It’s how we spread the news in the community.”

The harambee became a tradition in Kenya following independence in 1963. The first president, Jomo Kenyatta, adopted harambee as a motto to encourage all communities to “pull together” and build a new nation. Over the years, politicians seeking to buy influence corrupted the harambee process, and there was talk of banning the practice. But the “spirit of harambee,” as Kenyans call it, proved irresistible. Particularly in a time of need. “Just getting together is good,” Warega’s father said.

It was not the first time Warega had seen how you could stand on the shoulders of others in a time of need. As a young girl in Kenya, she saw how good jobs were hard to come by and the universities were roiled with protests, corruption and frequent closings. She longed to study abroad. Russia was the cheapest place to go. London the most popular. Many of her friends chose India.

When she met a Peace Corps volunteer and fell in love, she became determined to join him in Seattle. She was accepted at the community college there. She approached her mother, who owned a beauty salon in Nairobi, and her father, who worked in marketing.

“I said, ‘Here is the application. Here is the “yes.” Where is the money?’ ” she said, laughing. “I had no funds. No means. Just a dream.” Her parents decided to sell the family car, tapped into their network of family and friends and held a harambee to send her. She arrived in 1996 with one suitcase and $100 in her pocket.

Warega graduated from college, married the Peace Corps volunteer, became a U.S. citizen and applied to bring her parents here. They arrived, with green cards, in April 2006. Their plan was to work, become citizens and then apply for their three sons, Carlos, Keith and Christopher, to join them.

Almost immediately upon arriving, Warega noticed that her mother, usually so fashionable and gorgeous, looked different. She felt cold. She began losing weight. Warega, who had since divorced her first husband, had married again and had just given birth to a son, began what were to become seemingly endless rounds of visits to the doctor. In December, specialists finally discovered the liver cancer and began chemotherapy. By March, they said Anastasia had only a short while to live.

Photo: Tracy A. Woodward

Nyaji Alaro, 64 says goodbye to Emush Getachew. Getachew flew in from Florida for the event and is leaving to catch a plane at Dulles Airport. In the doorway in the background, Revella Warega (daughter of Alaro) looks for others coming to the fundraiser who have gotten lost on their drive from Baltimore.

That’s when she began begging to go home to see her children. “We tried to get access to a Web camera, so they could at least see her one last time,” Warega said. “But unfortunately, that was something we could not do.” And the letter from the Kenyan Embassy to expedite visitors’ visas for them did not come through in time.

When Anastasia died, taking her last breath, her husband said, at exactly 8:35 in the morning on Labor Day, the family did not even consider cremation, which would have made the journey home much cheaper. Anastasia didn’t want to be cremated. And if she could not see her sons again, she at least wanted them to see her. “Last year, they sent a healthy person here,” Warega said. “And even though we’ve been sending them updates, they need to have a chance to see her to be able to mourn. It would be devastating to them if we just handed them ashes.”

A few days after the harambee, Warega searched the Internet for cheaper flights to Nairobi, thinking perhaps only her father needed to be on the same expensive British Airways flight with the coffin. Her son’s bright red plastic firetruck and toys replaced the harambee basket in the middle of her living room floor. The harambee and other fundraising efforts had brought in $7,800. She still had $5,000 to find to enable her and her husband to fly to Kenya and to pay for the burial permit once they got there.

But she would worry about that later. It was time to go to Advent funeral home in Falls Church with her father. It was time for her own last look at her mother.

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