Find Me Unafraid Quotes

“I thought, if we could just come together as a community, even if that just meant playing soccer together, that could be the beginning of something good. Coming together as a community, as a people, creates more power than exists when individuals are fighting each other for scraps. Soccer has always brought people together. Soccer was where I would begin.”
― Kennedy Odede, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“There are two way of escaping your poverty,' he offers quietly. 'One, you can use drugs, get drunk - escape. Or you can escape into the world of books; that can be your refuge.”
― Kennedy Odede, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“They say love is supposed to set you free, but I think love binds you. It's only once you're so full of joy that you can imagine a devastation of loss.”
― Jessica Posner, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“Talent is universal, but opportunity is not.”
― Kennedy Odede, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“When we dare to hope, we create more hope in the world.”
― Kennedy Odede, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“No matter how much time I spend here I can't escape the whiteness of my skin, the way I stand out no matter what I do. But it's more than my skin. It's my privilege.”
― Jessica Posner, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“While I live my life expecting to live, others expect that they might die. The rules of the world are not the same for all of us.”
― Jessica Posner, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“I think of what it means to be a teenager in America, necessarily pushing boundaries, making expected mistakes. Here there is no margin for error: a mistake, no matter how insignificant, dashes any small hopes to break the cycle of poverty. Here in Kibera the world is relentless and unforgiving.”
― Jessica Posner, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“There is a whole mythology, a set of rules and issues surrounding a relationship like ours, that sneaks in uninvited.”
― Jessica Posner, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“Pretending that the locals ran the Western NGOs was a way to entice donors, grassroots was no longer a true goal but a buzzword. Sadly, the goal was not to empower true local leadership, but to find token locals to be token champions with no real decision-making power...
But I always knew true, long-term change cannot happen without involving the community.”
― Kennedy Odede, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“In my own eyes, I could only see how ridiculous I looked. How typical white-girl-goes-to-Africa. But in their eyes, the hair was a way to make me part of them, at least for a moment.”
― Jessica Posner, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“My only crime was drawing life's short straw.”
― Kennedy Odede, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“I never knew, until I came here, that my background could be something to apologize for. That these privileges were so randomly given to me, while other people were just as randomly denied...Privilege has begun to feel like and inescapable infection. I carry its implications with me, and my desire to understand how it works only seems to underscore it.”
― Jessica Posner, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“One day I saw something very strange, people walking around who looked like they had come directly from the grave, their skin was so pale. Mzungus. They carried a black machine that flashed bright when they pointed it at me. I screamed. I thought the machine was going to harm me, and so I fled. Later I learned it was a camera. Its flash and their voices terrified me. We didn't see them often, less than once in a year. But whenever I saw them, I ran and hid.
I had many ideas about them; first, I did not expect them to be smart, because they loved to take pictures of silly things like chickens on the street, shanties, and other things that were not interesting. Second, since I had seen a kid touching their skin and shouting, "How are you?," for many years I believed the name for all white people was "How are you?" I touched their skin as well and found it soft, but I was surprised and a bit disappointed because I thought touching it would leave a mark on my skin too.”
― Kennedy Odede, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum

“Ever since I was a child my reaction to the forbidden has been a stubborn desire to keep pushing: obstacles make something uncontrollably and deeply necessary.”
― Jessica Posner, Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum