A good thing, among many, about Bill Fahey is his singular focus on a specific goal. Which is not to say that there is necessarily a clear path to achieving that goal. In fact, there seldom is. When you work with Bill, the tasks to complete a given project are never easy because the goal is so worthwhile, the reward so dependent upon the work undertaken. This also means that the man is capable of completely exhausting you in ways you never knew you could be exhausted. You give yourself to the pursuit of the project because you believe. And if you believe, you believe until the undertaking is completed. And if you make it to the end of the project, you start working on the next vision on the horizon. And so in this way, if you believe you believe forever.
I am writing this from the coffee table of my friend Alex Baron's apartment in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, New York. Alex has kindly let me sleep on his couch and convert his table to a work station for my various freelance writing projects while I find that always elusive Brooklyn sublet apartment. As you can tell, I have little money at present. I eat slices of pizza and drink water. It was not a particularly frugal thing for a money-strapped 25-year old aspiring musician to spend $1250 on a plane ticket to East Africa. But such is my belief in Bill Fahey, the Andover Youth Services staff and the message that they, and by proxy me, are spreading not just to our hometown community but all around the world.
That's just to say there were reasons I found myself on a recent Friday afternoon, when most people my age were presumably gainfully employed at something, sitting in a tiny room in a brick house without electricity in a village of tin-roofed and mud huts 8,000 miles from my home amongst a few dozen Kenyans from the village of Kisii drinking Coca-Cola and eating white bread.
A village elder wearing a tattered fedora rose in the darkened room to say that as a child he had always run away when he saw white people coming. The sentiment, I am sure shared by many Kenyans of his generation, was that white people were in his country to take goods and land and, not too too long ago, people. The small presence of our group, and others like us, were responsible for a cataclysmic shift in the mind of this old man. We came to the village bringing art supplies and musical instruments and recording equipment. We were there to give and learn and understand.
There is a girl at the Okari School whose mother was a surgeon in Nairobi who died of disease. Her father was a soldier who was killed in Uganda. We sat on the soccer field one afternoon talking about the differences between American and Kenyan children. She asked me what was important to American youth and I stumbled to answer it (I think I gave a vague and rambling treatise on capitalism and why Americans can act very entitled and I would have forgiven her for falling asleep). But when I asked her what was important to Kenyan children above all else this 12-year old orphan in an impoverished region of a third world country told me, “love and kindness.”
Andover Youth Services helped me to realize that I was part of a community when I was a somewhat lost teenager who started playing music with my friends and was shown that there was a group of people in my hometown who wanted to help me allow that passion to grow.
That band developed into a lifelong pursuit. Slowly we began to play outside of our hometown. Then we made a record. Then we went on tour. The first time we played Cambridge, Mass.' famed rock club the Middle East, I wore my Andover Youth Services sweatshirt on stage. When we went on our first tour, it was Bill Fahey we called from a rest stop in Indiana. I think it was a way to simply say, we are out here in the middle of nowhere but we come from somewhere.
It was a similar feeling when the voices of the kids from the Okari School joined with ours on the morning of our departure as we performed alongside them in their dining room. A community can be a group of people in ones hometown. Or it can be two groups of people from across a very big ocean who share a set of beliefs. And if you believe, you believe forever.
-David Tanklefsky
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