Called by God: an interview with Migwe Kimemia

This is an interview by volunteer writer Kadija Diallo of Migwe Kimemia, director of AFSC's Peace and Trade Justice program in Dayton, Ohio. Migwe discusses the development of the program and the spiritual basis for his work. - Lucy

Kadija Diallo (KD): Your family immigrated here from Kenya. Can you tell me what that was like for you to move to the U.S. and to be in this new environment? What were some of the reasons your family left Kenya?  

Migwe Kimemia (MK): I went to the University of Wisconsin and then to Clark-Atlanta University School of Business. I went back to Kenya, was working for Citi Bank, and then I moved to promote international trade and investment between U.S. and other countries and Kenya. So I used to come to the U.S. to promote trade and investment, as part of my work in global development and consulting.  

In the middle of my career, in April 1998, I had a call, in my faith we call it a ‘call,’ when you’re called by God to do something much deeper. So, I received my call to join the Christian ministry, that’s when you start preaching, questioning your faith, and challenging yourself to connect your faith with the community—that’s what I was thinking.  

Dayton World Refugee Day

I decided to come to the seminary at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. When I was a student before I was not with a family, now I came with a family of four children and my wife. That was a different experience. I didn’t know about the school system, how it operates. My children had never been in such a rough environment in inner city schools where they were being teased, and of course they had a culture shock.  

My wife wanted to go back (laughs). Coming from a culture where we are more community driven, “collective culture” as we call it, and coming to an individualistic culture where you don’t know your neighbor—that was really difficult to adjust to.  

The other thing was language. Kenya is an English-speaking country. We learn it in school, and it is one of the official languages. When we come here, even though you are speaking English, the American public doesn’t understand what you are saying.  

It was very upsetting for me when I took up what Christians call Urban Ministry. I took Urban Ministry to go in the neighborhoods, the most depressed neighborhoods, the African-American neighborhoods. 

That was a shock to me to see the level of poverty in the United States. But it triggered my interest, because the U.S. always promotes America through Hollywood. People think everything is very easy here and everyone is very wealthy. They never show those neighborhoods in African TV or media, so it was a shock to see the level of crime and poverty in the community within the city.  

I found my calling to really work and empower the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized groups. That’s how I found my faith—working to do exactly that.  

KD: Did your experiences in Urban Ministry inform what you later did with AFSC and the immigrant community? 

MK: Exactly. I was there for about four years. I was very hopeful about starting small businesses and helping people start small businesses, microenterprises. I found other issues much larger than that--drug trafficking, other crimes. Children could not play outside because of fear within high transitional neighborhoods. It was very difficult to find leaders who were stable.  

I started in civic engagement from my experiences that involved, among other things, working in the city of Dayton to actually provide community policing. We worked with the police to make sure drug trafficking and other crimes were out.  

I found myself organizing absentee landlords, so-called slum landlords.  I was wondering who was benefiting from all this mess. I went to city hall, found out all their names and addresses, and I started writing to all of them, asking them to come to the Urban Ministry Center. Most of them ignored me, but a few of them showed up.  

They were surprised that an immigrant would be interested in cleaning up the place. A few of them captured our vision, and they started coming slowly. We had 10 and then we had around 15. I requested them to organize and elect their own leadership.  

They organized themselves, they had their leadership. They called it Wesleyan Hill Landlords Association. I became a member although I did not have any property there, but they saw me as valuable person who could inspire them. They gave me the position of Assistant Treasurer. That was amazing. I didn’t know that my presence here would mean much, but they saw my skills, my background, to be an asset.  

The city also recognized my skills and passion and actually took me to one of their leadership conferences. 

The Jubilee campaign was how I got involved with AFSC. In 2002, AFSC started the Jubilee campaign for Africa through the Africa Initiative that came up with the Life over Debt campaign. They were recruiting people around the country, and AFSC Dayton was one of them. They took almost a year, they tried to get someone suitable for the position, but they couldn’t find anyone. Then the Seminary alerted me about it, I came here and they were so excited because they had not met an African who had worked in Africa and with a banking background.  

It was a calling. My call was really answered, because I never knew if I would serve Africa when I was here even, to think of an organization like AFSC to be here in a small city. For me it was the answer to my call, to my prayers, and that’s why I feel so excited to be a part of AFSC.      

African caucus in Dayton

KD: How did you move from AFSC’s Africa Initiative to the Welcome Dayton program?

MK: When I started organizing for the debt campaign, I intentionally decided to organize Africans who were here: students, community leaders, and professionals. What I did was to organize an African advisory committee composed of all those professionals and African immigrants in different positions in the society here in the greater Dayton area. Then I invited other Americans to join us and share other experiences. Now we could tap into stories from different countries about the impact of debt on education, healthcare, and poverty in general. We created a very good resource, and we did our own internal research and started action research where we could connect the community on issues that affect Africa.  

We had a broad program committee that became a model. The highlight of the committee was one time we organized 10 students from Ohio to go to Congress to speak to the Senate and the House about debt, how immigrants living in Ohio are affected, and how our communities back home are affected. That’s why we were going there, to hear their voices to lift up youth voices, especially those who are most affected due to lack of access to education and opportunity.  

KD: Was the youth group that went to Congress involved with the Dayton programs? How did the students transfer what they spoke about with Congressional leaders in back to Dayton? 

MK: When we came back to Ohio, we also went to speak to other colleges, churches, and faith communities so that was part of the community engagement. We had petitions, cultural events, general public education. Building a constituency for Africa through petitions and public education, and of course the legislative visit—that was the strategy.  

Part of organizing principle is actually organizing the community most affected by the issue. We spoke to African communities in the events, so that they are part of the solution and that’s how our strategy has always worked. My own conviction is that people are to take responsibility and take the leadership to lift up their voices. Then we can advocate to create the climate for that to happen. That is the principle that the people affected by the issue should have the best answer. 

As part of the Africa Initiative, the program coordinator from Philadelphia would organize with the partners in Africa to bring African youth. We would host them on campus in faith communities—African youth from Africa. Then in turn, they would also take African-American youth to Africa to have experience, and then this youth would lead in part of the organizing when they came back. They became organizers and told stories, what they saw, what they heard in Africa. We called that Peace Tours. Those Peace Tours really created additional education and connected key advocates here.    

Mama Nozipo Glenn, a long term leader in the Dayton program

KD: How did you get non-immigrant members of the Dayton community involved? What were some of the challenges and did you get any negative push-back from the non-immigrant Dayton community?

MK: It was very challenging. As you’re aware, Africa is a huge continent: 54 countries now, with different nationalities divided along ethnic and religious lines. Bringing Africans together is not the same as organizing Hispanics. We have worked with Hispanics together here. 

In 2004, the Third World Coalition that used to be with AFSC was being revived again. All third-world nations, people from so called non-Caucasian communities, was part of the program of AFSC where we bring our voices together in planning, design, and so forth. This Third World Coalition hosted the third-world community and leaders who were among other things the program directors and program staff of AFSC and also community members. My program committee from Africa, they [were] part of that Third-World Coalition.  

One of the trips organized was to go to the Mexican border in San Diego. That was my first time going there. It was a very good educational tour. I never knew much about the Mexican border, other than reading about it. Until I went there, that’s when I realized how tough it was. This enlightened me more about the migration issue.  

At that time when we came back from that trip, I came back to Dayton and had one of the interns from the Ivory Coast, and she was a graduate student at university. When we came back, we decided to stand in solidarity with immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants. That was the biggest hot issue at the time. At that time they were demonstrating against Operation Gate Keeper that was started way back in 1994. This was the 10-year anniversary and they decided to do a demonstration. It was very peaceful and huge, all kinds of people and families. 

It inspired me. That experience inspired me to stand in solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the Hispanic community. When we came back we started connecting with the Hispanic community. They had a lot of organizations, they are well established, the churches here have Hispanic ministries and so they have a very well organized group of advocacy, even the Hispanic chamber of commerce. I started going to their meetings and we started working together.  

Then there was the issue of advocating for the issue of ‘matricular consular.’ I don’t know if you have heard of it—a Mexican ID that is issued by the Mexican consulate. For those who cross the border, undocumented Mexicans would use that ID for identification purposes.   

We were campaigning the city of Dayton to pass a resolution to allow the police to recognize this ID. I got involved in that campaign, and I actually drafted the resolution on behalf of AFSC to read it at the City Commission meeting. That was my first experience advocating for immigrants.  

Then, of course, it was not a big issue and the resolution passed. But then later on, problems came up again with the police raids in public parks and the Hispanics who were being arrested. Now some of the Africans also became afraid even though their immigration issues were different. This fear alone was felt through our advisory committee.  

We got more interested in knowing how Africans were being affected by the same issues. That’s how we started organizing and engaging with the city on immigration issues, and of course that is how we became more involved with Welcome Dayton back in 2011.  

Ten years later, by 2011, when we passed the resolution for Welcome Dayton we had been engaging for 10 years with the city and seeing how we can work as a community in rebuilding the city which had been devastated by the manufacturing sector. The auto industry was the key. Dayton had been known for manufacturing for many years.  

Now the manufacturing sector went away to China, Southern states and the auto history—you know the history—disappeared. The city was starting to lose its population because this of course disappeared. When we started organizing for Welcome Dayton, we used the economic language as a narrative to engage in how we would rebuild this city. Now before people did not hear, they did not want to talk about immigration. The fear was everywhere.  

Until we started changing the narrative to address the economic tactic for the city, they had been losing the population to other cities and now the city was in deficit and so forth.  

Now we started saying immigrants, actually even pulling out research that immigrants are more likely to start small businesses, they are more stable, they work very hard, and certainly they are here for a better life. They are not here to commit crimes. So we started changing the narrative to really reflect on the city itself and why it is people should live together in peace and harmony.  

The city started listening, and of course there were a lot of negative and bad publicity from hate groups and so forth and certainly we kept working.  

For people like us who have a calling, what we call prophetic call, for me it was a prophetic calling that focuses on justice and righteousness. Those are the kind of people we ended up having. We had one group that we called Interfaith Group on Immigration Reform, we formed that with Christian organizations, and we invited the Quakers, the Muslims. We would speak to different communities and even to campuses, to students, to other faith groups even as tense as it was.  

That’s how we continued with Welcome Dayton as well: putting our faith in practice and making sure our policymakers can hear another story through the faith community and also through the economic narrative. The whole thing came together and certainly AFSC was at the center and that’s how we became part of Welcome Dayton.  

All of the City Commission voted overwhelmingly for the resolution to have Welcome Dayton. Let me point out, unlike the matricular consular that allowed the Mexican residents to use their IDs, resolutions are really statements of intent. The city cannot really enforce it like an ordinance of the city. I came to know after they started targeting Hispanics and arresting them anywhere.   

So when we did Welcome Dayton, we were very intentional. There must be an implementation plan and that makes the biggest difference. Based on our experiences in the past, we made sure that there was an implementation plan. If you read the Welcome Dayton plan, it’s a very comprehensive plan of implementation and that’s why it was so different.  

It became a model for other cities and the country. The city passed another resolution to actually have what we call a Welcome Dayton Committee. A committee of the City Commission appointed at least 25 people to form the committee to implement the policy.. 

The Welcome Dayton process involves task forces, and I was involved in the Business and Economic Development subcommittee. There were other [subcommittees] on justice, on social-cultural, and on Youth. Welcome Dayton is a comprehensive policy on the whole immigration issue as we know it.  

So AFSC has been represented through my work here. I’m the voice for the African community and certainly we have other leaders. There’s a 25-person committee from different sectors and from business to social services to immigration lawyers, so it’s a very diverse group.   

Women with fair trade goods from Kenya in Dayton

KD: You also seemed to be involved in other immigrant economic justice initiatives, mainly the coffee co-op board. 

MK: Not directly. Since we had used the economic narrative, and because of poverty among African refugees and immigrants--the highest influx of refugees in the city--we had tried to figure out how we could help them become economically self-sufficient. Certainly small business is always one of the best solutions for a lot of immigrants—research shows that immigrants are more likely to start small businesses. We had been wondering in the city of Dayton why we didn’t even have an African restaurant.  

We thought through the African Advisory Committee to do a study. I had attended this fair-trade conference in 2012 and when we came back we thought even the fair trade conference has all these fair trade businesses from Africa, from everywhere, but they were not run by Africans, especially not immigrants.  

Immigrants didn’t have businesses there, and I was very struck by that and said that products are coming from countries where immigrants come from, It doesn’t make sense for immigrants to be here and they have no knowledge about those products—they should be involved in this kind of opportunity.  

We thought of coffee as one of the biggest crops in Africa, grown by so many countries in Africa. We decided to do a study; AFSC supported us, using African students in business schools here developing a business plan. We actually presented [the study] to community leaders, and they bought into the whole vision and they decide to form a cooperative. The study was based on a cooperative business model using coffee as the main product to access the market here. [Coffee is] a huge $59 billion industry, and we saw that as an opportunity for African immigrants to actually benefit from a project that they own, operate, and control.  

AFSC’s part of it was really through what we created earlier. Back in 2010 we created the Mandela Institute, the year South Africa hosted the world soccer tournament.  

We had foreseen a problem here that we had encountered in the course of organizing African immigrants. We saw that we had a leadership issue, a big leadership deficit here.  We created Mandela Institute to actually model after Mandela’s leadership legacy. Through the Mandela Institute we have been training a lot of African students and African leaders to become leaders who are really promoting justice and peace and of course empowering the community, not the kind of leaders we normally hear who are just oppressing the community.  

Through the Mandela Institute we have created several community organizations. The coffee program was the 12th program we helped to create, but we don’t control those organizations. We let the community go and pick the leaders, we train them to go and elect their own leadership and run the organization themselves.  

Now, the coffee project is the most complex project we have ever engaged—it requires issues of the marketplace. We had to do a study on coffee, the industry, and so far we used business students from Africa.  

Now, the communities that we presented to, some of our Advisory committee members became owners of the cooperative. They became founders, and these founders of the cooperative are the ones that are now running the cooperative. AFSC is only providing space to have their board, to have an office and their meetings here.  

We just inspire them to make connections with other agencies. We do trainings for them. We have been doing a lot of research on coffee, so that’s what we have been doing and now they have been independent, other than training and providing office space.  

We don’t run the coffee projects; it’s run by the community. It’s the supreme principle: let the people come up with the solution and let the people, through self-determination, develop solutions to their own issues and become the voice to their community. That’s how I have been doing that.    

KD: Can you please expand on how your spiritual beliefs have guided your work with AFSC and the Dayton Community? 

MK: In 1998, I received my spiritual call during the Christian Holy Week prayers at St. Andrews Church in Nairobi, Kenya. By that time, I was in the middle of my career in international business and management consulting.  

Prior to receiving my call, I had become more aware about extreme poverty in Africa and the exploitation of African human and natural resources.  In this regard, listening to God’s voice was a unique liberating experience that I will never forget.  So I decided to answer my call by joining the United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, where I studied eco-spirituality and globalization.  

I am currently undertaking a post-doctoral action research project on prophetic leadership in the global marketplace at the seminary. During my first year at the seminary, I was confronted with a difficult discernment process: pursuing pastoral ministry or prophetic voices for justice in the world. I tried pastoral ministry but I could not find God at the pulpit.  

Then God led me to an urban ministry in a low-income and marginalized neighborhood in West Dayton where drug traffickers and prostitutes were the role models for youth. Amazingly, this is where I met Jesus lifting up the voices of the voiceless! To make the matter faithfully exciting, I read a very special book entitled “Let Your Life Speak” by Parker Palmer. By then, I didn’t even know Palmer was a Quaker. Needless to say, Palmer’s story about his journey towards an authentic vocation resonated with my own experience in the corporate world. 

As I now reflect on my faith journey, I strongly believe that God led me to AFSC-Dayton to spearhead the Jubilee campaign for cancelling Africa’s international debt, and advocating for African refugees and conflict-free trade in Ohio. Since joining AFSC, my prophetic calling has become a reality: A voice of the voiceless across cultures and religions. Not only that, I have fully embraced the Quaker values in my faith journey. In other words, I have become a Quaker in Action for change in Dayton.