After battling many obstacles, Faith savours the world at CNN centre

Faith Karimi left her struggling family in Nakuru for faraway US with little more than faith and had to endure many tribulations before finally joining the exclusive list of Kenyans who have worked for the global media giant. PHOTO| CATHERINE SHOICHET, CNN  

In Summary

• What she did not know at the time was that she was about to embark on a gruelling journey that would test every fibre of her being.
• When she landed at the Shreveport Regional Airport in Louisiana, she expected to find the missionary who had promised to host her waiting for her, but he was nowhere to be found.

By ANTONY KARANJA
More by this Author

When Faith Karimi set out to the US as a student, nothing could have prepared her for the agonising ride she would endure. But the former Menengai High School student would soon realise that she ...
needed a lot of faith to thrive; and that may be her name was not Faith by accident. Hers is the story of a young woman who refused to give up in her lowest times and persevered until her moment of triumph came. But difficulties had been a part of her life long before she got to the land of possibilities.

Raised in Nakuru as the second born in a family of five, Faith learned to live with little as her family could barely make ends meet. Things would get worse when her father died in 1992 while she was in high school and her sickly mother was left to toil to feed her five children.

Her mother’s struggles did not go unnoticed. One day in 1998, a missionary who ran a children’s home in Nakuru where Faith’s mother was helping out, came up with a proposition that would change the young woman’s life.

“The missionary told my mum that if she could get me to the US, he would see me through college and that she would only need to worry about my other four siblings,” Faith told Lifestyle.

Seizing this God-sent opportunity, her mother sold the little property they had to raise money for Faith’s travel to the southern State of Louisiana, where the missionary would be waiting for her.

After securing a student visa and with an airline ticket in hand, Faith set off for the US in 1999.

It was a bitter-sweet moment for her. “I knew my mum was sick but she always reassured me that it was nothing much and she would be okay,” she says.

Though this thought was a burden to her, she believed that things would turn for the better once she was done with college. She would be able to cater for her mother’s medical expenses, take care of her siblings back home, and even reunite with them in the US.

GRUELLING JOURNEY

What she did not know at the time was that she was about to embark on a gruelling journey that would test every fibre of her being.

When she landed at the Shreveport Regional Airport in Louisiana, she expected to find the missionary who had promised to host her waiting for her, but he was nowhere to be found.

Instead, Grambling State University where she was to enrol as a student had sent a Nigerian lecturer at the college to pick her up. It was at this point that she learnt that the missionary had moved to Texas and was no longer in the City of Grambling.

Faith made efforts to get in touch with him to seek an explanation on what was going on.

“I eventually reached him on telephone but he did not seem to have an explanation for me as to what was going on,” Faith recounts.

The missionary told her that he would not meet her educational costs as he had promised.

Faith was devastated. This was supposed to be the long awaited break where she would start college and eventually be able to lend a helping hand to her family back home.

Though the Nigerian lecturer’s family eventually offered to host her, Faith faced the prospect of failing to start her classes and actually falling out of status in the US. Since the missionary was to take care of her college fees, Faith had only $100 to her name. She could only hope and pray.

The Nigerian family would eventually introduce her to a local Episcopal church which would serve as a source of spiritual refuge and hope for her. She prayed a lot and attended the church regularly.

When the host family could not make it to church, the pastor’s wife would offer to pick her up and drive her for services. It was during one of the many trips to church that the pastor’s wife learnt of her predicament.

She promised to consult with her husband to see if they could do anything for Faith. Luckily, the couple offered to meet her tuition for the first semester.

Faith was overjoyed but her tribulations were far from over. The generous gift by the church was just a temporary reprieve and she still needed fees for the rest of her degree programme.

All this time, Faith had not mentioned to her mother that the missionary never kept his promise. She kept all this to herself.

“I could not tell my mum about the situation because I knew she was sick and this would have just made things worse for her,” Faith says. “This was going to be my own battle.”

However, even as her mother thought she was well taken care of in terms of tuition expenses, she wanted to help out by providing money for Faith’s daily upkeep so as not to be overly-reliant on the missionary.

She offered to sell a piece of land and send Faith the proceeds. But this was not to be as she died only a few months later.

Faith could not bring herself to accept that her mother was gone — and while she was away from home. This proved to be a trying moment for the struggling student who had only been in the US for less than six months.

To add insult to injury, Faith could not afford to buy a ticket to travel back to Kenya for the funeral. This marked one of the lowest points of her life. The thought of her mother being buried in her absence was unbearable. Although her family sent her a video recording of her mother’s funeral, she could not bear watching it until five years later.

Inspite of this, a letter her mother had sent her before she died prodded Faith to stay true to her purpose.

“In the letter, my mother said she named me Faith because she knew I would need it some day,” she recalls. “I have hang on to this letter to this day”.

In the letter, her mother also told her that when she sent her to the US, she believed that she would in turn help her siblings and that she had all the faith in her.

With this, she knew failure was not an option. She promised herself that no matter what it took, she would fulfill her mother’s wish. Thus putting her heartache aside, Faith was able to complete a stressful first semester in college.

In the meantime, the local church where she worshipped knew about the loss of her mother and the fact that she was not able to attend her funeral. In December, they surprised her by presenting her with a cheque to enable her to buy a ticket to travel home for Christmas. The church also told her to keep any money that remained. A thrilled Faith used the balance to pay her tuition fees for the next semester.

TO EARN MONEY

After she returned from her vacation in Kenya, she was able to attend school worry-free for another semester. Now she needed to work hard to raise money for the rest of the school year.

To earn money during school breaks, Faith and a few of her friends would board a Greyhound bus which would take them 1,955 km across the US to Ocean City, Maryland, a resort city at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Here, she would make beds for tourists at motels. She would earn decent money due to tips from these tourists. With the money, Faith was able to fund her education as well as educate her siblings.

For the next three years, she worked hard doing all sorts of jobs which included tutoring in mathematics and writing for the college newspaper.

During these years, the church continued to support her and would even finance birthday parties for her to make her feel at home.

In 2004, Faith graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in journalism and also gave that year’s speech as the class valedictorian, which is a distinction bestowed on the student with the highest ranking amongst the graduating class.

Due to her stellar academic achievements the church, whose faithful also attended her graduation, secured a full scholarship for her to pursue a master’s programme. At the same time, her university offered her a full scholarship for the master’s programme. She opted to take up her college’s offer as the offer secured by the church was further away from the city she had come to call home.

During her master’s studies, she was able to secure internships with the Austin American-Statesman newspaper in Austin and later  an internship with the New York Times at their Nairobi Bureau in 2002-2003. She says internship  at the paper changed her life.

“While on internship at NYT Bureau in Nairobi during the 2002  elections, I remember falling into a ditch in Kibera after I was caught up in a stampede,” she recalls.

“I came out of that ditch covered in dirty sewage water but thinking, ‘This is so exciting! This is what I want to do!’”

At Grambling University, she went on to win various awards for academic excellence. She was a two-time winner of the Chipp Quinn Scholar Award for her excellence in academics as well as being feted as best columnist by the Society of Professional Journalists.

She graduated with a Master’s degree in Communications in 2005.

Immediately after completing her studies, she joined The Press-Enterprise newspaper in California. In 2006, she joined The Baltimore Sun in Baltimore, Maryland, as an editor/writer. One of her major assignments with the paper was assisting in covering then Senator Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential run.

In December 2008, she took a leap of faith and submitted a job  application to the global media giant Cable News Network (CNN) at a time when The Baltimore Sun was laying off staff. Though she believed that it was a long shot, she was invited for an interview during Christmas week of that year. Convinced that she would not get the position, she pushed the matter to the back of her mind and decided to take her vacation hours which she had accumulated at The Baltimore Sun and go home for holiday.

She was proved wrong a couple of weeks later. While shopping at a Nakumatt store in Nairobi, her phone rang. CNN was actually interested in her and wanted her to cut short her vacation in Kenya to start work at the station. She was asked to head to CNN’s Nairobi office where she would get more details.

ABOUT MUM

“I could not believe this was actually happening to me,” Faith says. “I knew I wanted to work for them but I did not know it was going to be so soon.”

“At this moment I thought about my mum and how proud she would have been to see me come this far,” she adds.

In February of 2009, she joined the news giant at their headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, as a newsdesk editor for CNN Digital.

“My daily duties include news gathering, writing and editing stories for the website,” she says. “I also work with our international correspondents on the big stories of the day from their regions to make sure they are reflected on the website.”

Faith says that as she works to gather international news, she puts a lot of pressure on herself to make sure that any big story from Kenya is told accurately and in a timely way to the world. She recalls the Westgate siege and the role of Kenyans on Twitter (KOT).

“One thing I love about KOT is that they are very vocal, and they alert us when they feel strongly about something or there’s an incident going on,” she says. “This then leads us to alert our Nairobi office to make a follow up on the reports.”

“Today’s successful journalist is more than a good writer with good sources. He/she should embrace social media as well. If you don’t, you’ll miss out on a lot of crucial conversations,” she told Lifestyle.

She says she also tries to stay plugged in on African conversations on social media, which always gives one an idea on what the next big story is.

On how CNN has impacted her career, she says that the media house has made the entire world a local story for her.

“Working here has made me well-rounded and opened my eyes to a world I’d never have known,” she says.

On what motivated her to study journalism, she says that at an early age, she used to send in stories to the children’s section of the Daily Nation and every time they would get printed, she would get really excited which motivated her to send in more. She says her interest in journalism was despite the fact that her father preferred her to become a lawyer.

She also notes that since they did not have a television at home, she did not identify with any journalist that she could look up to.

“Looking back, that was not a bad thing because I ended up doing things my way,” she says.

 In the US, she faced some discouragement at the beginning.

“When I came to the US after high school and decided to major in journalism, a lot of people told me I wouldn’t make it since I had what is considered here as a foreign accent,” she recalls. “But I didn’t have a Plan B so I stuck to it.”

Faith has now been with CNN for over six years. To this day, she still cannot believe how her fortunes have changed.

“Every day I walk into the CNN building, I always say to myself,  ‘wow, I still can’t believe I work here’,” she says.

However, she never forgets where she came from and the struggles she had to go through. She believes that the struggles made her a stronger person and strengthened her faith in God. She believes she made it through prayer, hard work, perseverance and determination.

Three of her siblings have now joined her in the US, with two in Kansas and one in Texas.

“My journey proves that nothing is impossible with faith,” she says. “Miracles happen whether you are rich or poor so never give up no matter the circumstances.”

 

Faith Karimi with colleagues. PHOTO| CATHERINE SHOICHET, CNN

MY WORK SCHEDULE

Ours is a team that wins by planning ahead

I work the overnight shift, which mostly handles international news, so I come into the office at 9.30 pm on a typical day. 

Obviously you don’t want to walk into the office clueless on what the big stories are, so before I leave home, I look at CNN.com and the competition to see what they have that we don’t have, etc. I also give Twitter a quick glimpse to see what people are talking about.

 The first thing I do when I walk into the office is log onto the CNN.com data page to see what stories are getting read the most. That way, I have an idea of what our readers’ priorities are.

Our overnight team then sits down with the team that’s about to go home so that they can fill us in on the nuts and bolts of the big stories, or any issues they had that we should be on the lookout for.

Team Overnight then takes over the reins and has its own meeting to discuss what direction we’ll take our stories and what fresh angles we can pursue.

We also talk to the international TV side to see what their priorities are, if they have any interesting guests coming up and how we can work together on overlapping coverage.

 After meetings, things get pretty intense. It’s writing, editing, talking to correspondents on the ground, and keeping an eye on social media and other media to make sure we’re not missing anything. The best part about my job is that it’s unpredictable — the game plan can change in an instant if a big story breaks. You never get bored.