Grand Kenyans

ELDORET, Kenya —  Kip Keino, one of the greatest Olympic runners of all time, a living legend in this East African nation who could command the sort of classy ride befitting a man of distinction, drives himself around this high-plateau town in a beat-up old four-door Nissan.

The speedometer is busted. So is the left rear taillight. The car has no hubcaps.

Others, he says, keep suggesting that he buy something more upscale, if only as a nod to appearances. But his priorities are elsewhere. “The money is needed at home,” he says. “I have people depending on me. I can get where I need to go.”

In a world too often dominated by tales of athletes who think me-first, Keino, 61, and his wife, Phyllis, make abundantly clear what the grace of selflessness and a heartfelt devotion to others can accomplish in life.

Over the last 30 years, the Keinos have taken in more than 100 orphaned or abandoned children, and made them their own. Every one of these children who has started grade school has finished high school, Phyllis says.

A few months ago, the Keinos realized a long-held dream. They opened the Kip Keino School, funded by various donations. Now some 250 boys and girls line up in the school’s quadrangle each Monday morning to sing the Kenyan national anthem and to dance to songs such as a sweet Congolese melody that proclaims God’s mercy.

Just down the road, giraffes nibble at the tops of acacia trees, their skinny legs and long necks outlined in the sun against the vast African sky.

“I am happy,” says Faraj Kiptarus Keino, 13. He lives on the Keino farm across the highway from the school, in a dormitory with two dozen other adoptive Keino kids. He wears the school uniform--purple sweater, white shirt, tie, gray shorts, knee socks--with pride. “Mum and Dad care for us,” he says.

Neither Phyllis nor Kip Keino sees anything extraordinary about the path they have pursued.

“We feel they need help,” Kip says of their extended family. “They need shelter. They need a mother and a father.” He pauses, then continues: “I came into this world with nothing. I will leave with nothing. While I am here, I should be mindful of those people who need help. They need food. They need clothing. They need shelter. They need love.”

Phyllis adds, “There are other people who do like this. Or more.”

Virtually everyone who comes to know the Keinos remarks not only on their sincerity but on their humility.

“This man--what he has done, what he does--is fantastic,” says International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch.

Told later of Samaranch’s remarks, Keino furrowed his brows in puzzlement. Then he said: “For what?”

This is no act. Humility is Kip Keino’s touchstone. For example, on a trip a few months ago to IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, he arrived in a way most uncharacteristic of IOC members.

He didn’t ask to be met at the nearest airport, in Geneva, about 45 minutes away. Instead, he took a commuter train to Lausanne. Arriving at the Lausanne station, he grabbed his luggage, walked past the taxi stand and, a bag in each hand, headed uphill to the hotel, three steep blocks up and then another block over. “Nice night,” he said when he got to the hotel door.

Bob Keino, 24, the fifth of seven children born to Kip and Phyllis, says, “He always taught us--you can be the best in the world at your sport but you always have to be humble.”

The son adds about the father, “I don’t see him as this superman. He’s such a humble guy. But you understand from other people the timing of what he did, the achievements. It’s amazing.”

On the Track

Kip Keino burst onto the world stage in October 1968, at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, where he raced against Jim Ryun of the United States.

Ryun went to the Games as the world-record holder at 880 yards, 1,500 meters and the mile; he had not been beaten at the 1,500 or the mile for more than three years.

Keino, by contrast, was an uncoached Nandi tribesman. But he had a distinct advantage that many others in track and field did not fully understand before the Games; he had been born, raised and done his training at altitude, about 7,000 feet.

He recalls his quiet confidence before the Olympics. But, it turned out, he was dogged by severe stomach pains--later diagnosed as a severe gall bladder infection.

Against the advice of doctors, he entered not only the 1,500 but the 5,000 and 10,000.

First up was the 10,000. He was leading with two laps to go when he doubled up in pain and fell to the infield. When attendants arrived with stretchers, he jumped up and--though now disqualified--finished the race.

Four days after that, he took second place in the 5,000.

On the day of the 1,500, he got caught in a traffic jam so severe that he decided to jog the last mile to the stadium. Then he won the race by an astounding 20 meters. Ryun came in second.

“He took the 1968 Olympics by storm,” acclaimed Games filmmaker Bud Greenspan said.

Four years later, at the Munich Games, Keino and Ryun met again in the Olympic 1,500--but, for a series of complex reasons, in the same first-round heat, not in the final. In one of the most poignant scenes ever to play out on an Olympic track, Ryun tripped on the heel of Uganda’s Vitus Ashaba and fell.

Keino went on to take silver in the 1,500. As a challenge, he had also entered the 3,000-meter steeplechase. He won the gold medal, setting an Olympic record.

The worldwide reach of television made Keino famous. As the colonial era was dissolving, he and Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila, who had won the 1960 Olympic marathon while running barefoot through the streets of Rome, became arguably the most famous faces in sub-Saharan Africa--symbols of what Africans could accomplish. Bikila died in 1973. Keino remains one of the most recognizable African names in the United States. He is president of Kenya’s national Olympic committee; last year, he was made an IOC member.

But, Keino said while driving recently in his beat-up Nissan around the vast tea plantations in western Kenya, not once did he ever think of parlaying his fame into fortune in the United States or Europe.

“I live here,” he said. “I stay here. This is my country. I was born here and I will die here.”

Family Man

When he came home to Kenya from the 1972 Olympics, Keino had four Olympic medals. By the end of that year, he and Phyllis would have eight children in their house.

Three had been born to them. Phyllis said she found the others queuing for food in front of a police station. A nurse, she told her husband that the children needed them. He agreed. “I feel the humanity of being a human being,” he says now.

Thus was launched what is now the Kip Keino Children’s Home. Since 1984, the home has been officially registered with the Kenyan government.

If they are old enough to remember, Phyllis said, the children who come to the Keino house typically have a horrifying tale to tell: They were abandoned. Or one or both parents died of AIDS. Or they were born to a mentally disabled woman who was unable to care for children.

Some stories, Phyllis said, are worse, relating the tale of a woman who got so drunk she beat her mother-in-law to death, whereupon the woman’s husband beat her to death, whereupon the husband then killed himself with insecticide. Left behind were seven children. “I took four girls,” then ages 12, 6, 3 and 6 months, Phyllis said.

The current Keino child count is 82, Phyllis said.

Half, however, are no longer living under the same roof with Kip or Phyllis. They are off at area boarding schools--essentially high school--or away at college.

Of the others, 18 live at the first farm Phyllis and Kip bought. It is called “Kazi Mingi,” Swahili for “a lot of work.” About 200 acres, it is dominated by a ranch-style house that features several additions designed more or less around long hallways off which are scattered rooms big enough to hold multiple numbers of bunk beds.

If not for Kip and Phyllis, “I would be somewhere else or maybe I would have died,” said Alice Cheruto Keino, now 16. She adds that she now has ambitions: “I’d like to go to the army.”

“I want to be a lawyer,” said Nancy Waithera Keino, 13.

“A doctor,” said Ruth Cherotich Keino, 13.

Twenty-three more live at the Keino’s second farm, dubbed “Baraka,” Swahili for “blessing.” Five of these 23 kids are nursery school-aged. All 23 live in a dormitory-style building on the grounds; when the older kids go off to school, the younger ones study their ABCs or their numbers in a makeshift classroom in the dorm.

Baraka was bought in 1989 for the Children’s Home through a Swiss priest stationed in Eldoret. The idea was Phyllis’. She wanted more land in order to grow more food for the children and to generate income for the Home.

The site, however, is problematic. Rainfall in the area is unpredictable. And the land itself was flat and treeless.

It took the better part of 10 years to make the land productive. Key financial backing came from Virginia-based Bread and Water for Africa, an affiliate of a nonprofit organization called Christian Relief Services. Manpower came from a Dutchman with a farming background, Jos Creemers; he moved to Kenya and took over day-to-day operation of the land.

Now Baraka is ringed with trees and boasts a reservoir. It even looks like a farm--with a herd of 120 Holsteins as well as a barn, feedlots, a milking station and, off the main house, a garden with fruits and vegetables.

Not all is rosy, however. In some ways farming at Baraka is evocative of the miseries many farmers encountered in taming the American West. Last year, for instance, Creemers said, half the corn crop was stolen.

The farm now produces milk, yogurt and cheese under the name “Tamu,” Swahili for “delicious.” Demand is high; the farm is processing 300 liters a day of milk or milk-related products and it typically sells out. But with a half-liter selling for 15 or 20 Kenyan shillings, about 20 cents, the farm generates maybe $60 a day in sales.

At Baraka, profit is important--but so too are ethics, particularly with young ones around to listen and learn. Wheeling the Nissan into Baraka one day recently, Kip stopped by the milking station to pick up a few cartons of “lala,” a fermented milk considered a local delicacy. He counted up the cartons, then paid the supervisor. When it was observed that perhaps the proprietor of the farm really didn’t have to pay, he responded, “No. They must keep records.”

At Kazi Mingi, meantime, Phyllis’ day begins at 5:30 a.m. It ends late at night.

A woman of strong and abiding religious faith, she said, “My pleasure is this: When these kids are happy, I am happy.”

“I look upon Phyllis as a saint,” observed Fred Hardy, who for 36 years was the track coach at the University of Richmond and has become a Keino family friend. “She is a strong, strong woman. And of course Kip is what he is, a great guy.”

School’s In

For many years, the Keinos had harbored plans for their own school.

For one thing, the school closest to Kazi Mingi, about a mile away, is a poorly constructed wood-and-mud affair topped by a sheet roof that doesn’t keep out the rain.

For another, a Keino grade school would concentrate a number of the Keino children in one place--a factor to be considered given the quality and maintenance of the Kenyan road system. If it were at Baraka, the children living there could walk.

And, finally, a school could generate tuition from some families able to pay--money that, in turn, could be used to help provide scholarships to educate other needy kids.

“They are tomorrow’s leaders of this country,” Kip says. “They must have education.”

Five years ago, a section of Baraka was set aside for the school. Construction lurched along until more than $100,000 came through from the IOC and DaimlerChrylser, a longtime IOC sponsor, to finish the building. Other significant donors include charities in England and in Australia.

In all, the building cost about $400,000. Books and desks and other equipment ran an additional $65,000, according to Paul Scott, a British expatriate who has been involved in Kenyan schools since 1972 and now serves as the Keino school’s administrator.

The school was dedicated last March. It runs this year from grades one through seven; next year it will expand to eighth grade. It has a staff of 10 teachers and 18 others. For those who pay, the school costs about $215 per year--payable in three installments.

The school has a library and an arts and crafts room as well as a music room and a computer lab. And a mascot, a dog from Baraka that shepherds the Keino kids to school, sleeps in the quad while class is in session, then heads back to the farm with the kids behind him. His name is Dog.

“We have people from the [Kenyan] Ministry of Education who come out there and say, ‘This is what a school should look like. This is what the teachers should look like.’ It’s a model,” said Constance Jones, the cultural attache at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.

But much remains to be done. The computer room, for instance, holds no computers. The music room needs instruments. The quad is brown dirt, awaiting grass.

Lunch--as well as a break for sugary tea, this being Kenya--is still being served at a split-log shelter out back that looks to an American eye like something Abe Lincoln might have built. Scott has plans on his desk for a new multipurpose hall; cost estimates run to about $300,000.

Kip, meantime, looks around the grounds and envisions a high school, houses for the staff, a swimming pool, a tennis court. How to pay for such projects remains unclear. Milk that sells for 20 cents per half-liter is obviously not the answer. Kip says with a grimace that reflects his discomfort at such issues, “You cannot develop anything in this world without money.”

The Keinos have no concerted marketing plan. They have no CD-ROM touting their work, no ad campaign, no lobbyists. They want to expand--but are acutely sensitive about exploiting the Keino name.

What’s next remains a mystery. In the meantime, Phyllis says, there is work to be done, the stuff of life: “Children have to eat. Children have to go to school.”

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ANOTHER KAROLYI

Martha Karolyi, wife of Bela, is now in charge of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team. D14