When a group of tourists from Chicago came to his village in Kenya in the fall of 1993, Patrick Ntutu was at the lowest point in his young life.
He had hoped to be one of the few members of his Masai tribe to go to college, but after completing high school a few months earlier, he learned he had fallen short by a single point on the nationwide examination that determines who can enroll in the country’s four universities.
He was devastated.
It seemed he would be spending the rest of his life as a herdsman, tending his father’s cattle as they grazed on the tribal grasslands from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week, which was what he had been doing since early childhood, except for the periods when he was permitted to attend school.
It did not matter that he was a son of Lerionka ole Ntutu, a respected Masai chief. It was the duty of all Masai males, whoever their father might be, to care for their families’ herds, which are the source of individual wealth and the basis of the tribal economy.
The arrival of the Chicagoans, however, changed everything for the better for Patrick Ntutu.
Thanks to them, he received the money he needed for college, and in August of 1994 he traveled the 35 miles from his rural village to bustling Nairobi, boarded an airplane for the first time and flew to the United States to pursue the dream he thought was lost.
“It was a miracle,” Ntutu said recently, a few days before graduating from Roosevelt University with a degree in business administration. “I never used to believe in miracles. Now I do.”
Perhaps it was a miracle. Perhaps that is the best explanation for what happened.
The 1993 Chicago tour to Kenya was organized by the Michael Jordan Foundation and led by Deloris Jordan, Michael’s mother and the president of his foundation.
Its purpose was to expand the horizons of six 6th graders from the Chicago Public Schools who had won a citywide contest by showing the most improvement in grades, attendance and attitude. Funding was provided by the Chicago Bulls organization and some of the companies whose products Jordan endorses.
“We hadn’t planned to bring a Kenyan student back to Chicago,” said Deloris Jordan, who was interviewed with Ntutu at the James Jordan Boys and Girls Club and Family Center, 2102 W. Monroe St. “Finding Patrick was totally unexpected.”
Indeed, she had not wanted to make the trip, for the departure fell only a few weeks after the death of her husband, James, who was shot to death during a robbery in North Carolina.
But the six children had begged her to go, and at the last minute she had agreed.
The itinerary called for a stay of several days in a Masai village, which proved to be Ololulunga, population 1,000, the home of the Ntutu clan.
“We slept in tents in the village compound,” Jordan said. “One morning the roar of a lion woke us up, and at night we’d hear a clump-clump-clump. It was elephants!”
She smiled. “Our kids were shocked,” she said. “They saw that life there was a lot harder than in Chicago. There was no electricity or plumbing. Drinking water was hauled to the village in buckets from a river.”
What was most affecting, she said, was the Masai hospitality and the opportunity to meet Lerionka ole Ntutu, the chief, and become acquainted with his wife Natana and their daughter Beatrice.
“It turned out to be a very emotional experience for me,” she said. “At one point, I went off by myself and prayed. I asked God what I could do to help.”
Because an emphasis of the Michael Jordan Foundation was education, she decided it would be appropriate to offer a college scholarship to one of the young people in the village. She huddled with the representatives of the sponsoring companies and a Bulls executive who were on the tour, and they pledged to come up with the financing.
The first choice was Beatrice Ntutu, who was in her 20s, but she said her family child-care responsibilities prevented her from accepting. She asked if she could recommend a younger brother, Patrick, who had attended Roman Catholic mission schools, as she had, and who was bright, disciplined and deserving.
His given name is Keturet (pronounced kay-too-RETT); Patrick is the Christian saint’s name he received at baptism.
“I chose St. Patrick because Beatrice told me of a great American basketball player named Patrick Ewing,” he said. “Unfortunately, she had not heard of the great Michael Jordan, or I might have been named after St. Michael.”
The Chicagoans were impressed with Patrick, who became the only person from outside this country to receive a Michael Jordan Foundation Scholarship. (The foundation was dissolved in 1996; the principal Jordan charity in Chicago is the James Jordan Boys and Girls Club and Family Center.)
One of the things that impressed them was his resolve. Indeed, the challenges he faced in getting an education are a rebuke to any of us middle-class Americans who may be compelled now and then to complain about how tough we had it as kids.
Ntutu lived with his mother and five brothers and sisters in one of the Masais’ distinctive one-room dwelling called a manyatta, which is made of mud, tree branches and reeds. (The chief resided in a separate manyatta.)
Every weekday from elementary school through high school, he arose quietly before dawn to move the family’s cows from their overnight corral to the milking pen.
By 6 a.m., he returned to the manyatta to change into his school uniform of navy blue shorts and a light blue shirt under a navy blue sweater; he then put on his sandals, grabbed his book bag and set out to run the six miles to school.
Going on foot was necessary because there were no cars, no school buses and no public transportation; in fact, there were no roads.
Running was necessary because it was the only way to arrive on time for the first class at 8:30 a.m. It took more than two hours to run the six miles because the trail was pocked with large stones and sliced by deep ravines, and his route took him over two mountains.
“This is why Kenya has many good distance runners,” he said. “We run because we have to run.”
And while traffic and crime were not concerns, wild animals were.
“I can look out from my village and see lions, hyenas, (Cape) buffalo, giraffes, elephants, zebras, monkeys,” he said. “That’s why we have a fence around our village.”
When he was 15, a friend the same age was killed by a lion while watching his family’s cattle in a pasture near the village.
When he was 12, he and a friend were returning home from school when they were attacked by a Cape buffalo. “We saw it running at us in time, and we climbed a tree,” he said. “It turned dark before he left our tree, and we could start running home again.”
Not surprisingly, he finds Chicago is simpler in some ways.
“Now I live in a dorm, and I take an elevator to my classes,” he said. “And I like to run here because it is so flat and smooth. I run on the lakefront early in the morning, and I have run in every Chicago marathon since I’ve been here.”
Some things, of course, have not been so easy.
For one thing, he was unfamiliar with computers. “In Kenya, we hand-write all our studies,” he said. “But now I can use the Internet and send e-mail to my family in Kenya” through a government site in Nairobi.
For another thing, classes were conducted differently. “I was used to studying for one national test each year, and here there are many tests. Sometimes, I got tired and wanted to be lazy. Then I said to myself, `I can’t. I must do my best. My family and my tribe are depending on me.’ “
At the beginning, there was also a question about his course of study.
“When he got here, he wanted to be a chef,” Jordan said, shaking her head.
“I wanted to study hotel management,” he said, smiling.
“I told him if he studied hotel management, I’d put him on the next plane home,” she said. “He didn’t come to Chicago to learn how to cook.”
Ntutu laughed. “I call Mrs. Jordan my second mom,” he said. “I am so glad she made me change. Now I want to work in a bank so I can help development in my country. And I also want to start a company of my own.”
He has followed his interest in the hospitality industry by working for the last three years at Michael Jordan’s Restaurant, 500 N. La Salle St.
“He’s a star for us,” said Mindy Moore, the restaurant’s director of catering and special events. “We started him clearing tables as a houseman, which was hard for him at first because he was so skinny. But he’s become one of our top waiters. We serve a lot of school groups, and students love him. He has a great personality and charm and humor, and the patience of a saint. Plus he knows the big guy–Michael.”
With the savings from his job, he has paid for a brother to attend one of Kenya’s best private schools and a friend to be trained as a teacher, and he has built the first Western-style house in his village.
The two-bedroom, concrete-block house, which he designed, sits on land that he owns as the son of a Masai chief, and it has become both a tourist attraction and a center of controversy.
“People from Nairobi drive to our village to look at it,” he said. “Some people in the village didn’t want me to build it. They said it would discourage tourists. It looked too Western.
“The Masai have always resisted Westernization, because they did not like being a British colony for so many years. My father was against the house, but now he wants one. I said, `Father, go sell your cows.’ But in our culture, we cannot sell our cattle. We milk them or slaughter them, but we never sell them. It is not our way.”
Ntutu realizes this may not always be so.
“My people are happy now,” he said. “But as time goes by, things will change. I am worried about my culture. I worry that one day it may come to an end. I hope not. There are good things about our Masai way of life and good things about the way of life in the West. I hope I can help to keep the good things of our culture.”
He was asked if he thinks about being in politics.
He smiled and said, “First, I am trying to find money for an MBA, but when I return home, who knows? Maybe one day, I will be president of my country. That is my goal. I have the skills and the education and the exposure to Western culture to be a good president.”
If that happens, this country ought to consider a former NBA player from Chicago named Michael Jordan as our ambassador to Kenya. He ought to have some influence with President Ntutu. Or better yet, how about Jordan’s mother?
