Two Giraffes

A story of love, overcoming loss, magic and finding home.

I.

We are mosaics
Pieces of light,
love,
History, stars
glued together with magic, music, and words.
~Anita Krishna

I can’t think of a better quote to sum up the beginning of my life.

My mom met my dad while she was singing backup for his band “The Alright Family Band”. At the time my mom was working at a spiritual retreat center at the foot of the Haleakala Crater in Maui, a place shrouded in stories of magic and miracles.

My mom said she knew the moment I was conceived because her room turned a sparkling blue.

Nine months later, on June 17th, I arrived as the sun was rising. She had a home birth with the support of just a midwife and a friend who happened to be a Cherokee Indian Chief. When I arrived I was not crying; she said I was instead cooing like a little bird. She asked the chief what to name me and he said, “Name her ‘Nyla’, it means happy bird.”

Six months later she decided that the rock and roll lifestyle was no place to raise a child so she left my father and we moved to California. We could barely afford it, but she always made it work. She taught ballroom dance and then she taught creative writing. She had never studied dance or writing in any professional capacity, and then what felt like overnight, she could dance like Ginger Rogers and write like a Bronte and make a business out of both.

She was just not of this world.

She had the incredible ability to make the ordinary, extraordinary. My drives to school would turn into a “magic road” where we would look for hawks and egrets who we believed to be our spirit animals. When we really wanted something like a new home or car we didn’t have to go out and search for it, we would simply manifest it and a few days later it would appear.

More perfect than we ever imagined.

II.

My mom also would always tell me, “Nyla, you are a citizen of the world who happens to live in America.”

The way that she filled her empty nest when I left for college was by sponsoring the school fees of a Kenyan boy named Bernard.

When most people sponsor a child they get the pictures and letters and put them away in a drawer, but not my mom. She answered every one of his letters and put his picture in a silver frame on our mantelpiece right next to an identical frame with a picture of me graduating from high school.

She would brag to me when he was top in his class in Biology, and tell me that he no longer wanted to be a pilot, but now a doctor. In fact, she bragged just as much about her Kenyan son as she did her American Daughter.

She showed me that love is the magic that transcends all borders and allows us to see everyone as our family.

III.

On July 3rd, 2005, I got a call from her that changed the trajectory of both of our lives.

“Nyla, something is terribly wrong and I need you to come and take me to the hospital right now.”

Within an hour we were sitting in the ER as the doctor told us she had 4th stage ovarian cancer.

I immediately took both her hands and looked directly in her terrified eyes and with all the strength I had said, “You are going to be fine. We are going to beat this.”

The minute the words left my mouth, I knew that I was lying. I sensed that this was the beginning of the end.

Then I excused myself and took a quiet moment alone to curse the universe, then hope, then curse and then pray.

“Please protect her. She is all I have. I can’t imagine a world without her.”

IV.

During this dark time, the light that kept her fighting was a dream for us to travel to Kenya to finally meet Bernard. I would hold her hand as we closed our eyes and traveled there together. We imagined the layers of languages we would hear, the red dirt roads, and endless skies and majestic animals. This dreaming calmed her and it allowed us to anchor together in a future free from cancer.

My mom would always imagine meeting Anastasia Juma who was the Kenyan director of Bernard’s program. For years she and Anastasia had formed an unlikely friendship over the phone. My mom would listen as Anastasia would reveal her dreams for her community. And then my mom would host small events to support Anastasia’s vision.

On Christmas night, my mother sneaked away for one last call with her friend and said, “Anastasia, I am dying but I have a daughter and I promise that she will continue the work that we began.”

My mom never told me about this promise.

V.

A week later, I held my mom’s hand as she took her last breath. She was in a room, surrounded by her friends and family. We all whispered we loved her as she passed. The minute I knew she was gone my heart broke into a million pieces.

A week later the foundation I was working for shut its doors and suddenly I found myself, motherless, jobless and losing all faith. I felt like the magical world we had created had died with her.

During one of my really dark days, when I had succumbed to my grief and I couldn’t stop crying; I heard a voice inside my sadness say, “Hold on. Everything is about to change.”

The very next day a miracle happened. I was offered a job with the United Nations. And of all the corners of this beautiful world, I was placed in Kisumu, Kenya; Bernard and Anastasia’s home.

VI.

A month later, I arrived in Kisumu and was greeted by Anastasia and Bernard along with hundreds of people holding a memorial in honor of my mother. The minute that they saw me, they started singing ‘Amazing Grace’ which was the same song that was sung at her memorial just weeks before.

I learned from Anastasia that my mom had become a household name because she had given $1,000 to a group of women with dreams to start their own businesses. And their dreams, once realized, had transformed the lives of the entire community.

In gratitude, Anastasia brought me up to the front of the group and presented me with a statue of two giraffes embracing and said, “Your mother was like a giraffe. She had the vision to see her feet, and the vision to see far beyond, and it is obvious that you are a giraffe as well.”

I stood there, tears streaming down my face and looked out and saw that everyone in the crowd was crying too.

At that moment, I realized that grief is just the leftover love you have for someone looking for a place to go. I remember looking out at this beautiful community and knowing exactly what I was going to do with my leftover love.

At that moment, Mama Hope was born.

VII.

Three years later, I was visiting Kisumu with Mama Hope and Anastasia told me the story of my mother’s last call to her on the Christmas before she passed.

“Your mother called me and told me you would come to finish the work we had started.”

She was shocked to learn that I did not know of my mother’s promise. Anastasia recalled that after hanging up the call, she immediately called her community together and told them about my mother’s passing and said, “We must pray for Nyla, the daughter come to us. She will soon be an orphan and she needs us now.”

So when I showed up in their community just a few months later they had believed their prayers had been answered.

Hearing this story I felt my heart begin to heal and I started to believe again that the universe had always been supporting me. I realized that even during the hardest time in my life, magic was still guiding my way home.

It had guided me to my purpose.

VIII.

Since starting Mama Hope over ten years ago, the Mama Hope family has grown exponentially. And with each new family member, another story of how they came to find Mama Hope is born. More often than not that story is not one of sheer coincidence, but one of magic. These triumphant and life-affirming stories are too miraculous to not be shared so we have decided that every first Monday of the month we will share another #MamaHopeMagic story with you. We hope that they will inspire you to be guided by love and of course, we hope they will make your day a little bit more magical.