 Hi, I'm Cynthia Lee Sinclair. This is Finding Respect in the Chaos on thinktecawai.com and this is a very special show for me today. As you know, I'm always out there trying to find respect in the chaos. Well, I'm here with my brother and there's some serious respect in this chaos that he has found out there in the world and I am absolutely honored to be able to say that I'm his little sister because he has some programs in Africa that we're gonna talk about today. So Jake, I wanna welcome you. This is Jake Sinclair, doctor, excuse me, doctor Jake Sinclair and I wanna welcome you to the show. Thanks so much for being here. This is really exciting for me. My pleasure. I know that most everybody out there knows about some of the dysfunctional family stuff that I dealt with growing up and yet we have, as a brother and sister rose above that and made something good in the world out there and so that's what I wanna talk about today. It's all the good that you are doing out there in the world. So we've got the school that you started. Well, see, the first thing you did out of medical school, right, was the youth industries which was an outreach program for street kids in San Francisco, right? That's correct. And you helped so many kids. You had like an 87% success rate or something like that. Was it just phenomenal success rate? It's hard to measure success amongst that very challenged and damaged population. Very high. Right, yeah, very high is right. No very high success rate, but we don't know what it is. We didn't do actual research. Oh, okay. But I know it was amazing. You had so many of you, the thing that was so great about it was it wasn't just a place where kids to come flop. You gave them jobs. There was a cafe, Einstein's Cafe, and the new to you thrift store and the pedal revolution, right? Couple thrift stores, yeah. Oh, couple thrift stores. A restaurant, yes, a bike shop. A bike shop's still there actually. Still helps homeless kids, yeah. Oh, that's so cool. How long ago was that? A long time ago. Like 20 years? 20 years ago, yes. Wow. So after that, you started into, was it Ujjama that started right away or was it Manassas Children that started next? Those, Manassas Children is the USA non-profit and Ujjama is the Africa NGO, which is equivalent to a non-profit. Right, the non-government organizations, right? NGOs. So tell us about Manassas Children. What was that? It was a school, right? Well, it's all a continuum, a learning continuum. I would say that we made every stupid mistake you can make as white people in the first, about four years when we went to Africa. We went to Kenya. I had worked there as a medical student. And we tried to duplicate the program we had in America working with street kids. And that was my first mistake. It's trying to duplicate anything that works in America is challenging because the infrastructure, the societal setup, cultural norms, et cetera, are so different. But we did try to take kids from the street at that point in time. It was a big issue there in Nairobi, Kenya, a country to relatives and put them in school. And I mean, there are some great successes. There are still a feeding program that feeds 12,000 school kids every day. Big nutritious meal, much of which they take home. Built a big high school there, a big public high school. And there's 600 kids go to that. Half of them are orphans, that's good. That's amazing. But what we found over time is that we also built a safe house for girls because sexual assault there is terribly common, especially amongst orphans who are not protected. And you know some statistics about that, right? I do, yeah. And what are some of the statistics for that? Well, the most interesting statistic is that we were, we felt compelled to go to Africa to help orphans because at that point in time, it was 20 years ago, there were six million AIDS orphans. Six million, wow. Yes, that's what we said because that's the Holocaust number. So we turned to each other and said, if we don't do something, then our grandchildren will shame us like, oh my gosh, there was a Holocaust in your generation, you did nothing. And it was on the cover of Time Magazine, a news week and everybody heard about it. Now there are 20 million AIDS orphans and nobody hears a whisper. Wow. Yeah. Man. So you went to make some changes and you have, you've made some amazing successes over there. Well, after the, I call them stupid white people mistakes, which is the first four years because we do, we try to project our culture or what works in our society onto another culture and there are always problems with that. Right, sure. There are often problems with that. And so all of the things that we do, including even a feeding program, even a school, buying school uniforms, sponsoring kids, ultimately they perpetuate the most damaging thing that I've seen in Africa, which is dependency. All right. Yeah. I like that. So you think you're doing good and you are to some extent, but you're also crippling people at the same time. Hey, so what did you do about that? How did you address that? First we had to figure it out. Everybody, first we had to listen to people. I think the most difficult thing for Americans in particular because we are, we tend to be know-it-alls and we tend to want an instant credit card fix. That's our thing. Right. So we try things and I think the biggest difficulty is that people aren't honest with why they're there. I'm a Christian as an example. I think we might be the worst and that we go there as like we're serving God and we are in a sense, but we're also serving ourselves and it's hard for us to admit that. Right. Like a big part of why we're there is to feel good about ourselves. And if you're unable to acknowledge that, you oftentimes can't sift through the multicultural obstacle and debilitation that you're not rehabilitation, debilitation if that's a word that you're actually causing in that culture. So I think the first thing was to really be humbled and begin to listen to what the people of that society were telling us. And it's difficult for them also to have a clear, honest voice because hey, you're the best thing since sliced bread. You know, it's like, whoa, this is like my kid's school fees and a lot of times in some of these schools, when there were droughts which were frequent, kids would not eat for two, three, four days. You'd go to a school, there'd be 400 kids and you'd say, how many of you haven't eaten yesterday? Just about everybody. How about two days, half of them, up to like six days? So you can imagine, yeah, kids would go to school and just fall asleep. You just wander outside the classroom and lay down, it's that difficult. So somebody like me shows up and it's like Candyland. So it's really hard to get to people who recognize the bigger picture in that society and can say, hey, wait a minute, all this buying things is not necessarily in the best long-term future for that child or even this village. So I would say after four years, we kind of figured out like, wait a minute, there are different levels of, and then there's also a tremendous amount of corruption in Africa. Oh my gosh, I didn't think of that, of course. Yeah, everyone knows about it. So the first level of corruption that you run into is the basic corruption, which is you meet a group of people and you're all dedicated to helping. Oftentimes we're all Christians and we're all feeling like we're in the faith together. And then you give them $500 to buy a huge pot to cook the food in for a school, for example, but the pot only costs $250. And then we began to notice that our main guy started to have these new vans. Oh dear. And this bus service was like, wait a minute. So yeah, so seeing through that first level of corruption, which is very common. And then the second level is like gatekeeper corruption. So as you go into a village or a town, a district, for example, and you are giving resources to school teacher, school principal, you really empower them in the community in ways you don't know so that people then are beholden to them. And then, yeah, so then they began to kind of push and assert their will on that community. They began to hire their relatives. They began to, so a lot of things that are very subtle that you don't know because most of the time when Americans go there, I'll switch from white people to Americans, but it's common. You can call them white people. Whoa, whoa. We call them Howie's. Yeah, yeah, no, it's a good society to talk about this. We actually spend a lot of time on racism there, but it's in reverse order. We teach a course called White People 2.0. White People 2.0, sounds great, I like that. And I have to take black people 2.0 Learning the African culture, it's an uphill battle. I just have all these assumptions and then the same as true in reverse. And so we're trying to educate each other around our pitfalls and foibles so that we can, when we're communicating, come up with the best plan, irrespective of self-interest. That's our goal. In any case, the second part, this gatekeeper corruption, we overcame having seen it happen right in front of us. And then we're left with like, well, what do we do that's not going to continue perpetuate the dependencies? Sure, exactly. What happens, it turns out in African orphanages are businesses and the commodity is the kids and American sympathy. So you've got, it's complex. I mean, these are orphans. They are in desperate situations. Problem is if you build an orphanage, they're ultimately cheap to build. Americans love to build things. That's another thing about us. We love quick and we love anything we can see. So you build an orphanage. It's relatively cheap to build, but it's very expensive to maintain. So over time, people aren't as interested. They stop sponsoring the kids and the kids are still there. Four or five years later, you come in with an eight-year-old kid, they're 12 and their sponsor drifts off and what are you going to do? So in addition to that, kids that do grow up in the context of an orphanage have been disconnected from their community. So they grow up and you send them to school. I mean, there are many kids that I sent to school and paid school fees for and felt really good about myself, but what do they do when they're 18? Right. How do you get a job? Yeah. I mean, in America, that's the question. Where are you going to work? Well, no, but how? Even here in America, how do you get a job? No, I mean, like normally in America, you get a job through your friends. There are your parents or your family and that's your first jobs are through your connections and we've ultimately disconnected them from their community connections. So there's not just a long-term life sustainability empowerment aspect to that. It's very like, let me come in and help you take care of you, paternalistic. So that's kind of what it's really hard to break free from because the need is so immediate and you love these kids and you just want to do good and help. Right. And then you have to take a step back and go, what's really important for this kid? This village, this town, this community. So the next big thing that we, well, so then we went to microloans. I mean, that's pretty straightforward and I completely believe in microloans, microfinance. Explain what those are. So for the people that don't know exactly what a microloan is, explain what that is. Give a person a fishing, give a person a fish, you feed them for a day, a fishing pole, you feed them for a lifetime. So it's like enabling people to overcome just a simple capital barrier that we take for granted here in America. I mean, if you want to like start a small business, a fruit stand or a taxi business, you ask your uncle who's got money, yeah, whatever. It's like, come on, give me 5,000 bucks. I'll buy a car or give me 200 bucks. I'll buy some lays. And that's even 200 bucks. Even 50 bucks in Africa is an insurmountable obstacle. So to get a business going, you just need like somebody to believe in you. But you have no collateral, right? Here you need some kind of, you need an uncle that's rich. Well, nobody has that, certainly if you're an orphan. Or you need some collateral, they have neither. So this is the green bank pioneered this. Everybody does these now. So you find a group of women, it used to be 10, now it's five, band them together and give them all $50 or $100, okay? And they all go out and start business. They have to write, you know, business plans, get business training. Oh, they do, they actually apply for it. There's a process. You put it, yeah. It's a six to 10 week training program that you put them through. Oh, nice, which is just as important as the money. Absolutely. Right, learning to do your finances, et cetera. So you give them a microloan and it catches, if all of you don't pay it back, none of you get the second loan. Oh, wow. So if the first loan's $100, the second's $200, but if four are successful and pay back the loan and one doesn't, nobody gets the money. Oh, so they like police each other. Exactly. Well, you could say police, which is. That's not exactly the right word. No, peer pressure, nothing's more powerful than peer pressure. Yeah, no sin. And they help each other. The other part of it is that they also, you know, whoa, she's not, you know. And they want them to be successful. Exactly, so. It creates a community, it's a whole system within it. That's so amazing. Okay, we got more to talk about, but we gotta take a break. So we will just be gone for a minute. This is Think Tech Hawaii, finding respect in the cast. I'm Cynthia Lee Sinclair, here with my brother, Dr. Jake Sinclair. And I hope you'll come back and join us for the second half. We all play a role in keeping our community safe. Every day, we move in and out of each other's busy lives. It's easy to take for granted all the little moments that make up our every day. Some are good, others not so much. But that's life. It's when something doesn't seem quite right, that it's time to pay attention. Because only you know what's not supposed to be in your every day. So protect your every day. If you see something suspicious, say something to local authorities. Welcome back to Finding Respect in the Chaos. I'm Cynthia Lee Sinclair on ThinkTechAway.com and this is my brother, Dr. Michael Jacobs Sinclair. And I'm so happy to have him here. And I'm gonna ask you to do me a favor, okay? Before we get started into the second half of this episode. There's a program that I learned about when I went around the world called the White Ribbon Campaign. And it asks men to get involved in the awareness part and the domestic violence and child abuse. And what it is is it's asking men to stand up to the men, men that don't abuse to stand up to the men that do is basically what it is. And it's all about taking a pledge where the pledge is I will not commit condone or keep silent about violence against women and girls. And I have a feeling you'll be willing to wear this ribbon, huh? Cool, man. Thank you very much. So you gotta take the pledge though. I will not commit condone or keep silent about abuse against women. Thank you very much. Right, now let's go back to what we were talking about before. Well, I think you just showed that video. Oh yeah, thank you. That's a good segue because that, so that video is, it has 46 million views at this point. 46 million? Million views, yeah. And so we call it the Weinstein effect. And it's related to the White Ribbon Campaign or the Me Too campaign. No means no, and I mean, Me Too, yeah. Oh, Gemini, yeah. Yeah, so in any case that we realized after having overcome, I was going on a little long about the dependency syndrome thing, but the microlons were also really helpful for women who are victims of domestic violence. Oh, okay. And what we did is, and this is one of the first people to do this, they did this in South Africa, they did it in Ivory Coast in Bangladesh. In some cultures it doesn't work actually, but you do a dual empowerment program with women who are victims of domestic violence. It's called intimate partner violence, IPV in other countries. And many of the women that came to us or many of the chiefs, elders, et cetera, said like, you got to help these women. I personally witnessed it, women coming with machete cuts and terribly beaten and they lodged a complaint with the police and two days later they'd withdraw. Right. And they'd be their kids. So I know that, we know that. We were victims of rape, violence in our childhood and when it's your caretaker or in that example when it's your kids, you can't just take them out of that situation because they'll starve or they'll lose their place in school and no school fees. So people told us, including the chief and the police, et cetera, it's like if you give them a job, then they'll be able to leave, they'll be independent. So we took the microloan program and we shifted it to help women victims of domestic violence and it was incredibly successful. Right. The unique thing about our program, the Ujjama program that's developed out of that, trying to not foster dependency, but empower. Ujjama, is that a word? It is. Is it, I mean, an African word, is it? Yes, it's an Afri, it's a Swahili word. Swahili word. Ujjama, it means together we can succeed. Oh, nice. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't know what that meant. No problem. So we have done all this research. That's what's unique about our program is that one is we're focused on stopping violence against women and girls, but two is we're focused on the prevention side of that and we have researched to prove that it works. So we published seven papers with Stanford and Johns Hopkins and in all these papers we show that we've cut rape in half after we've taught. We've taught hundreds of thousands of girls and hundreds of thousands of girls have now used and women have used these skills that we teach to prevent themselves from being raped. And what are the skills? Self-defense? Well, let me first talk about this video because we also use, you can't really use self-defense in a domestic violence situation. You can only like karate chop your husband one time, you know, when you're out. So this economic empowerment piece was really important and we have a study that we did with Stanford that shows that we cut domestic violence by 65%. Other studies have shown it cut by 50%, the other studies I mentioned. And so we thought, well yeah, of course the woman has money now, she can support her kids and she moves out but that's actually not the case, they don't leave. And we're doing further studies to figure out how it actually works. Some of the things we found, we did not expect, is that the husband doesn't beat the wife because she's the breadwinner now. He values her. Oh yeah, you can think about that. Yeah, she holds a place of respect and so that the way they carry themselves in that relationship changes. She's not in the house as much, there's not as much opportunity to fight. If she's just around the house they're both around the house. So it's complex but it's really interesting how well it works. Now we have that just economic empowerment has not proved to be enough. We also have support groups. So we have a 12 step support group that women go into. It's called Tuponipamoja, Together We Heal. And a lot of it has to do with, and I learned this from, again being a rape child abuse survivor, you go into these meetings and you don't know how it works. But somehow like telling your story to sympathetic others who've been through the same situation is healing. It is, I always say that guys, you hear me say that all the time, there's healing in the telling. It's exactly right, there's healing in the telling. Absolutely, so a lot of these women have gone their whole life, victims of domestic violence and never told anyone, even their neighbor, it's heartbreaking when you, you can only sit in these groups if you're part of it too. It's like only, it's not like a social worker or a psychologist, counselor thing. It's like it's a group of women, it's free because they're just lay trained people and they help each other. So that was really successful but we also, from the prevention side, most of the money that goes into stopping violence against women and children goes into aftercare. And there's not in Africa, one in four high school girls where we work are raped every year. One in four every year. Not like in their lifetime, like America, every year. So it's. Every year? It's, yeah. It's astonishing. So one girl could be raped. Every four girls you're looking at in high school, oh yeah, in multiple times, oh it's just horrifying. So there's not enough money in the world to, and as a survivor, I know I'm 63 years old, I'm still recovering, there's not enough money in the world to help all these girls that are victims of sexual violence. We have to prevent it. That's our initial theory, okay, our hypothesis. So, and then the rest of the money goes into these awareness campaigns and rallies. And they don't work. They've proven it. I mean, billions of dollars into a work. It's like rapists don't attend those. So it's like people aren't really thinking it through. So we're, to our knowledge, we're the only program that's had a wide or a broad-based prevention program that teaches 100,000 girls. And like I said, it cuts rape in half. So you're asking about what the skills are. A lot of them, it's just boundary-setting, awareness, assertiveness. And then, you know, if it comes down to it, we always say that your last option is even physical self-defense. So there's like, you know, the four primary targets. These are brutal, special forces, Israeli Mossad techniques for a girl to disable the attacker and get away. And the goal is always to get away. So we teach those in schools. But what the video showed is like, the real problem is the men. Right. And if you wanna work with men, you need to start with boys. That's our other assumption or theory hypothesis. Teach them when they're young, start them young. Yeah, so we also have a program called Your Moment of Truth, or now we've shifted, it's called The Hero and Me. And what we do is, yeah, instead of, yeah, teenage boys don't really respond well to, teenagers in general, like, you're gonna be punished, it's wrong, so, and so this is the opposite of that. We're appealing to the good side of the boy. Nice. And all boys wanna be heroes. Right. We just help them understand, like, this is your sister, could be your mother. And so that they wanna heroically intervene. So we did a big study on that. It's also been published. And in the year following the classes that we teach, 72% of the boys successfully intervened to prevent a girl in the middle of a sexual or physical assault. Yeah, it was only 22% in the control group. So we've done big RCTs, randomized control trials, 10,000 kids, and we've had these findings duplicated again and again. Now we work in Kenya and Malawi, and we just started working in Somalia and South Sudan. So our big thing is, like, the real, if you wanna make a change in sexual assault and violence against women and girls, there's just not enough money to, like, change the infrastructure. The courts take forever. You can pass as many laws as you want. The power is in the girl. Girls are incredibly powerful. They just need permission and some skills. And boys wanna be heroes. They wanna be good. You know, they just need to shift these negative gender norms. And that's what you saw in that video. And we also found in the study that in the initial baseline, boys thought, if I take a girl on an expensive date, I have a right to have sex with her. If a girl wears a miniskirt, I have a right to have sex with her. And after the classes, that shifted up. It flipped. Their 80% said yes in the beginning, and now 80% said no at the end. And it was durable. It lasted up to a year. And how long is the class that the guys go through? Both the girls and the boys' classes, they're six classes, two hours long each. Oh, wow, that's good. Yeah, it's a good chunk. So you're in, like, all the schools now in Nairobi? We've taught in all the schools in Nairobi. That's a population in the slums. Okay, that's a population of 2 million people. 2 million people? Yeah. That's almost hard to fit in my head. Yeah, so we have a big staff. We have 150 people, full-time people on our staff, all African staff. I'm the last white guy standing. And they just keep me around. Because I'm old, yeah. But anyway, so yeah, that's our story. That's a story that we would want to share with people is that really the boys and girls are where you need to make a difference in society. We're looking for, like, community-wide generational change. Quick fixes don't work, especially in something like this. I mean, sexual violence, it's just, it's too complex a problem. It's interwoven into the society. So you start with young people, students, and we teach in schools, because that's where you can reach the most of them cost-effectively. And you see in communities over time, because girls teach their sisters. They teach their classmates. It spreads throughout the community. And you can, we've cut the incidents of sexual assault, even in girls that have never taken the class. We go to a new school, okay? And like, if we were taught in that high school three, four years ago, we'd go to a freshman, and it's been cut in half. So that's our message. So it's already starting to just spread like wildfire. That is so exciting. Oh my gosh, exciting. I just can't even imagine, it's like, I'm related to you, what am I doing? I'm just working on my little corner. That's my sister talking. Yeah, it's not about me. It's about the fact that girls are powerful. Boys want to be good. That's the most beautiful message. I just love that message. I'm not quite sure how much more time we've got here, but I know that it's getting close. So, do you have one last thing that you'd like to maybe, maybe make sure all my viewers kind of know about this program and how maybe they can help even? What can we do? What can we do here at home to try to help you? Well, yeah, I do have one last thing I'd like to share with the audience, which is my sister's awesome. She's totally awesome. She also came from the same childhood, and she's built an amazing life for herself, and that's possible. For anybody out there who's been abused, we were severely abused. It's like, hey, you can like, you know, don't give up, and you can turn that into something powerful and good in your life. That's right. That's exactly right. Oh my gosh, Jake, I'm just, I'm so honored to be your sister, and I'm just so honored that you came. Likewise, to know, honored to be your brother. And this has been the most amazing thing. I just graduated from college last night, guys, and my brother has come from the mainland and has busy, busy life to be here with me for this momentous occasion. Who would have thought I'd wait until I was 60 to get a college degree, but that's okay, man. I am living, graduating proof that it's never too late. And we are living proof that you don't have to suffer alone and there is hope and healing out there. Reach out and find it, and keep reaching out until you find it. Thank you so much for being with us here today on Finding Respect in the Chaos on thinktecawai.com. I'm Cynthia Lee Sinclair, and I hope that you will join me on the next episode of Finding Respect in the Chaos. Thanks a lot.