Hightstown woman interns for prison reform program
By Matt Chiappardi
HIGHTSTOWN — The original reason Dorothy Vanderbeck wanted to go to Africa was to work with displaced people in refugee camps.
But she almost became displaced herself inside the stone walls and iron bars of the prison system where she eventually worked.
While many students spend their time abroad in universities in Paris or summering in Mallorca, Spain, the lifelong borough resident went to study abroad in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi while a junior at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, earlier this year.
While interning for the prison reform program of an organization called Muslims for Human Rights, she helped inmates in Mombasa’s Shimo la Tewa prison. Many of them were refugees, 25,000 of whom, she said, have never been convicted of any crime.
Ms. Vanderbeck, 21, was no stranger to east Africa when she arrived in Nairobi. While a junior at Peddie School, she spent a summer working in an AIDS clinic in Tanzania, just south of Kenya.
Four years later, a desire to work with displaced peoples inspired her to choose Africa once again.
Ms. Vanderbeck is small in stature and voice, but she carries an ample passion for human rights and a compassion for those who suffer. She majors in international development studies at Bates, which is an interdisciplinary field of study combining history, art, literature, and anthropology to examine cultures from a nontraditional point of view. She says it covers more than just the narrative of history, examining the colonial and post-colonial worlds in innovative ways.
”We’d do studies of race in the media, for example,” she said.
Scheduled to graduate in May of 2008, she plans to apply for a Fulbright scholarship and may pursue public interest law.
Her nontraditional path led her into some very traditional dangers that still exist in the Third World.
Her third day in Kenya she found herself in the middle of an armed robbery. Ms. Vanderbeck doesn’t like to talk about that experience except to call it a “baptism by fire.” It served as a reminder that life in Africa can be considerably more unstable than life in the United States, and it foreshadowed more danger that lay ahead.
To Kenya’s north is the horn of Africa, where Somalia has been embroiled in a brutal decades-long civil war that replaced a central government with tribal warlords. And in the Sudan, Arab-led militias have been slaughtering hundreds of thousands of black villagers in the country’s western Darfur region, in what some nations have called a genocide.
To Kenya’s west lies Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and the two nations that share the name Congo, where a bloody off-and-on conflict rages between many different factions in what’s been called Africa’s First World War.
And across all of sub-Saharan Africa, according to the joint United Nations AIDS project, nearly 25 million people are infected with HIV and more than 2 million people die from AIDS each year.
In the midst of this strife-ridden region, Kenya has remained relatively stable compared to other sub-Saharan African countries. Yet, corruption still plagues many of Africa’s young governments in ways Westerners are not accustomed to.
Ms. Vanderbeck’s work with a prisoner named Mussa Kazunga, she said, found her on the short end of Kenyan governmental corruption, with her passport confiscated and deportation charges levied against her. Her 10-day ordeal found her stranded, away from her host family in Mombasa, with her American family scrambling to assist in New Jersey.
As Ms. Vanderbeck recounts the story, Mr. Kazunga had been in prison for about a month before she started working with him. He was charged with unlawfully being in Kenya after his work visa expired. Mr. Kazunga had fled to Kenya from the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire) in 1996 during some of the most heated periods of warfare in the eastern region of that country. After hearing that his extended family had been killed, he briefly returned to Zaire to rescue the 14 children from his former village.
Upon his return to Kenya, he bought a tract of land on the Indian coast and started a boarding school for those children.
When an elected member of the National Assembly representing the community where Mr. Kazunga lived decided Mr. Kazunga owned too much land, in his opinion, for a non-Kenyan citizen, the Office of Immigration misplaced Mr. Kazunga’s visa application, said Ms. Vanderbeck.
Compiling her evidence, Ms. Vanderbeck went to the Office of Immigration in Nairobi, more than 200 miles from her temporary home in Mombasa, to help file his appeal. She asked the government to drop the charge of unlawfully being in Kenya.
Their response, she said, was to send her on a “wild goose chase” for official documents that likely never existed. After a week, she was then charged with unlawfully being in Kenya as well, she said.
Her co-workers were able to post bail, she said. After that, she spent more than a week in a Nairobi hotel, estranged from the host family in Mombasa that had been such a comfort to her in a strange land. Worse yet, she ran the risk of disappearing into the very justice system she was commissioned to help.
Back in New Jersey, her family’s reaction was “what you would expect,” said her father, Mike Vanderbeck.
Mr. Vanderbeck describes himself as well traveled also. And no doubt he is aware that Westerners can sometimes become prisoners in the Third World for years without respite on bogus or disproportionate charges.
”We were concerned,” he said.
”We had to pull every lever we had available to us,” he added.
Those levers included a host of international and African-based human rights organizations.
And through her connections Ms. Vanderbeck had been able to make in the human rights community, she was able to procure lawyers for herself and Mr. Kazunga. Armed with legal counsel, Mr. Kazunga and Ms. Vanderbeck were able to turn the tables on the Kenyan government’s attempt to silence her.
An American’s passport is not their own personal property. It must, for example, be surrendered to the U.S. State Department if demanded. Ms. Vanderbeck said the previous month she had spent becoming familiar with Kenya’s justice system and penal code, and recognized that taking a non-Kenyan citizen’s passport was illegal. The Office of Immigration was now in danger of having charges levied against it by a human rights organization, she said, so the government dropped the charges against her and Mr. Kazunga.
Ms. Vanderbeck had her passport returned to her, and her work with Mr. Kazunga eventually allowed him to go free as well.
She stayed in Kenya for the next month and a half to complete her internship in Mombasa, and Mr. Kazunga is now in the process of applying for refugee status through the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and is taking the Office of Immigration to court, she said.
In the end, it was “private acts of diplomacy,” as she calls them, which made all the difference for her and Mr. Kazunga.
”There are incredible gains that can be made though getting to know one another,” she said.

