Rye Barcott: It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine's Path to Peace

In 2000, Barcott spent part of the summer living in ten-by-ten-foot shacks in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. He was a twenty-year-old college student heading into the Marines, and he sought to better understand ethnic violence — something he knew he was likely to encounter in uniform.

Barcott learned Swahili and listened to young people talk about how they survived amidst poverty he had never imagined. He also stumbled into friendship with a widowed nurse, Tabitha Atieno Festo, and a tough community organizer, Salim Mohamed.

It Happened on the Way to War describes their effort to build Carolina for Kibera (CFK), a nongovernmental organization that would strive to develop a new generation of leaders in Kenya. Barcott continued his leadership in CFK while serving as a Marine in Iraq, Bosnia, and the Horn of Africa. In 2006, ABC World News named him a ‘Person of the Year’ for his dual service to CFK and the Marine Corps. Engaged in two forms of public service at once, fighting a war while waging peace, Barcott took the tools he learned building community in one of the most fractured parts of Kenya and became a more effective counterinsurgent — and a more effective peacekeeper.