Gift of the Maasai

The story of how longtime local cartoonist and illustrator James Cloutier finds himself in New York City today, a day before he will participate in a preview of the National September 11 Memorial Museum, is a tale that spans two continents, one of the greatest tragedies in American history, and a piece of artwork that was created right here in Eugene.

It’s also a father-son story about a young man from East Africa who never had a father and a Eugene man who never had a son — until they met in Kenya nearly two decades ago.

The 76-year-old Cloutier — probably best known as the guy who in the 1970s created those humorous “Oregon Ungreeting Cards” that captured the state’s anti-growth and anti-California sentiments — first met Wilson Kimeli Naiyomah when Naiyomah was a teenager in Kenya in 1996.

A 1963 University of Oregon graduate, Cloutier had volunteered for the Peace Corps in Kenya from 1964 to 1966. He had returned to the African nation to visit a man named Morompi Ole-Ronkei.

Cloutier, who always has reached out to the few Kenyans who have made their way to Eugene, had met Ole-Ronkei when the Maasai tribesmen was a UO graduate student in the 1990s. Naiyomah is also a member of the Maasai, a seminomadic people who have lived for centuries in villages with no electricity or running water.

Like Ole-Ronkei before him, Naiyomah had dreamed of attending college in the United States. He already had been accepted to the University of Nairobi, a rarity for someone from his village, but he had no money to attend.

When he met Cloutier, the Eugene man told him a story that inspired him. It was about fleas trapped in a jar and how they would jump against the lid, desperately trying to escape, Naiyomah said in a telephone interview from Durham, N.C., where he recently obtained a master’s degree from Duke University.

“Then you take the lid off, and they have given up,” Naiyomah said Cloutier told him. “They won’t even try, not realizing that if they just knew they could make one more leap, they could get out.”

Within the next year, Ole-Ronkei introduced Naiyomah to a Washington Post reporter who was in Kenya to cover the siege of ethnic violence that had enveloped the nation. The reporter would end up writing a story about Naiyomah and his dream to attend college in the United States.

After the story appeared on the front page of the Post, UO officials took note and offered him a scholarship, Naiyomah said.

“The UO is my savior,” Naiyomah said. “It’s forever ingrained in my soul. I’m a Duck man forever.”

“The city’s been seized up”

Cloutier became Naiyomah’s “host dad” for the three years he attended the university, from 1997 to 2000.

Naiyomah called Cloutier “Baba,” the Swahili word for father, and the two drank chai tea together most mornings before Naiyomah went off to class, Cloutier recalled on Thursday, two days before boarding a flight in Portland for the trip to New York.

“James is my Daddy,” Naiyomah said. “I love that man.”

Naiyomah would transfer to Stanford University in 2001. He eventually earned his first master’s degree, in molecular biology.

When the hijacked airplanes hit the World Trade Center’s twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, Naiyomah was in New York City, making his first visit to the “Big Apple.”

Naiyomah’s acceptance as the first Maasai warrior into Stanford was big news back in Kenya, he said. So much so that then-Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi made arrangements to meet the young man at the United Nations in New York.

They were supposed to visit the U.N. on Sept. 12, 2001, Naiyomah said. At 7:45 a.m. that Sept. 11, Naiyomah had an appointment to meet Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations so that arrangements could be made for his visit with arap Moi the following day.

After waiting for a while, he finally was introduced and found himself shaking hands with the ambassador.

“That’s when security stormed in” and announced, “You all have to evacuate the building immediately,” Naiyomah said. The North Tower of the World Trade Center had been hit first, at 8:46 a.m., by American Airlines Flight 11, and their were fears the U.N. could be next.

Naiyomah and others were hurried out of the building. He spent the next eight hours on the streets of Manhattan, enduring the unimaginable chaos of that day.

“It was such a really sad time. And that’s when I just went into my silent mode,” Naiyomah said.

People pressed into the lobbies of buildings to watch on TV as the tragedy unfolded at ground zero, just a couple of miles southwest of them.

“The city’s been seized up, and we could all die,” Naiyomah remembers thinking.

Strangers hugged him. Lipstick stains, from terrified women grabbing him, smudged his face.

He felt small, he said. There was nothing he could do.

Back in Kenya, he would be equipped with bows and arrows, ready to defend his tribe as all Maasai warriors are trained to do.

Here in America’s largest, most intense city, he could only watch and wait and try to comfort others as they were comforting him.

Cows for America

Eight months later, in the spring of 2002, Naiyomah had returned to his tiny, remote village of Enoosaen in southwest Kenya. No electricity means no TV or electronics of any type, so many villagers still were unaware of the unthinkable story of Sept. 11.

But Naiyomah had returned home to tell them. He had come to participate in a graduation ceremony for Maasai warriors, something he’d been working toward since boyhood.

He also was coming home to fulfill another childhood dream: to one day have enough money to purchase a calf for his family. His plans, though, to give the cow — his people’s most sacred possession, one which would cost about $120 — to his mother and his brothers, had changed.

Instead, he planned to ask the elders of his village a most difficult question: Would they abide his offering the cow to the United States as a symbolic gesture of sympathy for the pain his adopted nation had suffered on Sept. 11, 2001?

As children and elders alike gathered around to listen, Naiyomah told the story that “had burned a hole in his heart,” according to a best-selling children’s book that would later capture the moment.

The most remarkable thing that moment, though, was the response of the Maasai people, who stepped up to offer their own cows to the United States, 14 in all.

Acting U.S. Ambassador William Brencick would later make a trip to the village from the U.S. embassy in Nairobi to accept the symbolic gift officially. The cows would never make it across the Atlantic Ocean; instead, they would be protected from slaughter on an elder’s land.

Still, the story attracted media attention from across the globe, and by the time Naiyomah had returned to Stanford he was besieged with interview and speaking requests.

“I’m incredibly honored”

This is the part of the story in which Naiyomah’s “Baba” re-enters.

“When the (U.S.) State Department wouldn’t bring the cows here, I really wanted to have something symbolic for the families who had lost loved ones in 9/11,” Naiyomah said.

So he asked Cloutier if he would make a painting of a U.S. flag with a couple of cows on it as a visual representation for his talks, many of them for schoolchildren.

When he finished the 40-inch-by-60-inch acrylic-on-canvas painting that contains the words: “To the people of America with compassion from the Maasai,” Cloutier sent it to Naiyomah at Stanford.

Later, the painting would travel to Kenya with Naiyomah and be displayed at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.

Years later, Cloutier would retrieve the painting from Naiyomah in Sunnyvale, Calif., where Naiyomah was then living and working, and bring it back to Eugene.

Eventually, an image of the painting ended up on the back page of that children’s picture book, “14 Cows for America.” That one even impressed a woman named Oprah Winfrey, who called Naiyomah’s cellphone one day to order copies for her orphanage in South Africa.

“14 Cows for America,” written by Carmen Agra Deedy, with illustrations by Thomas Gonzalez, in collaboration with Naiyomah, is where National September 11 Memorial Museum volunteer Vernoy Paolini first saw the image of Cloutier’s flag painting.

It sits in the back of the book, at the end of a two-page letter titled “A Note From Kimeli Naiyomah.”

In it, he explains that “I am the Kimeli in this story” and how the cows have reproduced to number more than 35 and “continue to be a symbol of hope from the Maasai to their brothers and sisters in America.”

The book will be sold at the museum, Naiymoah said, and all of his portions of its sales proceeds have gone to pay for copies of the families of all Sept. 11 victims.

A father-son thing

About four years ago, Cloutier received a call from Paolini wondering if he would be willing to donate the painting to the museum that was then still very much in the works. She even flew to Eugene to personally retrieve it.

And that is why Cloutier and Naiyomah — who already attended Thursday’s museum dedication ceremony alongside Sept. 11 survivors, family members of victims and President Obama — will reunite on Monday in Manhattan.

There, they will join with Deedy and Paolini and others, as will other museum donors, for their tour.

“I’m incredibly honored,” Cloutier said. “It’s kind of abstract right now. It’s kind of like, I know it’s happening. I’ve known it was going to be happening, but I don’t think it’ll hit until I get there. But this is really (Naiyomah’s) thing.

“He just said, ‘I really want you to come. This is very important. It’s a father-son experience.’

“And I was incredibly touched by that. How could I not go?”

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