Assessing How We Define Diversity - Seattle University

Though she is a full-time staff member
at NIST, she doesn’t collect a salary.
Instead, she is supported as a missionary
by the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Christianity has had a presence in
Africa for a long time but is now exploding
across the continent, she says. “The
rest of the world needs to be watching,
paying attention.”
The exponential growth of the church
globally coincides with a deep change in
the African leadership model,
according to Bennett. “I don’t
hear the term ‘big man’ anymore.
… The people are hungry
to learn about leadership, principles,
character and not being a
hierarchical one-man show.”
Professor John Jacob Gardiner,
of SU’s College of Education,
met Bennett as a student but
has come to know her best as
a colleague in the International
Leadership Association, a professional
organization for those
who teach, study or practice
leadership.
“She’s making a difference
in the world, and she selected a place
in the world desperately in need,”
Gardiner says. “Her work is grounded
in the indigenous cultures. There’s a
lot we can learn from that. She’s doing
a great service to Africa, but some of
those models are very applicable for
nonprofits here.”
Bennett agrees that Africa has much
to teach the Western world. “One
aspect I very much value here in the
African context is the assumption that
life is holistic, not compartmentalized,”
she says. “Part of leadership is advocacy
for those who have no voice. And the
purpose of leadership is to enable communities
to develop themselves holistically,
toward a vision of a just and
healthy society.”
Bennett’s ties to Kenya became
unbreakable nearly 10 years ago when
she met a baby boy abandoned by his
mother. “It was one of those things that
just had God’s fingerprints on it,” she
“Part of leadership is advocacy
for those who have no voice.
And the purpose of leadership
is to enable communities
to develop themselves
holistically.”
Marta Bennett
says. “I wasn’t looking to adopt, but
there was a period of time in November
of 1997 when every time I opened the
paper, there would be an article about
abandoned children.”
Confronted with the problem every
day, she began to wonder what she
could do about it. Kenya has very strict
laws and doesn’t do many international
adoptions. But she eventually found
a home for abandoned children where
adoption was possible. The last baby
she met there was a newborn she would
bring home two weeks later. She named
him Justin.
Two years passed and she went to the
home again. She found a little girl named
Imani who had been abandoned at a
public hospital the day before. She was
nearly 3 months old but weighed just
four pounds. “She looked so much like
Justin—they just belonged together,”
Bennett says of her children, now ages
9 and 7.
About six years ago another
boy, Steven, came into the family,
Bennett says. Now 19, Steven is
away at school for all but four
months of the year. “He’s a foster
son, but he’s ours,” Bennett says.
As a single professional,
Bennett says she couldn’t have
imagined raising a family before
she met Justin. “It was right
and there was grace to do it,”
she says. “I can’t imagine life
without them.”
Bennett is committed to staying
in Kenya at least until her
children are grown, and likely
beyond that.
“Seattle is home, but this is home
too,” she says. “I will probably retire
here. My life is here now. My community
is here now.”
And it’s not as if life in Kenya—one
of 52 independent nations on the African
continent—is so far removed from life in
the States. There is a large, progressive
middle class, cell phones are ubiquitous
and modern architecture fills the cities.
“Africa is not all grass huts, snakes
and jungle,” she says.
—Cheryl Reid-Simons
SU Magazine Fall 2007 | 35