When most college students were probably enjoying summer vacation, Rye Barcott was hanging out in a Kenyan slum. In the summer of 2000, while still a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rye went to Kibera. The slum is small, about the size of Central Park in New York City. But within it more than a million people live in squalid, desperate conditions.
Rye decided he had to do something about it, but first he had to fulfill his commitment to the Marines. After graduation, he served in the Marines for five years while also working on a non-profit called Carolina for Kibera. He’s written a memoir about his experience called “It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine’s Path to Peace” (Bloomsbury/2011).
