It takes eight hours of travel on asphalt, dirt roads and grass tracks to get from Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, to the remote village of Kpondu, where, among some of the world’s poorest children, a group of charity workers from the UK have helped open the Kate Gross Community School.
It was in Kpondu, in a densely forested area of Sierra Leone, known for its abundance of cocoa and coffee plants, that Finda Nyume, a local faith healer, became the first person in the country to be struck with Ebola in 2014.
“Kate really empathised with any child whose parents died of Ebola because she could think of her own sons being without their mum,” Kate’s mother, Jean Gross, tells me when I meet her at Kate’s former home in Cambridge.
This Christmas will mark two years since Kate, the former aide to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and CEO of Blair’s charity the Africa Governance Initiative, died following a battle with colon cancer. She was 36, and left behind her husband Billy and twins Oscar and Isaac, then five years old.
During her long and difficult illness, Kate requested that on her death, instead of sending flowers, donations be made to Street Child, an NGO whose work with children she admired. At her behest, a total of £43,019 was raised by family and friends and put towards the new school in Sierra Leone with the aim of helping to reduce the chance of future disease outbreaks and prevent child orphans of Ebola – many the same age as Kate’s sons – from becoming a lost generation.
With the funds, which far exceeded expectations, Street Child has been able to build a permanent school that will cater to 130 African children a year from eight different villages, as well as put money into teacher training and equipment.
“People did the most amazing things,” Gross says. “The headteacher at the boys’ school ran a half marathon, a waiter gave all her tips from one evening, the school’s Irish dancing club stayed up late to tour parts of the city and raise money. Street Child has still got to build a well and a couple of other things. Altogether it’s been very powerful.”
Kate died at 6.29am on Christmas Day 2014. Her mother has previously written about those few hours, which she called “the blackest of black comedy”, involving watching stockings being unwrapped, phoning the GP and undertakers, while cooking a turkey for her grandsons. “Grief is a funny thing, it isn’t a smooth course of getting better,” she says with glassy eyes. “Although broadly on the whole I’d say we’re all feeling better, it’s still a big blip, and December is a big blip for us.
“Christmas and the weeks leading up to it are about finding things that will make the people you love happy, it is about giving, buying and getting presents, dressing the tree, making everything feel warm and smelling beautiful. It’s about sharing love in a concrete way. With Kate not here I can’t share my love with her.”
During the festive season, Gross adds, almost everybody will be meeting someone who has been bereaved. “It is easy for other people to think you’ve moved on, and actually when you’ve lost someone you’ve never quite moved on. Instead of just writing Christmas cards saying ‘have a lovely Christmas’, it’s better just to say ‘we’re thinking of you this Christmas, we know it’s hard’. People do want you to be tidied up so they don’t have to be worried about you any more, but it’s lonely.”
For the family, it is particularly significant that Kate’s death will have led to something positive. Nyume’s funeral is thought to have directly resulted in the death of 350 people from Ebola, a major cause being a lack of education and information on contagion. “Literacy saves lives, good healthcare in the developing world depends on education,” Gross says. “Education also wipes out some of the superstitious practices, like there was a period where children who lost their families to Ebola were shunned by their community.”
In the home where Billy and the twins still live, an elegant Christmas tree reaches to the ceiling, with immaculately wrapped presents underneath. On the wall are pictures of the family, as well as one of a big group of people waving. In the middle are Tony and Cherie Blair, and Kate stands smiling nearby.
AGI, which Kate headed and was awarded an OBE for, was founded by Blair in 2008 to provide advice on leadership and political reform in Africa. Its successes include working alongside Rwandan public servants to unlock access to electricity for over a million Rwandans, assisting the delivery of an economic plan which led to a new railway connecting two of Nigeria’s biggest cities, Kano and Lagos, working with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to train Liberian civil servants, and supporting a scheme in Sierra Leone to double rice crops in parts of the country and improve farmers’ access to markets.
“We all want to help those suffering and feel totally powerless when we can’t, like in Aleppo now,” Gross says. “Most of us don’t have the right skills, we can only give donations. I think Kate was proud of working for AGI and pleased she could apply practical skills. Most of the countries that she worked with were emerging through the most dreadful civil wars and atrocities, and have very little in the way of infrastructure.
“What she talked about most was the recovery, the hope that it’s possible. Also of hair-raising experiences, like when you go to Sierra Leone it takes hours to get from the airport to the capital because there’s water in between and no bridge. The things we take for granted in this country take a lot of thinking about elsewhere.”
If Kate saw the world now she would feel devastated, according to her mother, both at the destruction and loss of war and the prominence of populism. “She would feel that 2016 has been very sad. She would be heartbroken at what is going in Syria, at what is going on with migrants crossing the Mediterranean.
“She would also be talking about Brexit. Kate was a really global person, she wanted Oscar and Isaac to grow up as global citizens. She wanted them to think about going to university overseas, to work internationally. It seems to me eminently sensible that Blair is now trying to bring people together around this issue. Her thinking now would be ‘how you move the world on is not by pulling up the drawbridge’.”
Gross currently works as an education consultant, but she used to be a psychologist and before that a teacher. Her mother was a teacher, and her other daughter, Jo, is also a teacher, in Hackney. “Education is a really important thing to all my family,” she says. “Kate would be so happy about the school in Kpondu, she would feel that something positive had happened. But she’d want to do more, she was a real doer, she’d say ‘OK, we’ve got one school, let’s do another one’.”
While this December has proved more difficult than anticipated, she takes pleasure in the company of her grandchildren, to whom she tells stories of their mother.
One of the things that most touches her, she adds, is that another woman’s grandchildren, thousands of miles away, will now be able to go to a school.
“My grandchildren are very lucky, they go to a lovely school, they have a good life really, despite losing their mother. It’s nice to know that Finda Nyume, if she were alive, would see her grandchildren have a better future.
“And it’s bizarre, that in the middle of an African bush, eight hours from anywhere, there is now a school with Kate’s name on it.”
