Final Thoughts - Anna Leist

International Advocacy Expanding Worldview

Anna Leist

(Final for a journalism class - Anna spent 2 days with Scott and the Pepperdine team in the prisons while she was in Kampala in March.)

While many of my classmates were buying tickets for last-minute spring break trips to places like Cabo or St. Barts, I was boarding a plane to Qatar to begin my 24-hour journey to Kampala, Uganda where my parents are maintaining a semi-permanent residence.

This is not the first time my family has moved overseas. In 2008, we moved to Nairobi, Kenya for one year where my dad worked for International Justice Mission (IJM). He now serves as the Director of East Africa for a program within the Pepperdine Law School that works with the Ugandan judicial system. My parent’s recent move to Uganda was not just the start of a new chapter, but it was also my dad’s pursuit of what he sees as his calling: advocacy.

My dad has a long history in legal work in the safety of the United States where he began as a police officer in Seattle. He attended law school and later worked as both a prosecutor and a defense attorney. He struggled with all three of these occupations because he said they were only focused on right or wrong and the idea that the main goal of legal work is to bring justice through punishment.

Scott Lewis, the chief operating officer of IJM, presented my dad with his first opportunity to practice legal work overseas. After careful deliberation with my mother, they decided to embrace change and move our family to Nairobi. They wanted to expose my sister and me to a different way of living and teach us that advocacy for all individuals is important.

Emerging on the other side of his one-year contract with IJM, my dad decided to start his own law firm in Seattle. After a career focused on criminal justice, in Nairobi my dad witnessed a justice system that in many ways did not work. He approached the opening of Leist Law Offices with confidence in our country’s justice system and with the recognition that advocates are important.

“You develop a strong justice system by having strong people on both sides,” my dad said on one of our weekly WhatsApp calls, a few weeks after my visit. “There is honor and importance in defending the accused, even if they are guilty.”

After 11 years of self-employment, my dad had watched both my sister and I leave home to attend college and finally felt enough financial security to move forward. He had been volunteering for several years with the Pepperdine Law School, and when a position opened in Uganda, my parents did not hesitate. Since Jan. 24, they have been living in an apartment in Kampala. My dad has a Ugandan staff including lawyers and social workers.

The Ugandan judicial system recently implemented plea-bargaining, an arrangement between a defendant and prosecutor in which the defendant pleads guilty to receive a more lenient charge or sentencing. They asked Pepperdine to help make it happen. The country did this as they explored ways to reduce case backlog within the system. Up until this year, Pepperdine’s work with the Ugandan judicial system has been focused on the country’s implementation of plea-bargaining. Now, the work of my father’s team is categorized more as a public defense program.

The assembled team includes social workers and lawyers aiming to address the weaknesses in the Ugandan judicial system and provide defense services to people who cannot afford it. They work hands-on with both employees within the judicial system as well as inmates at multiple prisons. While my dad oversees a staff of three, I was only able to meet two, Esther Lokwang and Sheena Mutonyi.

Esther Lokwang is a Ugandan lawyer and an integral part of my father’s team. She calls herself an “advocate” instead of a lawyer. She worked with Pepperdine while she was still at Ugandan Christian University on a project that brought help to people in the prisons. Once she graduated, she shortly worked for a law firm but soon transferred to work as an advocate for Pepperdine. Lokwang said “watching the excitement in [the inmates’] eyes when they realize we are on their side,” is her favorite part of working with the prisons.

In our conversation, Lokwang sounded a lot like my dad. Here she was, a woman who attended law school thousands of miles away in a developing nation, inspired by the same goals and causes as my dad. It was a beautiful reminder that while the world is incredibly diverse, human experience is often singular. And at the same time, we are not as different from others as our limited worldview sometimes leads us to believe.

Sheena Mutonyi, known by her coworkers as Olive, is a social worker who got involved with Pepperdine in 2017 after graduating from Kyambogo University. Olive was familiar with the process of Ugandan courts as she had spent time visiting Mkono Court where her mother was employed. As part of my father’s team, she says that her favorite part of her job is meeting prisoners and watching how legal advice propels them forward to change their way of life.

“I used to look at people in jail and think that they were bad people,” Olive said. “I had grown up in a cultural environment where it was all about convicting people. So, I really had a bad image about the people that were in jail.”

As she began to work with inmates, she discovered that many were innocent. But even when faced with inmates who were guilty, Olive says that she watches some take complete responsibility for their actions and change the trajectory of the life they had previously been following.

It is these life-changing stories that motivate Olive, Lokwang, and my dad. All three of them illustrated their own realization of the idea that no matter the time or place, advocacy is always a necessity. Additionally, that it is always beneficial to expand your view of others and recognize the possibility of change.

More than a decade ago when my dad moved my family to Nairobi, he said it was because he wanted us to know that there are uplifting stories in unknown or intimidating places. He said, “the more difficult the environment… the more you look, those are the places with the most compelling stories.”

He often quotes Walt Whitman’s poem “O Me! O Life!” with the last stanza:

That you are here- that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

My dad said “the work I do here is small. Nobody but [the inmates] are going to know the work I did for them. I don’t need to tell my story or their story, but I know that I have contributed a verse.”

On the plane home, I had a realization. On the cusp of adulthood, I need to think critically about my place in the world. I went into this trip believing I was open-minded with a vast worldview. But my worldview expanded, and I have been humbled to recognize that there is more for me to learn and understand. My dad and his team exemplify the importance and necessity of acting as an advocate. Through them, I discovered my desire to build a career that matters. Maybe this is the start of the verse that I contribute.