That was the starting point to doing a lot of investigation on my part.
Forgive me....
Of all that I read in the Bloomberg article, that was the most important touchpoint for me to investigate. I received, not long after the article, photos that were taken, I presume within recent months, of every door on every school at every campus in Kenya. I noticed that the door to the school building we had opened on the one-year anniversary of Wesley's tragedy....
We had made a goal. We had said that on the one-year anniversary of what happened to Wesley—I still can't say the D word—we'll be in Kenya and we'll be opening a school.
After I read the Bloomberg article and acquired photos of every door of every school of every campus in Kenya, I saw that the school we had opened and put our plaque on, with Wesley's name and his motto, “Be Happy Every Day”, which I wear on a bracelet—we gave away thousands of these bracelets—was no longer on his school. Instead, it had the name Esther Grodnik, and then, in a smaller font, the Howie Stillman Foundation.
I thought, “Who's Esther Grodnik and who's the Howie Stillman Foundation?” I went to the foundation's website. I don't know if their videos are still up, but I followed the link to videos. I saw a video—I have it, but it may have been taken down now—and there was a time-stamp for an opening celebration where they opened the very same building less than two weeks before we arrived there. We went to Kenya thinking we were opening that building for Wesley, but their video, with the time-stamp on it....
I've matched it. I've matched it frame for frame, because I have extensive documentary footage. It shows, or suggests damningly, that what the Stillmans celebrated in their video was the same one that I think 13 days later we opened. The ceremony was re-cued for us with the same people, same songs and same everything, but with different plaques.
It's pretty devastating. As I told Craig Kielburger....
You know, you mentioned 15 years, but I have PTSD. I still walk these floors at night. On the hardest nights, I close my eyes and go back to Enelerai campus and the school building we opened, believing that was Wesley's campus, and that the sun was coming up in Kenya and kids were in his desks. That got me through lots of nights, so you can imagine that when I saw the time-stamp on the Howie Stillman Foundation's building that bore the name of Esther Grodnik on the building that we thought our plaque was on, it raised a lot of questions and felt pretty damned devastating.