By Trevor Kraus, Managing Editor, Students For Liberty

Walter Ooko is a proud man. A loving man. A successful man.

He’s a man who worked himself out of poverty and bought a home where he could raise his family.

But now, he’s starting all over.

After more than 20 years in the insurance business in Nairobi, Kenya, when his wife accepted a nursing job in the U.S., he knew those 20 years meant little here.

He’s still working in insurance — it’s just another kind of insurance: He accepted a job as an Asset Protection Specialist at Walmart. In other words, he’s an entry-level security guard.

“In America, I have proven nothing,” he said. “And in life, you don’t get to take the escalator. So it will be the stairs for me. And I am ready to climb.”

When Walter’s not working or caring for the three younger sons who moved with the family, his heart is back in Kenya with his daughter, Beryl.

On two separate continents — when I met the family in Kenya and now in the St. Louis suburb of St. Charles, MO., where he and I coincidentally both live — Walter couldn’t stop talking about Beryl. How proud of her he is; how Beryl inspires her siblings; how much it hurts to be so far away, but how certain he is that she’s strong enough to handle this new chapter.

And yet, except for the brief admission that she had been shy as a child, there’s no hint of wistfulness when Walter speaks about her. His focus is entirely on her future.

“She’s going to do great things,” he said. “I just know it. She already has.”

Indeed. Beryl’s greatest achievement in her burgeoning legal career was pushing through the Public Benefits Organization Act — a bill in Kenya that had been stuck in bureaucracy for years … until Beryl’s report on it made it to the president’s desk. It was passed three days later and has made it dramatically easier for non-profit organizations in Kenya to operate.

But what Walter is proudest of goes beyond government and politics and borders, to a place only the individual, beating hearts of a loving father and daughter, can reach. He’s proud of the woman Beryl has become.

“In an African proverb,” Walter said, “a tree does not grow better under the shade of another tree. So if she wants to grow bigger, she has to go and have her own shade. That’s what she did.”

It’s not just a proverb, and Walter is not just a doting father. Because when I met Beryl in Kenya, she was the most gracious host you can imagine. She cooked lunch for the SFL team, gave us parting gifts, showed us around her hometown … even amidst the emotion and the tears of her family’s imminent move to the U.S.

“I was so proud of how she handled it,” Walter told me later. “The shy little girl I remember is now this fully-grown woman. I don’t know how it happened so fast,” he said with a chuckle.

Naturally, Beryl attributes her growing confidence largely to her father — but not solely to him.

“I owe so much to him,” she said. “He always pushed me to be independent and strong, whether it was in basketball or in school or in life. Without that independence, I never would have done something like join Students For Liberty, which has changed everything for me now as a lawyer.”

“Maybe,” she continued, “he was responsible for making me independent enough to join SFL … and then SFL gave me the confidence to really break out of my shell.”

Now living on her own, her strongest and greatest supporter an ocean and two continents away, Beryl’s spirit will be tested more than ever.

But she’s not alone.

“I have my father’s spirit with me,” she said, “and I know he is proud of how hard I’m working with other SFLers to make the world a little more free and a little less bureaucratic.”