Towne ’75 Featured in ‘Super Lawyers’ for Humanitarian Work in Kenya

James T. Towne ’75 was featured in the September 2016 issue of Upstate New York Super Lawyers magazine for his humanitarian efforts in Kenya. The excerpt below was originally published in the article "Towne & Another Country: Building schools and clinics in Kenya with Jim Towne." 

Last spring, in a village in Kenya, a 14-year-old girl with a stomachache walked over to a short drop—a hole used as a restroom—and, as Jim Towne, a trustee for the Loisaba Community Conservation Foundation recounts, “out popped a baby, placenta and umbilical cord.”

At first, everyone thought the baby was dead. Then the grandmother nudged the child, and it moved. That’s when the mad dash to the hospital began.

Handed the baby in a blanket, Towne led a crew in an off-road vehicle onto the village’s only road, where he was hoping to cross paths with a faster vehicle. Instead, an hour into the trip, his engine overheated.

“I’m hysterical,” says Towne. “It was the day of the Garissa University attack, when 147 kids were killed, and I got it in my mind—I’m very emotional about this—that I was going to save a Kenyan, period.”