Mr. and Miss Kibera

It is a sunny breezy Friday morning in Nairobi. My roommates and I have spent our morning resting and watching Aljezeera. At 1 pm we walk 15 min to Westlands to grab some milk from Uchumi our neighborhood grocery store to have we our tea during class. It is customary in Kenya to take chai (tea) at noon and 4 pm. It is a treat we are quickly becoming accustomed too! We have our class on the Development Culture of Kenya at 2 pm and tonight we are hosting some friends from Kibera for dinner. We are going shopping after our 3 hour class for ingredients for Mexican dishes to serve our guests. Betty, Sylvia, Irosh and Daniel live in the informal settlement and they are very excited to eat international food. All four of them are well known performers/dancers in Kibera and they are really excited to take us out tonight to a neighborhood club to show us how to really get down!

This weekend we are going to go shopping at a Masai market, maybe play soccer with some kids at my roommate Cait's internship site Shangilia and start....homework!

The picture today was taken yesterday, my second day in Kibera, at my externship site ISSA. OJ, my director, and I are standing in the entry of our cement/tin building in the village of Mashimoni, Kibera. I spent my morning there with another director Tony reviewing some of ISSA's literature. We decided I am going to write a grant proposal for their Eagle Project. The Eagle Project is a broad plan to start a ICT Center at ISSA for the Kiberan community. It will be fun to watch this project take shape because an ICT center could truly revoluntionize the economy of Kibera. Later on in the afternoon Tony and I met with an Ph.D candidate anthropologist from Oxford who has agreed to help Tony analyze a survey he completed about the slum upgrading project near the Soweto village. It was fun to watch her manipulate the data to see all the angles of the reactions the villagers have towards the intiative. Back in Kibera I watched another cat walk training and attended our Thursday evening meetings at ISSA. ISSA so far has been a great way to experience many levels of development at the grassroots level.

Tatuonana! (I will be seeing you!)

ISSA Day 1: Kibera Tour

For those of you who have seen "The Constant Gardener" you can visualize the setting for my first day at ISSA. I dropped at the DO's stage (that short for I was dropped off at the District Officer's matatu stop on the number 32 route) around ten am. I was the only "mzungu" in the village of Mashimoni of Kibera on that morning and the locals knew it because they stared and greeted me with choruses of "How are you?". I walked into my organizations new headquaters. They recently moved into a two room cement building that was previously a health clinic. To enter the building you cross a rough cement bridge over a drainage/drinking water/sewage trench filled with garbage. A "poshi" mill crunches and grinds grain for "ugali" next door and a small one room market across the dirt pathway sells sodas and snacks.

The first hour at ISSA was an intro meeting with the three directors; OJ, Tony and Andrew, and the Sports and Culture Program Officer Daniel who we call "Sambasa". Sambasa is a comedian, artist and actor. "Sambasa" means "to spread". It fits Daniel well because his talents have carried him all throughout the community. After my introductory meeting, the directors had a meeting in a different informal community called Mathare so Daniel and I spent the day touring Kibera.

We walked to a soccer field, the Nairobi Dam, and we stopped at a scenic view between the informal settlement and high rise condominiums across the Nairobi River. We ate lunch with Betty and Sylvia, two of AU Abroad's Cultural Orientation leaders at their house. Later we walked to Lindi (Lindi is another village of the informal settlement) to visit Daniel's aunt who he considers his mother in Kibera. After playing with his 6 month old cousin and Auntie we went back to the office to get ready for our training in the early afternoon.

In the context of the ISSA Beauty Pageant, "a training" really means a dance party with thirty 23 year olds at a local schoolroom. We went to help the other two trainers facilitate a cat walk training session for our contestants. The contestants cat walked to pop hits from the early 2000s and I was the DJ! Couldn't have asked for anything more!

I was escorted to a different matatu stage on route 40 to head home to KiSwahili class at 7:00 pm in Westlands. I grabbed two pizzas at Pizza Inn..two for one pizzas on Tuesdays and ran to class!

(These boys are not from Kibera, they are street kids I met from South B who are currently enrolled in an arts program to restore their sense of humanity and health through fine arts, drumming and dance.)