Maji Mazuri

Or Macs. We've been working with youth in a ghetto in Kenya, promoting peace through making, screening and publishing short films in their community and online.

The Maji Mazuri Youth group is trained by Dr. Wanjiku Kironyo in a method called Re-evaluating Counseling. This picture was taken during the post-election violence in January 2008 when youth came to the Maji Mazuri Head Office for counseling, food and other type of relief while their ghetto was in war. The youth were able to discharge their emotions of having experienced and witnessed indescribable atrocities in their neighborhood Mathare.

The Maji Mazuri Youth group's community service also entails regular clean-ups of the ghetto Mathare. As you can here it is a battle against all odds. The youth group, currently, is preparing a project on garbage collection that will help the community with garbage collection points and regular pick-ups by the city council.

Part of the activities of The Maji Mazuri Youth group is community service and the youth frequently visits homes for orphans and disables children to cook for them, play with them and help out with improving the home. Here we see Wambua paint the outer class room of Maji Mazuri's children's home in Kasarani.

Part of the activities of The Maji Mazuri Youth group consists of community service and the youth frequently visits homes for orphans and disables children to cook for them, play with them and help out with improving the home. Here we see a happy and satisfied group of youth members after completing a good job painting the fence of Maji Mazuri Children Centre in Kasarani.

So far the Maji Mazuri Training Center has trained over 100 youth from Mathare Valley, equipping them with computer and entrepreneurship skills.  This empowers them and boosts their self esteem. Most of them feel trapped in this cycle of poverty and the community has lost many in their attempt to get out of the cycle through wrongful means. Most of them have dreams and are looking out for opportunities to start the journey towards those dreams. 43 showed up for the computer training intake at the Maji Mazuri Training Center in Mathare this April. Only 30 positions were available.

Greetings from Maji Mazuri!

I take a moment to reflect on the progress and development of Maji Mazuri since we started this journey. We continue to reach out to more communities and empower people at different levels of their lives.

One of the things that keeps us going and motivated is the collective effort and unwavering support of all the friends of Maji Mazuri.

I express my appreciation to all our supporters and well wishers as I share with you the highlights of the first half of 2010.

Wanjiku Kironyo.

PROGRAM DIRECTOR.

HEADSTART SCHOOL MATHARE

The Headstart School continues to grow in terms of students, and the staff. One area of note this year is talent development. The teachers are engaging the students in weekly activities for the purpose of talent identification and development. Every Wednesday afternoon, the students and teachers gather, and the students show off their talents in different areas such as poetry recital, dancing, acting and art. This initiative by the teachers has had a positive impact on the children, raising their self esteem, and in consequence, their grades. The students are also more aware of the opportunities that are available once they have identified their fields of interest.

One other way the school is encouraging holistic development is sports. Every Friday, the teachers and students walk for a long distance to access a police depot field which is spacious and allows proper interaction. The teachers and students engage in games such as football, relay and netball among others. This walk and the games have created a bond between the teachers and the students, facilitating better interaction and a good working relationship. It is through this relationship that the teachers are able to reach out to the students, and this month, the school held a workshop for the older girls to talk about one of the dangers facing young girls in the slum areas, sexual harassment. The girls were able to discuss this topic, share and ask questions, which shows that it is a challenge they are facing, and the workshop was important in order to provide them with more information.

MAJI MAZURI YOUTH AND TEENZ GROUP

The youth group training centre has so far trained over 100 youth from Mathare Valley, equipping them with computer and entrepreneurship skills, which they use to advance themselves. This year, two youth members have graduated with a Diploma in Web design from the Nairobits Digital Design School. This is an achievement! They are currently on internship at one of the leading web design companies in Nairobi.

The youth members have also been using the training centre as an opportunity to interact with youth from other groups in Mathare and surrounding areas, an interaction which has led to exchange of ideas and collective community effort towards having positive impact in the slum areas. The youth have also been using football to reach out to the young people. Maji Mazuri youth group now boasts of a dynamic football team that is leaving its mark in Mathare.

The Teenz group membership has grown to 60, this year they visited the Nairobi National park and the safari walk, among other activities.

MAJI MAZURI KISERIAN PROJECT

The Kiserian High School has grown in enrollment and also activities that the students engage in. Mary Wairimu from Maji Mazuri Kasarani has joined the high school.

The Rotary clubs in Ohio District 6670 have continued to support Maji Mazuri Kiserian tremendously. Currently a clinic is being built on site courtesy of the Rotary Club of Cincinatti as well as a biogas digester which has been supported by Rotary International grant at the farm. These projects are both underway. The bio gas digested is one of the ways through which Maji Mazuri is embracing the going-green campaign and plan to use the methane produced from the digester for cooking and lighting complimenting the existing solar power.

UPPER MATASIA SCHOOLS

The Upper Matasia High school was happy to receive a donation of ten computers through the fundraising efforts of Richard Morris, a friend of Maji Mazuri from U.K. The computers will go a long way in terms of connecting the students to the world wide web and allowing them access of useful and much needed information, the computer skills will also give them an added advantage after they finish school.

MAJI MAZURI CHILDREN’S CENTRE KASARANI

Maji Mazuri Children’s Centre Kasarani has also been stable throughout this first half of the year, and continue to receive visitors and well wishers who continue to donate their time and resources to the centre. The centre also acquired a posho mill courtesy of the Trinity Episcopal Church in Ohio  and have been using it to mill maize into flour for the children. It has also extended services to outsiders as a means of generating income. The centre also recently opened a craft shop, to display the work done by the handicapped children under the guidance of Teacher Carol.

ADMINISTRATION

Maji Mazuri has held two workshops for its staff and students during the first quarter of this year, facilitated by the director. One workshop was for the male members of staff, and the other for the female students and members of staff. The aim of these workshops was to sensitize the staff on the challenges facing both men and women in the current society and how to deal with them, as well as a platform for teambuilding.

Maji Mazuri recently launched its website after the collective efforts of the web team comprising of: Kevin Corcoran, Lark Bui, Wandia Chiuri, Naomi Van Stapele, Taylor Harper and the Maji Mazuri Kenya Team. The new design website is dynamic and will have a wider outreach and better communication of Maji Mazuri Activities because it is being regularly updated. We would like to appreciate the team’s efforts towards making this dream a reality.

We would like to thank the following visitors who have taken their time to visit with us during the first half of this year.

• - Friends of Rotarian Hans Berkel, Dan, Steve, Charlie, Jack and Lee who visited Maji Mazuri Centre in Kasarani, Mathare & Kiserian.
• - The Tour d’Afrique team, who donated bicycles to Maji Mazuri at the Indaba camp site in Karen.
• - Wandia’s friend Sarah Feldman who visited the projects and donated a flip share video camera.
• - Nelleke Nijhuis from Holland who is currently working with the youth, training them in life skills as well as the Mavuno Microfinance.
• - Marriane Nijhuis who worked with the Maji Mazuri Multimedia team of reporters, and bought five data enabled phones for the multimedia work.
• - Carolyn and Kurt Wacker from Ohio who visited the projects courtesy of Crosscurrents International while they were here on a Conference.
• - Brittany Jackson, a volunteer who came through Kevin Corcoran, President, Maji Mazuri USA.
• - The Mount Pisgah team, who visited the Maji Mazuri projects, and ministered through puppet shows and taught the children hygiene skills. .North Avenue Presbyterian church team led by Kristina Robb-Dover who visited Maji Mazuri in Mathare, Kasarani and Kiserian.

To all those who have been supporting us and kept up with our activities through various ways by making visits, sponsoring children, donating funds for our many projects and keeping us in your prayers, writing to us via email and being engaged with us in any way, we say thank you and God Bless.

Mount Pisgah Team teaching Hygiene Skills at the Upper Matasia Academy.

Maji Mazuri Headstart's children playing.

Children from the Maji Mazuri Daycare Class in Karasarani reciting a poem.

Maji Mazuri Kiserian Primary School students entertaining guests.

Biogas Digester under construction at the Maji Mazuri Kiserian Farm.

View of the Maji Mazuri Maize Milling shop

Packaged maize flour for sale at the Maji Mazuri Centre.

Packaging flour for consumption and sale at Maji Mazuri.

View of the Maji Mazuri Maize Milling shop

The Yummy Coffee fundraiser went amazingly well!

Alison and I were out there from about 10am - 7pm.  With the help of 7 other volunteers we handed out nearly 150 brochures and 150 flyers.  I believe we had about 50 jewelry transactions and raised $415 in sales from the Maji Mazuri crafts.

We also sold 20 lbs of coffee and raised about $250 from those sales.  Our grand total for the day was $667.37 raised for Maji Mazuri.  Wahoo!  And we may have raised even more money with online sales.  But perhaps even more than dollars raised, we raised a lot of awareness and spoke with several people who were super interested in learning more about Maji Mazuri or sponsoring a child.

A big thanks to Luisa for helping us look polished and professional out there with new t-shirts, flyer, and brochures.  They're not a finished product but she worked overtime to create something that we could use for this single event.  THANKS, LUISA!!  You are amazingly talented.

And a SUPER BIG THANKS to Alison for coming up with this fundraiser idea and working like crazy to make sure it went off without a hitch.  You're the best!!

Now, on to the next fundraiser! :)

In 1982, the University of Nairobi did not have a department of Social Work and only one college in Kenya offered what they called Diploma in Social Work. I had just been engaged as a young lecturer and had a passion for Social Work. I approached the Vice Chancellor with a proposal to start a degree program. He approved it and the university began setting modalities to offer the course. As the program coordinator, I was given the task of identifying places where students could undertake field placements. That is how I stumbled across the dejected and forsaken of Mathare Valley.

Nairobi was a city under duress from a population growth spurt that was straining the town’s resources beyond its limits. The city council was under-equipped to provide housing, water, and sanitation. People were migrating into the city in large numbers to find jobs, in vain. They created squalor squatter communities on the city outskirts that spawned into endless hodgepodge slum dwellings of shanty make-shift homes in the most squalid of conditions.

Mathare is located in Nairobi’s Northern end as you exit the city towards Mt Kenya and its fertile highlands. The tin huts and cardboard shanties, the odor, and local deadly brew made the ramshackle dwellings of villagers in countryside look like paradise. These miserable cages were home to families as big as eight or more. The people stayed out of the huts most of the day, children playing, adults drinking, and women ”working” - selling their bodies or a lethal brew of illegal alcohol called chang’aa. There was little resembling city here. The place was one ugly chang’aa den.

The majority of the slum dwellers are women and children. Many women in Mathare Valley have a story of domestic violence, a family row, or an unwanted pregnancy. In the early years, what struck me most when I went into the valley were the stories. There were many stories of brutal beatings, fatherless children, and runaways, and they all ended up here, in Mathare slums.

The men of Mathare Valley were broken job seekers who had sunk into acquiescence after facing the harsh realities of unemployment. Many resorted to crime. Most drowned their sorrows in alcohol and grew accustomed to life in the shanties.

The notion throughout the eighties was that in the city you found a job and made money, lots of money. In rural Kenya, money was revered and rare. The city folk would totter back to the country loaded with fancy gifts. Long loafs of bread that were sparse in  the rural area, fancy outfits that were out of reach and elaborate tales of the intoxicating city life. Most boys and men dreamed of going to the city and making the break of their lives.

The reality was different. Although the city goers faked success to impress the rural people, jobs were few in the city and unskilled workers from the country could only find work waiters, house boys or bar tenders. Most found themselves unemployed, broke and living in the slums.

There was no electricity, no schools or clinics, no sewerage or paved roads – just dirt and litter. One could easily have turned back but I had embarked on a mission - to ensure we had a robust social work program at the University of Nairobi.

When I sent the first batch of students that was admitted to study Social Work at the university here and they didn’t like it. They came back after their first tour and indignantly expressed their disdain to the head of Department, Mr Mbithi. He was outraged.

He summoned me and informed me that the students were dropping out because of my style and the field experience.

The government had already pledged a grant to support forty students every academic year for a bachelor’s degree in Social Work at the University. They were now dropping to other departments. I could not believe the reaction. I never backed down. I was convinced the students needed Mathare and other slum exposure as a mandatory requirement for social work. I decided to keep the requirement until the university could train only students who had genuine interest in society and this particular study.

At that time most students viewed social work as a white collar occupation where you became a bridge between needy people and donors or social welfare providers. They felt a social worker’s job was to give handouts or other incentives from the comfort of an office. The Welfare Office in Kenya had been introduced by missionaries and was mostly concerned with distributing second hand clothes from Western countries. That’s how the confusion was sowed in the student’s mind.

Meanwhile I made a date with Mathare women. On Wednesday afternoons I didn’t have classes so every week I used the time to visit the place. During the first few contact meetings with the women the suspicion and mistrust was palpable. Years later I learned that they were cautious because they thought I was an undercover police woman out to catch them in their illegal ways.

Most of the women were jail birds roving from prison and back to prostitution or Chang’aa brewing. Chang’aa is an illicit brew, capable of poisoning its consumers while intoxicating them. The police came through the valley, under the facade of stopping crime, but often sought bribes and incarcerated only people who couldn’t pay their stifling fees.” One of the women had birthed her four children in jail.

I quickly learned not to dress like a university don, or talk like one, and certainly not to behave like one. Blend in: that was the Mathare password.

Then the dialogue began.

I started asking questions – serious, engaging, provoking questions that got

the women thinking. I asked them how much selling illicit brew had helped their

children. I asked them how much strain they went through doing jail term and

selling their bodies for a little cash.

I asked them if selling tea or firewood would be less demanding. I let them

explore their own options and figure their own destiny. I was in no hurry to push

them and neither was I offering to think for them as they soon realized.

Then the admissions begun.

They begun to acknowledge they were painfully disadvantaged by their

trades. They admitted their children were becoming teenage mothers and fathers.

They admitted the prostitution was taking enormous toll on their bodies. They

admitted the risks were unreasonable with AIDS and leaving orphans behind. I

talked about alternative business. That is how the Maji Mazuri initiative was born.