Maji Mazuri

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.

On a crispy cold morning in September 2005 Buda and I walked down to the river to get hot charcoal from the Chang’aa (illegal alcohol) brewers to cook our lunch with. Once in a while we took a day off from work, to cook lunch together for some of our friends. When we arrived down at the river that day the men were in the process of filling the jerry cans with Chang’aa. This complicated process involved cooling the copper coil in the river until all the alcohol was caught in the jerry cans after which the residue in the drum was released from the drums with a loud explosion. The men had to take great care while doing this so we decided to wait before disturbing them. We sat among the men who were gambling close by. They rapidly played a complicated game of cards and I had a hard time understanding the rules. I observed the men instead. One guy stood out. Jeff. I had seen him down at the riverside before. He had a natural authority about him and he looked at me with an amused and slightly defiant look on his face.