Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Hello Again,
We have had our organizational meeting. For the next two weeks, most of the Cambridge students are going to interact with the students at the various schools. The activities will include everything ranging from playing with the preschoolers and helping the primary school teachers to playing soccer with the high school kids.
Susan is starting off working at a Maji Mazuri program called Headstart. It differs from Headstart in the US because the school serves children from toddlers to eighth graders. This school has 300 kids all crowded in a very small space located in the Mathare Slum. The baby classes as they are called may have 30 children per classroom measuring 10 ft by 16 ft It is designed to give them all a “Headstart” that is prepare them to compete in the opportunity to continue their education after secondary school. It is competitive in the sense that 8th graders have to pass a very tough test in order to get into high school and high schoolers have to pass a very tough test to get into college. The attrition rate is very high at both levels and if the students do not move on to the next level, they are pretty much destined to live a life and have occupations that reflect their educational level. We happen to be here at the end of their school year and everyone at each top level is studying very hard – the pressure is tremendous. The government pays for primary school. Kenyans must pay for high school and college themselves.
Susan is also involved in “Mavuno” a micro-finance program which Maji Mazuri operates in the slum called Mathare (400,000 people). The essence of the program is as follows: Five residents (most, if not all, women) of Mathare form a Group and borrow money from Mavuno to start a joint business. Each participant receives five hundred shillings.
(approximately 5 dollars!) to start a business, such as a vegetable stand, a sewing business, a shoe store, etc. They must then pay the debt off every week until it is paid off. If the Group is successful and current in their payments, they may borrow a larger amount ($10). If they continue to be successful, expand their businesses, and pay off their loans, they can borrow up to 5000 shillings (approximately $50). There are currently about 250 women involved in 50 active businesses and the number is growing.
We have seen two businesses that are part of the micro finance program. One was a woman who has a stand in Mathare selling fresh vegetables. The other business is a restaurant also in the slum. Susan had the wonderful opportunity to have lunch there. At first, the tiny building looked uninhabitable but once inside, we found ourselves in the kitchen where there were two rough wooden tables with benches. The proprietor was very welcoming and served a delicious Kenyan meal.
We participated in a fascinating Mavuno meeting yesterday. Mavuno, the name of the microfinance program, has never had a written “Constitution” or set of written rules and regulations governing and describing the organization. So the staff is writing one.
The Kenyan “team” is made up of a couple of young, recent college graduates, who are staff members, and three or four very street smart young people who know how the program is, in actuality, working. They had already done some preliminary work on the documents. Susan and I and 3 other volunteers (one a recent graduate with an Economics major from Cambridge, another a young lady from China, working on her Masters in social work, etc.) were invited to join them and contribute our ideas. 12 of us sat around for 4 hours in a dark, cement block room with no water and little electricity, etc. and “banged out” a very good second draft of the document. The team will review the document again on Friday.
These 12 people, all of whom actively participated, were from four continents and we all worked together on a common successful task. It was wonderful!
Paul is not a teacher. Paul is not a social worker. Paul is not a farmer. Paul cannot play soccer with Kenyan high school students. Maji Mazuri does not happen to serve old people. What can Paul do? Of course, pick up garbage:
Maji Mazuri has a very effective garbage pick up program for high school and college age young people, all of whom have grown up in the slums. The leaders of these two programs called the Youth and Teens programs are also from the slums and are people who have come up through these programs themselves. These leaders are truly remarkable folks. Their overall competence, maturity, intelligence, leadership skills, mastery of the English language, etc. after having been born in and grown up in the slums, is truly hard to believe.
The Youth and Teen programs includes a lot of information programs designed to help young people grow up in the slums without doing drugs, getting pregnant, stealing, etc. and maybe move out - a very hard thing to do.
They have also started a modest slum clean-up program. The city does not pick up any garbage from the slums. Therefore, most garbage just piles up. In addition, since there are very inadequate toilet facilities (four central locations for 400,000 people), there is a lot of waste from this source also flowing down polluted trenches to a very polluted “river”. The young people have handed out garbage bags to several dozen slum dwellings and every Saturday, they pick up the garbage bags, put the garbage bags in wheelbarrows and dump them along the main road. It is illegal to dump the garbage on the road and there are fines involved, so the young people dump the garbage at “odd hours” and since the city does not want so much garbage on the main street, they pick it up.
The young people also take shovels (three) and rakes (four) which are used by a dozen or more people to clean the garbage out of the polluted trenches so the sewage can flow down to the river. Last Saturday, along with a number of other volunteers, Paul became a full-fledged garbage man for about three hours. He was particularly good on the rake. (We volunteers are going to buy some more wheelbarrows, rakes, and shovels for the young people).
The people of the slums are very appreciative of the program and it is providing a very good example for others to follow. It is, of course, a drop in the bucket when you are dealing with a slum of 400,000 people but Maji Mazuri and the young people are to be highly commended for their efforts in very challenging circumstances.
Tune in again some day, if you wish.
