Maji Mazuri

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

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.

The building was finally complete. As Wanjiku inspected the new premises, she was accompanied by some volunteers and a nine year old girl from Mathare slum. The little girl was so excited about the electricity and the clean smell of paint and concrete. She had never been in such spacious rooms or  seen the inside of a stone structure. She expressed her joy by jumping up and down exclaiming, “hapa ni kama maji mazuri, (this is just like clear water).” That is  how the the name Maji Mazuri was born…

In 1982, as a lecturer from the University of Nairobi I was given the task of identifying places where students could undertake social work field placements.  That is how I stumbled across Mathare Valley.

On the evening of 24th June 2005, John* walked into a Chang’aa den, and ordered a glass of Chang’aa, he looked into the glass as he swigged it, not knowing that that would be the last thing he will ever see. He lost his eyesight soon after finishing that drink. Upon examination by a government chemist, the drink was found to be 94.72 percent methanol, which is industrial-strength alcohol not meant for human consumption. The doctor then dropped a goat liver in a sample of the tainted Chang’aa to show its corrosive effects. Within minutes, the liver began to corrode. That particular brew killed 51 people and 18 lost their sight.

During one of my first few visits to Mathare Valley, it started pouring heavily.

We were sitting in a woman's living room, which was 4 by 3 foot wide. Above the room was an old sagging polythene paper which served as the roof. The paper was able to keep the house warm but didn’t realize it had another purpose.

As the rain continued pouring the paper sagged and started dripping water at one corner. The woman put a pot there to harvest the rain water. Soon the same thing happened to another corner and she put a pot there too. The water from the polythene started dripping on the table and splashed onto our faces.

It continued raining and I asked her if I could leave while it was still raining. She told me that the water was coming downhill at such a high speed it would wash me away.

The floodwater gathered and started  gushing into the house through a hole on the floor. It was dirty water carrying sewage and mud. Soon my shoes were soaked wet.

I felt too embarrassed to ask if I could stand on the table but soon we were almost knee deep in the water. The polythene paper sagged and finally dropped. Water poured into the house from the sky.

All this time, I was watching her harvest the water on one hand while on the hand her house was flooding, leaving no where to live.

The rain stopped and she saw me to the bus stop. Now frogs there were coming out and hopping about everywhere.  I tried to restrain myself from showing my fear of frogs, acutely aware of what she was going through.

All the way home I thought of her.

Where would she sleep?

Does anyone know that is the kind of life people in Mathare go through?

It bothered me a lot, especially sleeping in a warm bed that night.

I realized that the reality of life in Mathare valley can only be understood by the people who live there.

While we as a Nation are praying for rain, the people in Mathare are torn in two, on one hand, they need the clean rain water. On the other hand, the rain water will flood and ruin their homes.

I was left with a picture that I could not get over.

I could tell a lot other stories because each visit left me with images, experiences and feelings that i cannot translate into writing.