a simple place

Slum artists – acrobats, rappers, b-boys… It’s been a long time since my last post… I’ve been busy – in Rwanda and the slums.

*Update*  I just made a website for these guys to take tourists into the Dandora and Mathare slums.  It is KenyaStreetSlam.com.

[If you can't see the video below you can watch it on Youtube or see it on KenyaStreetSlam.com.]

"Move over" painted on a rock in "the temple" in Dandora

I was going to write more, but I think these two videos say most of it.  The day I first went to Dandora it took me an hour and a half to get to downtown Nairobi where I met my friend D’costa to go with him to Dandora, the slum where he lives.  Dandora is another one of the many slums that ring Nairobi and the site of the largest garbage dump in East Africa.  People tell me that Dandora is considered one of the most dangerous slums in the city, but now I’ve been told that Dandora is much safer than it used to be. The youths police the slum, and on one of the times I was there we came across a couple of police with ak-47s.  I never felt threatened at all.  It’s totally safe to visit Dandora if you go with people who live there.  The same is true with the Mathare slums another nearby slums where I have friends. Mathare used to be dangerous, now it is totally safe for a foreigner to walk there during the day.  Like anywhere in Nairobi, night would not be a good time to be there.

me and the gang at "the temple" in Dandora

The mounds of trash around Dandora stretch for acres and acres.  I had followed D’Costa’s small form through pressing crowds and billowing clouds of diesel until we came upon an unmarked bus stop on the rundown side of downtown Nairobi. Then the two of us squeezed into a seat in the back of a decrepit bus, and crept along a road to the Dandora slums where D’Costa shares a room with a friend from Mombasa. It wasn’t a bad little room.  For $25 a month they had a decent window on the second floor, shared toilet and shower, shared sink for washing, no kitchen. But way better than the shanty rooms in the real downtrodden part of the slums.  This was in a real building. D’Costa is a rapper and acrobat, and he knows many, many people in the slums.  He introduced me to his friends and the two times I visited we walked all over the slum and met people and artists who live there.  The acrobatic group that I met also do community projects like picking up trash, planting trees by the river, and keeping the slum safe.  They are amazing guys.

I also spent some time in Mathare with two other friends, Fred and Ben, who are peace-makers – leaders in the community who help keep it safe and help make peace.  Ben helps run a school in Mathare that is totally put together by the community. They use whatever rooms they can find in the slums and the teachers don’t get paid anything. They just want their kids to get an education. There is only one government school in Mathare – not nearly enough for the half million people who live there, so they took matters into their own hands. The school also hosts a couple youth groups that do dance and music.

Defying gravity in Dandora

I am helping my friends from Dandora and Mathare start projects to bring tourists into the slums. These are incredibly vibrant places with amazingly talented people who are trying really hard to make a difference in their own lives.  They are not looking for handouts.  The acrobats practice every day starting at 6 am.  My friends also took me around to see people who are making crafts in the slums, amazing little slum farms, and a waterfall on the Nairobi River that runs through both Mathare and Dandora.  The waterfall is a waterfall of trash, because the slums are built on trash dumps.

These are incredible places and amazing people.  I’m going to build websites for them, and try to get tourists going there.  This could be one of the best things you do if you travel to East Africa.  *And* you could help these people empower themselves at the same time.   I made the video above from both the communities.  Below is a video of my friend D’costa rapping at “the temple”.

temple rap…

I leave Kenya next week.   Totally mixed feelings about that.  A month ago I didn’t think I would ever come back to Kenya, but now I want to come back.  It’s complicated, and I’ll write about it when I get back.  But here’s something I txt-ed to a friend the other day when I was riding a matatu through town… “Somewhere amidst the swirling masses of people and the billowing clouds of diesel fumes I’ve finally found a sense of peace with it all. Like a column of sunlight angling down through the clouds at the very end of an overcast day.”

My next blog post will be about my trip to Rwanda last week – genocide survivors and participants and a trip to see the mountain gorillas.

Land use change in the Transmara, from "Wildlife and People: Conflict and Conservation in Masai Mara, Kenya" by Noah Sitati

Here’s a quickie to follow up on my post about elephant conflicts in Masai land.  Quite a few people have written me back to express the thought that the elephants were there first, and that people are probably taking away their habitat.  Without a doubt this is true.  In the past twenty five years the amount of farmland in the Transmara has increased by 1000%, and forested land has likewise decreased.  An elephant population that used to be contiguous with the Masai Mara National Reserve now is increasingly only sustainable within the reserve itself.

“Your elephants”

Before coming to Kenya I’d heard that people in villages with elephant problems often refer to the elephants as “your elephants” when they talk with the Kenya Wildlife Service.  I definitely came across this attitude.  In fact, the prevailing attitude was that the Masai Mara Reserve was created to protect wildlife, and the rest of this land should be for the Masai – not wildlife.  The Masai Mara is actually a fairly small reserve, but it is part of the huge Serengeti – Masai Mara ecosystem and there are elephants that move back and forth between the two.  But what is the answer?

elephant skull from poaching

In Kenya, elephant poaching is still a large problem.  Elephants that live outside of parks are at risk from both poaching and from being shot by farmers who want to take things into their own hands after losing all their food.  When I was in Transmara we were looking for elephants in the areas around peoples farms.  There is still a good amount of forest in Transmara, but the elephants are increasingly wary of people. In one patch of forest near a dwelling and school we came across a recently poached carcass that was maybe two weeks old.  The elephant’s tusks had been removed, making it clear that it had been poached and not just shot when it was raiding a farm. So there are multiple problems here.

Elephants are not threatened throughout their range.  In fact, in South Africa conservation has been so successful that there has been serious talk about the need to cull elephant herds again at some point in the future (here’s a NG article about elephant management).  Culling is unlikely to ever be a need here in Kenya, but the conflicts between elephants and people are likely to continue unabated unless some solutions can be found to this problem. I think that it is easy for us as Americans to sit back and talk about the idea that people are the problem here.  When someone’s grain storage is raided, they can lose six months worth of food that they were depending on to keep themselves and their kids fed.  Most of the people here have no jobs to rely on beyond their farming, and there are virtually no jobs even if they did want to do something other than subsistence farming.

Dr. Noah Sitati of WWF has been looking at this problem for years now.  He believes that it is possible to equip farms that are in known elephant paths with electric fence (here is the report on wildlife / people conflict in the Masai Mara), but he thinks the long term solution is to pass zoning laws that would limit farming, and create economic development so that so many people were not dependent on farming.  Noah also writes that the Kenya Wildlife Service could do more to help the people who have ongoing conflicts with elephants.  Most of the people I talked with said that KWS does nothing when they receive a report about an elephant conflict.  If someone is killed they offer apologies only.  The man that was injured was given some money by KWS, but it was not enough to cover hospital costs.  In the US our government does not compensate people for either personal or property damage caused by wildlife.  Here is seems to be an expectation, because the wildlife is considered to be around for tourists only.  The locals don’t see any benefit.  In reality, I would say that many people benefit to some degree, because tourism is the largest source of income for Kenya, but subsistence farmers cannot see this in their own lives.

Here is a short interview with a woman whose house was broken into by an elephant.  She and her husband are both educated.  They are both nurses.  There house is quite nice for the area.  The elephant pushed a wall completely into the house, but they were both gone when it happened.  The elephant ate most of their grain, which they generally distribute to family members who have no jobs.

Are the elephants in these areas doomed?  Noah thinks it could go either way for the population in Transmara and those other areas close to the Masai Mara.  For the elephants around Narok, those populations probably have no future.

………………………………………………..

Parting shots:

adorable elephant orphan in Nairobi…

Orphaned elephant at the David Sheldrick Trust in Nairobi

Masai school girls having fun with my sunglasses

Masai girls having fun with my sunglasses

Acrobats from Dandora, one of the most dangerous slums in Nairobi (next post)

Dandora acrobats

S. Sudan woman walking on road

This post is from the first trip for my ENEMIES Project.  Read more about it here: www.EnemiesProject.com

Warawar – an ominous name for a town in a country that is coming out of decades of civil war and genocide.  Add to that the fact that Warawar also happens to sit near the border of South and north Sudan, and you could be excused for thinking this little town might not be the safest place to travel in the newest country in the world. These thoughts and more were bouncing along in my head as we rattled out the road to Warawar from Aweil, a long red scar that runs through an otherwise green landscape dotted with small clearings, mud huts and large spreading fig and mango trees. Though filled with massive potholes, the road was better than I expected. We passed occasional vehicles and once stopped to take pictures of a bus that had overturned in a massive water-filled ditch by the side of the road. Manal, our Sudanese colleague and soon to be American citizen wanted her picture taken with the overturned bus. We also passed a steady stream of people walking for miles between the nearest towns – women carrying vast burdens on their heads, young children herding cattle and scores of men on bicycles. Now that I think about it, I never saw a single woman on a bicycle and I wonder why that was. Nearly everyone here walks, even the police. In nearby Wanjoyk we asked the police what they do about cattle theft incidents near the border, and we were told that they only have one vehicle. Otherwise they have to walk three days or bike one day to the border. After rains the road is a red, gooey mess.

The Warawar peace committee

Warawar is a market town. Dirt roads lined with stalls spread out like ribs from the raised red road that runs through town, and we drove by brightly colored goods spread out onto tarps, open buckets of grain and racks of clothes. After a quick lunch of fresh pita bread, grilled goat in sauce, a dal-like lentil dish and beans (see last post) we met our hosts on the far edge of town going towards the border at the Warawar Peace Center, recently built with aid from USAID. I traveled to S. Sudan with a delegation from the US Institute of Peace led by Jacki Wilson that had come to talk about the implementation of a peace settlement they had helped negotiate between the Dinka communities of the south and the Misseriya communities of the north. Before we arrived, Jacki’s local partner had gathered together members of the Warawar peace committee who came from both sides of the border to spend two days giving Jacki and her colleagues their stories about the history and reasons behind the conflicts in the region, and as they settled into their talks a man who worked for the city administrator offered to take me around to meet and photograph the traders in town. Warawar was filled with police, and I was told without hesitation that I should not raise a camera around the police, so unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of the streets of Warawar.

Dinka / Misseriya merchant partners in Warawar

But, you may ask, why did I care about photographing the traders in Warawar?  Years ago when Sudan was still embroiled in civil war the government in the north had locked down the roads to the south. Nobody was allowed in or out, and gangs of Misseriya militia regularly attacked anyone on the road who tried to travel back and forth between the north and south. The Misseriya and Dinka have centuries of conflict and mistrust behind them, but they also have relied on each other for trade, and the blockades were hurting Misseriya traders as much as they were the Dinka people of the south. Eventually a group of traders from the north braved the militia and crossed the border to set up a market in Warawar, and they called it the “Peace Market”. This was the seed of today’s peace efforts in the area, peace efforts that grew from the ground up rather than being imposed from the government.

Today the Warawar market is filled with both Misseriya and Dinka stalls, and a number of shops are run jointly by Misseriya-Dinka partners.  These three men are just one example.  They have been working together for several years now. The two men on the left were the first partners – the Misseriya partner makes trips north to buy goods while the Dinka partner stays to mind the shop. This is a typical pattern  This market is a living story of people who have overcome extremely serious grievances that stretch from the forgotten past into recent months. The conflict here has foundations in ethnic, racial and religious differences as well as land ownership, economics and even national politics. It is a conflict that has been filled with horrors that include ethnic cleansing, abduction and property theft. These are not easy to move beyond, and yet these people are trying to put the conflict aside to make their lives work. Are they friends?  Ignore the lack of smiles, smiling for a camera is not part of the culture here.  Many of them clearly are friends.

Five Warawar merchants

On my second day in Warawar I walked around the shops myself. The atmosphere was so completely different than Kenya.  Almost every shop that I stopped in the people would smile and seemed happy for me to take their picture (and generally totally entertained to see the pictures afterward).  One group of five merchants insisted that I sit down for tea.  They were overwhelmingly friendly even though we had absolutely no shared language.  They were three Misseriya and two Dinka, and they ran a clothing store. Right now these guys and all the merchants I talked with are suffering because of the actions of N. Sudan. North Sudan recently blocked the road and isn’t allowing any merchants through again.  So instead of making trips by car they have to take motorbikes and travel at night often on small trails through the bush. If they are caught they can be jailed, but this is their only way to make a living.

The other problem is currency. After South Sudan created its own currency, north Sudan said that it would only take the old Sudanese currency for a grace period of a few days. That happened while I was there.  Several of the merchants were trying to figure out what they could do with the cash they had in the old currency. By the time I’m writing this it might be useless already.

At the end of the day I met the group from USIP at the Warawar Peace Center and after a few photographs and much hand-shaking we climbed back into our Land Rover and headed out of town.  I felt good.  I’d had tea with three different people in Warawar and had spent a half hour chatting with a man who spoke english under a fig trea. I was leaving with a good feeling for the future of South Sudan.

As we drove out of town, a kid I didn’t see shouted at our car.  Jacki turned to me.  ”Did you here that?”  She asked.

I had.  He had shouted  ”I want to kill you!”

We agreed that it was probably just something that he heard in a pirated American movie.  Still, it left a funny taste in my mouth.  As we bumped back along the road toward Wanjyok I thought back on the five men I shared tea with.  They had tried hard to give me a second cup of tea.  I focused on their smiles and laughs as we looked at the photographs I had taken of them.

Parting shots… a handful of currency that was going to be obsolete in three days; an ancient english reader that a young Dinka boy showed me – I sat and read with him while drinking sweet tea.

Old currency

Ancient English reader for Africa

Cows in Wanjyok, S. Sudan

This post is from the first trip for my ENEMIES Project.  Read more about it here: www.EnemiesProject.com.

Cows are everything in South Sudan.  At least if you want to get married they are.  Here, as in much of Africa, men pay a dowry to their future wife’s family in livestock, and in S. Sudan this means cows.  The thing that makes this part of the continent a bit different is that the people here don’t use their cows for anything else. They don’t milk them and they don’t eat them. They do eat beef, but the type of cows people raise here are not considered very good to eat. So here cows are simply currency, a sort of bovine bank account that has to be herded around the countryside until you, your son or a male relative needs to get married.

I’ve talked to dozens of people about dowry.  Even men living in Nairobi, Kenya, one of Africa’s most modern cities, pay dowry.  One local television actor who I met told me about the negotiations he had with his wife’s family and how many goats and cattle he had to buy to pay the dowry. One morning I was walked around Wanjyok by a young Dinka man named Justin, and at the end of our he took me to the market to sit and have tea. As we drank our mouth-puckeringly sweet tea I asked him about his life and if he planned to marry soon. Justin was fairly well educated having the equivalent of a secondary school degree and a moderately good command of english. He told me that he needed twenty cows to marry and that he would probably get them from the dowry his two sisters had received when they married. When I told Justin that we don’t pay dowry in the U.S. he simply could not understand. “Why would a father give his daughter away if he doesn’t get anything?” he asked.  I tried to explain that women’s lives were independent, and he seemed to grasp the point I was trying to make.

Warawar peace leaders

Cows are also the reason for many of the conflicts in the border areas where I traveled with the US Institute of Peace.  This photograph is of the two heads of the Warawar Peace Committee (one Dinka and one Misseriya), which was formed to deal with conflicts in the border area around Warawar, a trading town near the border of north and South Sudan. Warawar has a really interesting history in peace-building that I’ll write about next time, but the main issues that came up in the peace conference on this trip were related to cattle theft between the Dinka of the south and the Misseriya from the north.  Cattle aren’t the only conflict, but they are central.  The Misseriya are nomadic, and for centuries they have been moving their cattle down from the more arid north to graze in the south during the dry season.  Their need to find better pasture for their cattle has also become increasingly severe with an increase in desertification that is likely related to climate change.  There is a sensitive and difficult history between these communities including abductions, cattle raids, and violence during the war.  It is a complex problem.  On a visit to the governor before going to Warawar, the governor talked about his efforts to return a large herd of cattle that had recently been stolen from Misseriya herdsman.

Dinka cows?

Before I go on, here is a big callout to Jacki Wilson of the US Institute of Peace who started this grazing corridor peace building initiative.  I had heard her stories, and it was wonderful to see her work in real life.  So during the talks on this trip, Jacki asked how they go about finding and returning stolen cows.  This is a huge area and there are cows everywhere. We were told that the Dinka cows are all black and white while the Misseriya cows are red.  Okay, fine – so we started paying attention to the cows we saw from the road when we were driving, and we thought “hmmmm…”. Take a look at the herd of cows in this picture to the right being herded by a Dinka boy.

Cows, cows, cows, cows…

It was interesting talking with the Samburu about cows also.  The Samburu and Turkana will basically never sell their cows.  They have a massive traditional biases against the idea of selling cows, even in a drought when they know their cattle will likely die.  One Samburu man who worked for the Grevy’s trust told me a story about his own cows.  He had decided to sell most of his cows when this recent drought began several years back.  His family nearly disowned him – they could not understand at all why he would want to sell them, because you never, ever do that.  He sold them and made a fairly decent amount of money for them. Six months later his family’s cows were all dying, and by then the price of cows had plummeted to less than half what it had been before.

Cows…

Lunch in Warawar, S. Sudan

Parting image… Lunch in Warawar

The airport in Aweil, South Sudan

This post is from the first trip for my ENEMIES Project.  Read more about it here: www.EnemiesProject.com.

I love the airport in Aweil, South Sudan. A thatched grass hut, with a giant hanging fish scale to weigh the luggage. Wouldn’t it be great if our airports could be so simple?

South Sudan was nothing at all like I imagined. Maybe because of it’s proximity to the arid north Kenya, I had imagined South Sudan as infinite stretch of arid semi-desert. So as the airplane was descending towards Aweil, the third largest city in S. Sudan, I was surprised to see a sea of lush green surrounding the airport.  Hundreds of acres of flat and flooded land that sparkled like the new green of freshly planted rice paddies. But after leaving the luxurious Aweil airport waiting area, we stopped by the local Ministry of Agriculture on our way to the hotel, where we found out that none of the land we had flown over is cultivated.  In fact, very little land in South Sudan is cultivated.  Now that South Sudan has gained independence after decades of civil war, the people of South Sudan are coming back from the north or other places in the region where they had been hiding. But they have largely forgotten how to do agriculture. The UN Food Programe is predicting a serious potential for famine in this newest nation for the next year. So the sparkling green of these vast fields seem like a cruel irony.

I went to South Sudan with a peace-building mission from the US Institute of Peace (USIP) to get images for my ENEMIES project.  The USIP group, led by Jacki Wilson, was there to follow up on a peace-building project in a grazing corridor on the border of South and North Sudan east of the contested Abyei region. Jacki has been trying to help negotiate a peace settlement here for nearly five years.

In this part of South Sudan / Sudan, the main conflict is between the Dinka people who are black Africans related to the Luo tribe of Kenya and the Misseriya, who are Arabic Africans more closely related to tribes further north.  The Dinka and Misseriya have been in conflict for generations – as long as anyone can remember.  The Misseriya are nomadic and historically they have moved in and out of Dinka territory with the wet and dry seasons. Unfortunately the Misseriya also have a long history of abducting Dinka children as slaves and Dinka women as wives.  The most recent abduction of children happened two years ago. The Dinka and Misseriya also have a long history of stealing each other’s cattle and reprisal raids for cattle theft. This year a few dozen Misseriya cattle were stolen, and we heard that the Governor is in the process of trying to have them returned.

Nhial Deng and Fatima Ali Ahmed

Aweil was only a stopover, we were actually going to a town on the border called Warawar. I dont think you could have invented a more ominous sounding name for a city in a country that has recently come out of twenty plus years of civil war and genocide. On the way to Warawar we passed through the village of Wanjyok, a town almost entirely comprised of people who have moved back to South Sudan from Khartoum after fleeing from the decades of civil war in the south. In Wanjyok I photographed Nhial Deng and Fatima Ali Ahmed, a mixed Misseriya/Dinka couple in which the wife was Misseriya and the husband Dinka. Normally Misseriya never allow their women to marry Dinka, even though they regularly take Dinka wives for themselves. This couple met when they were living in Khartoum, and Fatima’s family was happy for them to marry. Soon after marrying they moved back to S. Sudan and settled in Wanjyok where Nhial’s family had been from.   Both the Dinka and the Misseriya pay dowries in cattle (more on this later), but Fatima’s family accepted a dowry of cash.

I talked with many people about the conflict between the Dinka and Misseriya and what they think of it.  Most of the people I talked to said that they don’t trust the other group, but they do have friends who are different.  They trust their friends. This was particularly true among the traders I talked with and photographed in Warawar.

Handstand in rural S. Sudan

I’ll write more about the other people I photographed later, but in the meantime… of course the kids in the villages went crazy over my camera.  It’s fun to be able to be so hugely entertaining to people.  :)   This guy just had to have me take his photograph doing a handstand – he was great!  This was in a little village near Wanjyok where we were staying in a hotel owned by the governor.  The governor of Bar El Gazah state is reputedly one of the most powerful men in South Sudan.  He’s got 70 wives and according what we heard people who oppose him don’t stay around for long. The hotel had good food, but the rooms were totally filled with dirt and in fact, some of the food had sand grains in it as well.

One of the evenings when we were then I went out into the village with Manal, a Sudanese woman from the U.S. who is contracting for USIP. Manal wanted to show me a small place next door that was making a local alcoholic drink made from sorghum. I took a few pics of them pounding the roasted sorghum, and then a drunk policeman came in and started hassling us.  I don’t know what he was saying, but his tone was aggressive and he was waving an ak-47 around.  Manal hustled us out of there, and he followed.  Finally Manal gave him one S. Sudanese pound, and he went away.  As we were walking back to the hotel, Manal told me what happened.  Apparently she told him we knew the governor (which was true), and then he was said we should give him a pound for a drink.

A few more tidbits…

S. Sudan typical Dinka dwelling

Me with a woman in Wanjyok

A little business in Aweil where you can charge your cellphone. Just a shack - my wide angle lens makes it look bigger than it is.

Paintings on the side of a pharmacy in Aweil

Yesterday I got to go and photograph an elephant translocation for the Kenya Wildlife Service.  So cool.  I wasn’t the only photographer there.  In fact there were a lot.  This was the beginning of a huge project to move two hundred (yes, 200) elephants.  The elephants are being moved from a heavily populated area near Narok to the Masai Mara National Park, and they are being relocated because they are causing severe conflicts with the local communities.  This relatively small population of elephants is also completely separated from the much larger population to the south in Masai Mara, which has a population of over three thousand elephants.  Here is the KWS description of the project with more detail.

I wanted to photograph the elephant relocation, because it is related to another story that I will go to photograph when I return from Sudan in a little over a week.  It is a story about the conflicts between elephants and the Masai communities near the park.  Here are just a few pics from the elephant relocation.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to see the elephants being released in the Mara, because of a miscommunication.  Bummer.  I was really hoping to see them set free in a new place.

Still, it was an amazing experience. The local Masai village also poured out for the event.  Of course they had seen elephants, but never so close (unless they were in a life-threatening situation.

Sedated elephant being loaded onto a flatbed trailer (click to see larger)

Largish male in the transport carrier

This guy was pretty big and when he woke up he was groggy and mad.  He banged around the container for a minute or so before he calmed down.  I happened to be on top of the container at the moment, and it almost threw me over the side.  That was exciting.  :)

elephants in transport container (click to view larger)

These are the three smaller elephants after they moved them into one container.  Eventually they got all four elephants into one container.  KWS can move eight elephants in a day.  Here is a short montage of video I shot of some of the translocation.

After the elephant move I went with KWS to a Masai school where they were inaugurating the project, which also includes several water projects for the Masai community.  This area has been affected by drought and relies entirely on groundwater.  At the school i was totally mobbed by the students, which was fun.  A group of the older students led by one named James insisted on showing me their new school, which was just built this year.  The were *so* happy and proud of it.  They were also a bunch of complete goofballs.  Totally fun.  I want to go back.

The younger kids also totally swarmed me.  This time I asked if they wanted to touch my hair and I was almost completely bowled over – kinda like being in the middle of a rubgy scrum I’m guessing.  :)

awesomely crazy masai students

awesomely crazy masai students and me (self portrait

One of the biggest impressions I’ve had in Kenya is the staggering amount of poverty and the massive income inequality here.  All the cities I have been to are filled with people who are clearly unemployed or underemployed.  Official unemployment figures are 40%, but I’ve heard numbers as high as 75%.  I’ve been to plenty of other countries that have massive poverty problems, but I’ve found the poverty issue here to be different for a number of reasons.   I’ve had a chance to see the lives of foreigners and white Kenyans who live in the upper few percent as well as dozens of people from the slums of Nairobi and poor rural areas. The main question that I have found myself asking is how an economy with such vast poverty and immense income inequality can also be fair and working toward the improvement of everyone’s lives. More importantly, how can someone coming from a country with vastly a different economy treat people here in a way that is both reasonable and fair. This is a harder question to answer than you might expect.

Me with residents of the Kasabuhi slum that I photographed (click to view larger)

Working in the slums around Nairobi has been an interesting and fairly enlightening experience.   The people I’ve met there don’t seem to fit easily into any broad generalization that we might take away from what little we can read in the western media.  Even the writings of Nicholas Kristof, who is one of my journalism heroes, creates an fairly simplistic impression of this vast world of economic insecurity.  The slums around Nairobi are vast, some of the biggest in the world, and the people who live in them cover a vast range of backgrounds and are here for a variety of reasons.

A couple of posts back I wrote about Fred Owino who I met in Mathare.  Fred was part of a youth gang and was involved in the riots that broke out after the 2007 elections. Shortly after the riots he went through an Alternatives to Violence Program workshop (AVP), which gave him a certificate that he was able to present to the police and have his name cleared.  Now he works with the Alternative to Violence Program training other people in the slums about how to deal with problems without resorting to violence.  Fred is articulate and passionate.  He is a barber, and he is actively involved in a church. Fred was part of one of the largest gangs in Kenya. The gangs here are not all what you would imagine. The largest gangs police the slums, because the police don’t. To be a gang member you must have a job, so these are not people who sit around drinking all day. This is not to say that the gangs are saints – I am sure they are not, but the situation here is not what you would guess from the outside.

Last week I went to another slum called Kasabuhi. It is a relatively small slum compared to Kibera and Mathare. Fred arranged for me to meet a large group of people who he has brought into AVP.  All of them talked about their experiences during the post-election violence and something about their backgrounds. One story I heard over and over was of people who had small businesses and lost everything to looting and fire during the riots. Many of these people had taken out small bank loans for their businesses, and now four years after the riots they are still struggling to repay loans for businesses which no longer exist. They don’t have their businesses to earn money from and repay the bank, and they cannot get loans to start new businesses.  It is a vicious cycle of poverty.

Also last week I met another guy from the slums in a capoeira group that I’ve started training with in Nairobi. He is from Mombasa, and he moved to Nairobi to escape a bad life, and he admits that he has been involved in drugs and crime.  He has gotten himself out of that cycle and he attributes it largely to the capoeira training he started getting from a local teacher who teaches capoeira in the slums. Now he helps teach other kids in the slums and he has dreams of becoming a capoeira teacher and starting a school himself.  I played capoeira with this guy in class, but I got a chance to talk a bit more with him when I accidentally ran into him at a concert at the German Goethe institute – a cross cultural arts institute sponsored by the German government.  It was very esoteric – not the type of event where I would expect to run into someone from the slums. Again, these slums are big places with complex communities that defy the expectations I had come with.

These men and their lives paint a complex picture of low end of the economic spectrum here in Kenya. When you start meeting people here, you realize that these large communities cannot be easily delineated with a single brush stroke.  I could write pages about them.

Right now I am sitting in a lovely house on the beach in Mombasa writing this on a laptop computer.  The sun is shining, the waves are rolling gently against the sand, and inside the house the paid servant is cleaning up the living room. It is lovely. It is the house of a friend of someone I met here in Mombasa, a couple who live like most other foreigners in Kenya.  However embedded in this scene is another side of the issues of poverty and income inequality. Here in Kenya, where so many people are unemployed and there is no social safety net, normal wages can be pitifully low. Everyone above a certain income, which includes almost all foreigners and certainly all politicians here employ guards to watch their house and people to clean and often cook for them.  A typical wage for guard or house servant is 5000 Kenyan shillings a month, which is about $50.  Most of the foreigners I’ve met consider this impossibly low and pay their employees twice that – still only $100 per month. Typically most workers also only have off one day a month, and again most foreigners give their employees one to two days off a week.

Five thousand shillings a month,  160 shillings per day, is abject poverty. It is not enough money to pay for food and housing let alone school fees and medical costs. In Nairobi to get across town and back on a matatu, the cheapest form of public transportation, is 80 shillings – half of a day’s pay.

Why are wages so low?  People here are desperate.  Many parts of Kenya are over-populated, meaning that there are too many people for the land to support.  This is obviously true in the southwest where people crowd the fertile land intensely and regularly kill family members in disputes of land inheritance.  It is also clearly true in the arid north, where the population is sparse but the land is clearly over-grazed.  Desperate people will work for whatever they can get, and if someone is unwilling to work for 5000 shillings a month, there is always someone else to take their place.  It is easy to understand the economics of this situation, but it is hard to understand the morality of it.  It is an issue I have been struggling with since I arrived.

Can economics and morality be separated?  It doesn’t feel to me that they can.  Next time I’ll write more about my own interaction with the economy and what I’ve run up against in dealing with these issues.

in Mathare

She reached out her hand.
it was small,
delicate like a flower.
And when I held my hand
she tentatively took one of my fingers.

"How are you?"
Her voice was small and full of innocence.

While we held hands
a sea surged around us
"How are you, how are you, how are you?"

And beyond them a forest of hardened faces,
beaten down by years of compromised hopes,
and certain about the desperate
unfairness of the world. 

"How are you?" I ask
And a riptide of laughter
ran across the muddy path.

In the shadow of a nearby doorway
an older woman smiled
as the giggles bounced down the street.

We look at each other and she smiled again.
Her bare feet are dirty and worn.

This post is from the first trip for my ENEMIES Project.  Read more about it here: www.EnemiesProject.com.

On Thursday I went to Mathare again to photograph a man who was the head of one of the youth gangs that were directly involved with the post-election violence in 2007-2008.

A little historical background… Since gaining independence in 1963, politics in Kenya has been marked by corruption and high levels of politics related to tribal background. The riots that happened after the 2007 elections were an outpouring of anger at the perception that the election had been stolen by the sitting president. The anger was intensified by immense levels of poverty and the feeling that the politicians were enriching themselves at the expense of everybody else in the country. The election came after several years of scandals in which government officials were found to be involved in corrupt business dealings that funneled government money into shady business deals. Because the government was dominated by one tribal group, tribal tensions flared and politicians from both sides started using these tensions to their advantage. The anger that started as economic desperation was quickly fanned into an ethnic fire that exploded into riots and looting.  For over three months Kenya was shut down. Thousands of people were killed, and over 300,000 were driven from their land in response to what were perceived as unjust land-takings in the past. The main two ethnic groups in this conflict were the Luo and the Kikuyo.  A great book that explains much of this history is “It’s Our Turn to Eat”, by Michela Wong about the Kenyan man who blew the whistle on the corruption scandals by the Kibaki government.

Fred, Joseph and Jemimah from the Mathare slums

This is a photograph of Fred Owino, Joseph Maina and Jemimah Kafura. All three of these men were directly involved in the riots that exploded across the slums in 2007. People who had been friends turned against one another based on ethnic background. Fred, in the center, is a Luo. Joseph and Jemimah are Kikuyu. Fred was a leader in a gang that had been politically involved and turned violent when the results of the election came out under to great suspicion. At one point during the riots Fred came across a Kikuyu friend of his who was being attacked by a group of Luo armed with machetes. His friend called out for help. He was already injured and bleeding. Fred knew that he couldn’t appear to sympathize without becoming a target himself, so he told the others he would take things into his own hands and pulled his friend away roughly as though he was going to continue the violence. Once alone, he told his friend to never return to that area and let him go. Unfortunately, that act was misinterpreted by the other side and Fred became a target, and he soon went into hiding.

Two months after the riots ended Fred went to a workshop sponsored by the Kenya Alternatives to Violence Project. Fred feels as though that workshop changed his life, and he started training to give workshops himself.  Now Fred gives workshops regularly. Joseph and Jemimah are two men from the other side of the conflict who have attended his workshops. Since 2008 Fred has been leading the charge to make Mathare into a safer place. It is clear that the part of Mathare that I visited is safe. I walked the streets there without any feeling of tension.

Next week I am going back to photograph a group of men from the youth gangs from both sides. Fred is getting them together for me. Today I am meeting with a graffiti artist to talk about converting these photographs into a mural for peace.

…… …… …… …… …… …… …… …… …… ……

Ben and Janet and their kids

On another note, I met Ben and Janet again, and this time had the opportunity to photograph him with all of their kids – their one natural daughter and the eight orphans they care for.  Their nine kids are between them – a few other kids had crowded in – it’s almost impossible to keep kids out from in front of a camera here.

During the riots Ben and Janet took in four children whose parents had disappeared (maybe killed, nobody knows). A year later, Ben was approached by a man from the US who was in Kenya to help orphans through a small non-profit he was starting. He encouraged Ben to adopt another four children so that he could more easily get a Kenyan work permit, and then use the work permit to help support Ben and others like him. The man’s project was called “Haven of Hope” – promoting itself as a Christian ngo supporting poor orphans. Ben assisted the man in getting a work permit, and Haven of Hope profiled Ben and his orphans in a newsletter their first project in Kenya to receive support. According to Ben after the man received his work permit, he never contacted them again. Ben and Janet now had twice as many kids to take care of and no additional help.

This is a picture of the newsletter in which Haven of Hope asserted that they were helping Ben and Janet’s orphans. I don’t know what really happened with Haven of Hope. It is clear from the rest of the newsletter that they received donations from churchgoers in the US. Looking through the web, they have a facebook page and a non-functioning website. Ben says the man is still in Kenya working.  Unfortunately, I have heard plenty of stories of small non-profits like this coming in with great promises and then leaving unexpectedly.

The riots left many orphans.  Ben and Janet aren’t the only couple I have met who have adopted orphans after the violence. Many people have.  It is a testament to the nature of the people living in these dense and difficult conditions that they adopt these children.

Kids in Mathare

The kids in Mathare are great. As you walk or drive through they gather around to call out “How are you?, How are you?”.  It is adorable and hilarious. There was an art project done by a Kenyan artist where he made a ringtone out of kids saying “How are you?” in Kibera.  It’s great – you can get the ringtone or just listen to it here: Conversations in Silence. I’m totally putting this on my phone when I get back.  :)  Too bad my Kenya cell phone is too cheap to use cool ringtones.

Snippet of the day: Kenya bread – soft as tissue; Kenyan peanut butter – hard as dried mud. A combination guaranteed to create morning frustration for silly muzungus like me  :)

Oh yeah, one more thing…

Check out the song on this youtube video. Totally the most popular song in Kenya now, maybe in all Africa. It’s from a Nigerian band called Flavour.  Awesome tune – it’s everywhere – stores, clubs, taxis, homes, matatus… (the video itself is just another stereotypical music vid – ignore it if you don’t like it, it’s the song that is great).

And… I just found the origin of that song.  Apparently its an old highlife song from Nigeria called Sawa Sawa Le.  You can hear it here.

This post is from the first trip for my ENEMIES Project.  Read more about it here: www.EnemiesProject.com.

This weekend I went into the Mathare slums of Nairobi to photograph people involved with the 2008 post-election violence.  I met and photographed two families. Ben was directly involved in the violence, and he talked at length about what he considered to be the problems that led to the violence – specifically the lack of jobs for young people and the fanning of ethnic divisions by politicians who were seeking to make political gains.

After the riots Ben and his wife, Janet, adopted eight children who had been orphaned in the riots.  The eleven of them (including their own daughter) live in two small rooms that are maybe eight to nine feet square. This part of Mathare is really different that Kibera. The Kenyan government teamed up with the German government to build concrete structures here that people live and work in.  They are still tiny, but it is totally different than the haphazard mud and tin structures of Kibera.

Ben used to own a butchers shop, but his shop was burned down during the riots. He still owes money to the bank for the shop which no longer exists, so he hasn’t been able to start a new one.  He now runs a small co-op that makes jewelry from bones for tourists. Janet sells frozen sweets from a small freezer that takes up the corner of one of their rooms.  After the riots, Ben became involved with the Kenya Alternatives to Violence Project which he feels has helped him get past his anger about what happened in 2008.

Tomorrow I’m going back to Mathare so that I can photograph Ben and Janet with all of their children.  I’ll also be working with two other people from opposite sides of the conflict who were also directly involved with the violence.

The second room in Ben and Janet's dwelling in the Mathare slums

Ben's Co-op for making jewelry in Mathare

Ben's coop in Mathare - they also make instruments