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.

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

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

This week I had my first actual shoot for the enemies project in the Kibera slums of Nairobi.  There are a lot of things I didn’t say here in the video.  I would have liked to take so many more photographs there in the slums, but I have decided that I won’t take peoples’ photographs unless they agree to it.  Walking through the slums, you see a wide variety of reactions – from innocent laughing curiosity in the young children to suspicion or resentment to stares that are as blank as some of the mud and tin walls of the narrow passageways.  It is an incredible place, and the people I met were wonderful beyond words.

The woman who I photographed was Loice.  She was quiet and beautiful.  When I interviewed her she talked at length about forgiveness and how grateful she was for her Luo neighbors. In the post-election violence of 2007 the Luo and Kikuyu people were killing each other in great numbers.  It is so beautiful to me that her former Luo neighbors worked hard to help her move back into Kibera.  You might wonder why someone would want to move back into the biggest slum in the world, but it is still a community and the bonds of friendship are meaningful to people who live here, scraping by to live one less than a dollar a day.

The New Zealand woman who came with me is Jeannette.  It was her first full day in Kenya – what a first day.  I think that it was shocking for many of the people in the slums to see a disabled white woman.  But the meeting between her and James was beautiful.  Then the meeting of James and Loice, from opposite sides of the conflict, was beyond words.  These experiences make this whole project worthwhile.  As difficult as it has been to arrange, and as challenging as it will be to fund, I am glad that I have started on this.

Many thanks to the Kenya Alternatives to Violence Project, and especially to  Thomas Kozzih and Cornelius Ambias for helping me find and arrange the shoots in Kibera.

Minor notes: I was not so happy with the photographs I got from this shoot.  I was paying so much attention to the people interactions that I feel as though I didn’t give the photographs enough attention – so rare for me.  But this is just the first shoot of a huge project and I consider these raw images just material for the final pieces which will be far from the raw photographs.  Also, I video-ed James and Loice telling their stories as well, and that is not something I planned on doing. I’ll put some of these interviews up when I have time, though I’m sure the audio is not great since I didn’t bring an external mike.  So much was happening in these shoots that I wish that I had a person dedicated to doing video of the experience itself.  I wanted more documentation than I could possibly do on my own.  Something to think about for the next trip.