Slums and Suburbs

I am about as middle class as they come in Canada, which makes the prospect of spending three months living in a slum seem like a dream. To be honest, I have not grasped what this will mean and I have a feeling that it will be only that first night in Kariobangi when I will fully understand the comforts I have in the suburbs. But in order to try to gain a better idea of slums, I will muse about them and what they mean to the world today.

Knowing that I would be living in Nairobi’s slums this summer and a lifelong interest in cities led me to buy Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums the other day. I wanted to learn more about slums and the problems associated with them and even though I have done little more then read small parts throughout, I see a very bleak picture. Did you know that there are 1 billion slum dwellers in the world? Or that one of the world’s largest slums lies in Mexico City, where around 4 million people live in the Nezo, Chalca and Izta slums located next to each other? These facts, among many others that I have yet to learn, lie in this book and are providing the foreboding background knowledge of what I will be getting into this summer in the Kariobangi slum of Nairobi.

But what exactly is a slum? A slum, defined by the UN, is a “run-down area of a city with substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security”. The poorest live in debilitating conditions and little hope is left for the future, especially to the large youth populations. A slum is the result of the exodus of rural citizens, moving to the bright lights of a city for a better life. Too often, this dream has become unfulfilled, living in the poorest areas of a city with no hope of going back to a simpler way of life in the country. The prevalence of slums and their growth rate are even worse in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 332 million people will live in slums on the continent in 2015 according to Davis. He also mentions the incredible growth rate of Kenya, where 85% of the population growth between 1989 and 1999 occurred in two cities slums, Nairobi and Mombasa.

The social problems that exist in slums are because of the poverty of the communities and lack of hope for a better future. This is what I will be attempting to combat in the Education for Life organization in Nairobi. But the enormity of this task has yet to hit me. After all, what is the level these kids have been educated at? How different have their lives been then the sheltered life I grew up with? For me, everything will go back to the “nurture” phase that I undertook, in the Canadian suburbs, to the same phase that twenty one year old Kenyans have had growing up in a slum. There is a world of difference right there that aptly shows us the separation of slums and suburbs. I grew up with so much and at times it is hard to realize this because so much interest is always placed on what you don’t have. It is pretty easy to see what people born in slums don’t have.

A fellow Beyond Borders student Sebastien that will be going to Kenya with me wrote about how he is wondering what that first night in Kariobangi will be like for the four of us. Emma, Sam, Sebastien and I will be living together in an apartment, which I can imagine will be very small, right in the slums of Kariobangi, in the north-eastern part of Nairobi. For all four of us, this night will be dominating our dreams for the next three months. The time is certainly passing quickly and I am sure it will spring up on us very soon. I think that night will be one of the longest nights of my life because of the uncertainty of the situation. Writing this in my room in a normal suburban house, surrounded by hundreds of similar abodes, I know that this learning experience will hit me in the gut pretty hard. Goodbye comforts, hello uncertainty.

Conor Brennan

For more information on Mike Davis’s book Planet of Slums, here is his Wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_%28scholar%29

Kenya!

This Friday I was lucky enough to find out my placement for Beyond Borders in May. I will be going to Nairobi, Kenya and helping out with the Education for Life NGO in the Kariobangi slums of the city. It was quite the moment reading this email, the elation at finding out about what my summer would be like. I could have been located in Kenya, India, Uganda, Ukraine or the Dominican Republic and my first choice ended up being the one deemed to be the best fit by my Professor. I am pleased that it has been selected but all of the realities of the situation are now coming to the forefront. I now have to fully research to make sure I am prepared for this huge step in my life. I will update this blog as I learn more and find out what I will probably be doing. However, one of the most interesting things about finding out where I am going is the contrasts involved.

                We live in a world of contrast: light and dark, good and evil, hot and cold. So I think it will be extremely educational to travel and live in a country that is such a contrast of Canada. I found out on a freezing, snowy day with the wind whipping at all of the bundled-up students at school. Kenya is on the equator, will be the most sustained, consistent heat I have ever had to deal with, dry and the schools that I will help at, the schools of poor slum children, will not be in the same stratosphere as Waterloo. Other contrasts exist that show the gaps between the developing world and the developed. Canada is the 15^th largest economy in the world, Kenya is 82^nd according to the CIA World Factbook while for the comprehensive Human Development Index that ranks how human life flourishes in a given country Canada is 8^th while Kenya is 128^th. I could probably go on for a while, showing the differences between the country I am living in versus the country that will be my home for three months during the summer. However, much like my last post, I want to learn from these contrasts and change for the better. I hope, now that I know where I am going and generally what to prepare for, that time will pass a bit faster. However, I am sure this excitement will be contrasted by total fear in May when I am about to leave for an unknown country for three months. Stupid emotions. Damn contrast.

Until next time,

Conor Brennan

Creative Destruction

I anticipate this trip being a time of great personal growth because of how much I see my world view changing. No matter where I go, I will see poverty on a scale that I would be very unlikely to see anywhere in Canada and I have travelled a fair amount. I have been through Winnipeg and it is certainly a rundown city in parts, but I cannot imagine that even the worst slum in the city is close to the level of those in Africa, India or other developing nations of the world. I will be seeing and in some cases living in these slums and I think this will change me greatly. However, any moment of death culminates in new life being born, like the mythical phoenix from the ashes. Therefore, I think Joseph Schumpeter’s term creative destruction is very applicable.

Joseph Schumpeter was an Austrian economist that moved to the United States in 1932 to escape the Nazism in Germany where he had been teaching. He coined the term creative destruction after Karl Marx’s use of the term in describing how healthy economies would nonetheless encounter times where great amounts of change was underway and through the destruction of established systems came new innovation and thinking. Essentially like the phoenix, a period of destruction would cause new ideas to be accepted into society. Nazism might be a good example of this because after the end of World War One and the amount of financial hardship that Germany endured during the 1930’s came the fascist Nazi movement. Creative destruction can be positive or negative, depending on what is destroyed and why it is. I see myself undergoing a change that leads to positive personal development on Beyond Borders, and indeed I already have. Every year, every month, every day should be a moment of growth and this summer will reflect this attitude.

I will be learning a lot overseas and I think I will be greatly changed because of it. Ideas I might have had in the past will die to be replaced by a global view of the world that will not shove problems that we create in the developed world under the rug, so to speak. That is the outlook I see myself having when I come back, but I will only know when it is over. Until then, I hope to prepare myself as much as I can for the creative destruction that might come to pass.

Until next time,

Conor Brennan

Take It Now

      Hello friends, family and fellow adventurers. I am embarking on a journey this summer that has been ongoing for a year now, when I first heard about the Beyond Borders program at the University of Waterloo and applied for it. When I got in over the summer and was faced with the prospect of volunteering for three months in the summer of 2011 in the developing world, I was both excited and anxious about what this journey would involve. The nerves are still there, as they are before any big step in each of our lives, but I truly am looking forward to my trip.
      I will be leaving in May to either Kenya, Uganda, India, the Dominican Republic or Ukraine to help out in non-governmental organizations in these countries focused on alleviating the poverty that they face every day. It will also be a personal development journey as I will have to rely on myself in a foreign country more than I ever have had to in the sheltered life I have here in Canada. I look forward to this because the experience I will gain seeing what is outside of my bubble will be invaluable to learning what it is I want to do with my life and where my next steps will be. I don't know where I will be going after university but I genuinely do believe that we can learn so much about ourselves by exploring the world around us. I also often hear that the best way to learn about the world is to travel and this is an opportunity that fit all of my needs: learn about myself, learn about the world and help where I can.
      As some of you know, I go to the University of Waterloo for Political Science and International Development, and these two programs form the basis for what my interests are in engaging in an international program like Beyond Borders, where I will be learning in a global environment, as much in the classroom as abroad. The three months of international placement is also balanced by the next four months of volunteering I will be engaging in at The Working Center in downtown Kitchener (http://www.theworkingcentre.org/). This is an opportunity to not only volunteer in the developing world but in the community as well. I have not focused my volunteer placement yet or how applicable this will be to my overseas placement, but the lesson that I am learning from volunteering is the importance of action. It is far easier to read about the world's problems then acting on them and attempting to fix them and as a Beyond Borders student I am looking to become committed to looking for solutions at both the local and global levels. 
      A man that I was talking to over the summer at work said something when I told him about this program that really struck a chord with me. When I told him about this program and the dreams I have for what and where I wanted to go, he simply told me "take it now". The lesson here is that you never know what is around the corner; what commitments, responsibilities, injuries, accidents or changes that are outside of our control which could rob us of our opportunities. This is a wonderful opportunity that will teach me so much about the world and that I will be able to share with others when I get back. Therefore, I am quite glad that I have grasped this and ran with it because no one is graced with the ability to look into the future. I don't know what is around the corner but I hope that this trip will be the start of putting my thoughts about alleviating global poverty and all that I have studied into action.
     I encourage everyone to live by the spirit of 'take it now', for it can be a very inspiring message. We are capable of so much as human beings and we need to lose our inhibitions and act to live in a world we are proud of. I look forward to using this blog as a way to communicate my journey with my friends and family and I hope you learn a bit more about the world as I do.

Until next time,

Conor Brennan