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