Desperation, Real and Perceived (IMPRINT ARTICLE)

          I have been in the Kariobangi slums of Nairobi, Kenya for almost two weeks now, with three months ahead of me. Four of us from the University of Waterloo are living in an apartment building in the Riverside area of the Kariobangi slums and though we are uplifted by the positivity and hope of the Kenyan people, we also see desperation daily. The poverty of living daily among sewage and few material possessions with thousands of similar stories is around every corner.  Everywhere you look from our roof you see garbage and debilitated houses and we are separated from that because we are mazungos, white people. This difference means that we have money and opportunities for the future that others do not have. I witness desperation while I have none. Our separation from this desperation is apparent every day in our attempt to live in community with our Kenyan brethren.

          One situation in particular sticks out. When we went into the city center of Nairobi to explore, two young girls started following us to beg for money. The Kenyan director of our organization Education for Life named George told us to never give the kids money because it perpetuates the poverty they live in. It is one thing to be taught this lesson between the well-off and another to follow it among the poor. We have all walked by a homeless person without sparing any change and later felt bad about it. As one girl followed me for five minutes, I finally gave her some small change although that didn’t absolve any of my bad feelings. I keep asking myself why I was born in my situation and she was born in Kenya. I have to believe it is for a reason, that we can all do something good with our position.

These differences in position were never more apparent than on Friday, when I went to the clinic with what I was convinced was malaria. Even though I am on anti-malarial pills, my hands and arms had begun to be covered in small red dots on Wednesday. I hoped they were an allergy but as I grew increasingly weak, I began to think they could be malaria because I woke up a few times with the bug net off my bed and body. Coworkers also thought they might be bug bites so I was whisked in to see a doctor on Friday, got a blood test and had to wait an hour, totally drained and depressed while waiting for the results. Despite my money and precautions, I was convinced I had malaria, a disease which can cause lifelong problems. I had the money to get the best healthcare possible and was better off than the millions who die from this every year, so why was I so scared? These desperate moments I had do not compare to the desperation I see in the shacks I walk by every day, the youth with no jobs and a dismal future.

My few desperate moments were for naught. Ultimately, I didn’t have malaria, just an allergic reaction that looked worse than it was. However, my first two weeks have shown me the separation that exists in our world first hand. My brush with disease in the developing world does not come close to what they undergo daily. I suppose this trip will show me the depth of our separation and whether I can be a part of the generation that will close this gap. And from what I have seen, I need to be. Desperation is scary, to see and experience.

Sawa Sawa, Kenya So Far

      Sawa means alright in Swahili, and that is where I am at now. I have grown accustomed to my new life in Kenya and I am now at the point where I can have an even mind and put some of my thoughts to paper. It has been the strangest experience I have ever undertaken so far in my life. I have been shocked so far by the Kenya I have seen so far because of stark contrasts. We in Canada live in a world of convenience and it seems everywhere I look, things are hard. Education is hard, buying and making food is hard, traveling is hard, living is seemingly hard. So why are the vast majority of the people so happy, and why do I see so much hope?

     My work has been with the Education for Life organization located in the Kariobangi, Huruma and Korogocho slums in Nairobi, Kenya. The organization mostly goes around to schools and teaches life skills that students do not necessarily receive from parents, guardians and teachers in the hectic and desperate world that a lot of the people in the slums live in. I have been involved in dealing with some of the most enthusiastic children I have ever met so far, especially since many of them rarely see a mazungo, the word for white guys which I hear around corner. I can safely expect that most times I hear raised voices on the street, it is about us, the white people that stand out so much. However, Education for Life has been a haven because of the difference I feel like I will be able to make over this summer, both in the people around me and in my own life.I will be helping out in three grade four to six classes each week, helping them discuss the issues they face in the slums and helping to ensure that they will become high character individuals in a difficult society. I will also be leading a weekly Youth Alive Club, where I will be in charge of leading a group of thirty kids in developing their talents and showing them that learning can be fun. I am also involved in working with youth that are setting up small businesses in Nairobi because of specific skills they have, such as woodworking and auto mechanics, and in overlooking garbage collection systems.

      I am extremely gracious at all the smiles and greetings I have been receiving the last five days, opposed to what I thought were malicious chants the first couple of days when I did not understand the language as well. Heads are turning but as I am greeting them in their language and smiling, I am receiving positive greetings back. What I attribute this to is that I think most Kenyans realize the position I was born in and instead of resenting me for it, they want to greet me and be nice to me. I think this mostly has to do with hope, where people live their lives as best they can and fight for improvement, whether for themselves or their children. I hate giving up and I think resiliency is an admirable quality of the Kenyan people. Maybe that is why they are such good long distance runners.

     Those are my immediate thoughts and I hope this blog was not too jumbled, I will write a cohesive post about what I have learned so far about corruption in Kenya in the next few days as well. Those are some of my first thoughts on what has so far been a humbling experience. I never realized how big the world's population was until I saw what is behind some of the numbers on poverty I have been researching for three years. But just like these Kenyans, I wish to live with hope for the future. There is one quote I have always really liked,"the courageous never surrender hope". I will try to live up to this while in the slums of Nairobi.

On the Cusp of Kenya

This is it, hours before I leave Canada for three and a half months. This is an article that will be appearing in the Imprint at the University of Waterloo on Friday, which is partly new and part of an old blog. I will write for this school paper about my Kenyan experiences every two weeks when it comes out. I will also be updating my blog about once a week. I want to greatly thank everybody that made this trip possible, your support has been greatly appreciated. See you all back in Canada, feel free to comment or drop me an email at cmbrenna@uwaterloo.ca  .

On the Cusp of Kenya

             I am departing to live in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya for three months for an international volunteer program called Beyond Borders. This will easily be the biggest change of my life and right now I am teetering on the edge, about to dive head first in. A lot of preparation has gone into this trip, as it has to making any big step in life.  A lot of people had to provide support for me to get here and I leaned on friends, family, my fellow thirteen students on similar trips to Uganda, India, Ukraine and Dominican Republic, professors and total strangers that talked to me, wished me good luck and vanished into the woodwork. I am anxious and excited before going, but I know I am only prepared because I have this support.

            I will be working in the slums of Nairobi called Mathare and Kariobangi. These are the second and third largest slums in Nairobi, characterized for their poor infrastructure, poor water quality and lack of security and privacy. My whole entire life I have lived in suburbs, in a house that could likely fit ten Mathare dwellings. This is partly why I am so anxious because of the fear of the unknown. I have read books, talked to people that have experienced slums, and watched movies that show their struggles in depth, but I still have no idea what slums will be like until I am there. Overall, I just see my worldview changing in ways I cannot imagine right now.

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. I think Joseph Schumpeter’s term creative destruction is very applicable because of the changes I will undergo in Kenya. 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. While I am over in Kenya, I will undergo creative destruction that will give me a new worldview when I get back. I look forward to sharing these changes throughout the summer.