When you are driving through the slums of Nairobi, it is easy for them to blend together in your mind. Listless youth roving around with little to do. Garbage littering the dusty streets. Ramshackle buildings made of sheet metal. But having visited a variety of slums where the Undugu Society has fostered Street Associations, I have come to realize that there can still be healthy communities amidst an unhealthy environment.

Members of the TUFF Community youth group performing garbage collection in their slum

Picture taken by Jane Njoki, DSP Participant and Members of the TUFF Community youth group

 Yesterday, Alixa and I went to Langatta to visit Jane Njoki, a member of one of the Undugu Street Associations and a participant in the Digital Storytelling Project. Her association, the TUFF-Gong youth empowerment group is actually one of the oldest street associations Undugu works with. (See my previous blog “The Undugu Society of Kenya: a unique model for youth empowerment” for a more detailed description of Street associations). It was formed almost a decade ago by the youth in the slum. Its purpose was both social and vocational. Socially it gave the young people in the slum an increased since of community. The group also began outreach programs related to issues such as HIV/AIDS, sanitation, and civic education. Vocationally, the group provided a livelihood to its members because the group began to function in the community as the primary waste management provider.

Borrowed Wheelbarrow

What might sound like a mundane and miserable task, strangely, is a joy to watch. On the day we were with them, a throng of over a dozen youth members chattered and teased one another, towed wheelbarrows through the narrow alleys, zipped in and out of houses with blue bags in hand, and enthusiastically answered our questions and posed for pictures.

Jane taking pictures in her community

Gotta Love a Shortcut

As Alixa and I toured the slum, there was a different feeling about the place. Neighbors were visiting with one another or talking with the youth, there was less garbage on the streets and less obvious areas of open sewage. There was even a new community project underway. Apparently a women’s group in the slum had received sponsorship from an NGO that was going to put in a water system. Men from the community had been contracted by the women and were digging two foot deep ditches throughout the slum. When I asked how long they had been working on these ditches, which were in evidence everywhere, I was shocked to learn they had just begun digging the previous day.

Water Project by a Women's group

I asked Kengathe, a youth facilitator, if he felt like this community (where he too lives) is more healthy, stronger, less violent, than some of the other areas where Undugu works. He agreed that yes it was. When I asked him why, he thought it was because of its size. This slum is walled in by the National Wildlife Reserve on one side and the Wilson International Airport on the other which prevents it from the kind of endless sprawl you find in places like Kibera or Mathare. People know one another and can therefore keep each other accountable.

Wall Art

Che and Darren

During the post election riots of 2008, much of the anger and violence in Nairobi about what many in Kenya perceived as a stolen election was perpetuated on the Kikuyu tribe (the tribe of the newly “elected” President Kibaki). Looming over the slum of Kibera is a seven story building highly visible and widely known to be owned by a Kikuyu. During the violence, a mob approached this building prepared to burn it to the ground. The only thing that stopped them was that on the very top floor of this building was a community radio station called Pamoja Radio. “We told them that this station belonged to all of them. They agreed and went elsewhere.” This from Antony Nyandiek, the 23 year old station manager who showed us around the radio station.

Pamoja Radio Tower

This moment is emblematic of just how significant the medium of radio is in the developing world. It is cheap, it is pervasive, and it is therefore powerful. In recognition of this, aid organizations, including USAID, have begun to fund local radio that supports civic society and community empowerment. Because the Digital Story Telling Project at the Undugu Society has similar goals, we were visiting Pamoja with the hopes of building a partnership between their work and ours.

Before arriving at the station, I had come up with a list of questions, many of which centered around Pamoja’s willingness to do youth radio. Then I met the staff…who were all youth themselves. No one was older than 27. In fact, instead of citing the token youth radio programs that they had, they instead pointed out segments of their programming meant for, “the older people” in Kibera.

Pamoja is only a year and a half old, but it already is a well known entity in Kibera with an ever expanding line up of locally relevant radio programs. These include shows on drug abuse, women’s issues, HIV/AIDS, and a new program meant to deal specifically with youth perpetuated crime and violence. All of their reporters are young people from Kibera who are daily in the community in order to gather the local news.

Intern from Kibera working at Pamoja

On Saturdays, Pamoja hosts a competition that features local artists; the winning artist (based on call in votes) wins a free recording session with a studio in Nairobi. And because the station broadcasts mostly in Kiswahili, this again increases its accesibility to the impoverished populations that stretch out to the horizon on all sides of the building.

Along with us on the visit were Martin and Joseph, two participants in last year’s Digital Storytelling project. As we were moving through the cramped rooms of Pamoja, Joseph, who is shy about speaking English, kept saying, “This is very exciting. This is very exciting.” And it is. This station transmits a very important message well beyond the strength of its FM signal. That message is that if you give young people a voice, they will more often than not use it in creative and constructive ways. Moreover, if it was able to stop a mob once before, perhaps there is hope for a more peaceful election in Kenya the next time around.

The one room house is packed shoulder to shoulder with young people, all 18 to 25. I am at the officers meeting for SMART Club, a community based organization founded shortly after the 2008 post election riots. Its goal is to promote civic education among the youth in Kibera some of which were participants some victims of the election violence.

Peace Club Meeting, Kibera Slums

Kenneth Odogo Owade, the club’s founder, sits perched on the arm of one of the overcrowded sofas. He is bleary eyed because he worked three shifts in a row at the YMCA starting the previous afternoon. He will go back to work tonight, go straight to class the next day, return to Kibera for a nap, and start the process again earning in a month the equivalent of 80 US Dollars. Despite his weariness, Ken is never too tired to talk passionately about the importance of this club or the immense challenges that stand in the way of a young persons survival in a place like Kibera, a city like Nairobi, and a country like Kenya.

The name Kibera is notorious; the second largest “temporary settlement” in all of Africa, it is less than 700 acres but houses an estimated 1 million people. Despite the notoriety of Kibera, I once heard Kibera called the “most peaceful” slum in Nairobi. When I asked Henry, another attendee of the meeting about this, he at first responded with incredulity, but then after the brief pause conceded, “well, in Kibera, you won’t get mugged during the day.” At night it is a different story.

As a Muzungo (white person) I am told daily that I am a perpetual target in Nairobi and must always leave Kibera well before twilight. But squeezed shoulder to shoulder with these energetic, well-spoken young people who alternately debate and tease one another, I do not feel fear, pity, shock, or any other emotion that people who visit Kibera the first time often report experiencing. Despite the poverty and crime, the youth in this room are exactly what the world has been looking for. They are the segment of the “youth bulge” that could keep their country from plunging into the civil chaos that has plagued their neighbors Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Sudan.

Kibera Alley

Before 2008, much of the world took for granted that Kenya was a bastion of stability in the Sub-Saharan Africa. People inside and outside the country reacted with shock at just how quickly the violence spiraled out of control. Conflicts that at first appeared to be tribal feuding, it later was confirmed, were in part the result of groups of youth that had been bribed by politicians first for their votes, then for their violence. Kenneth himself at the onset went out into the city center to take pictures in hopes of documenting the atrocities, “but I took five pictures and I had to stop. It was too much.” He instead went back to Kibera and did his best to calm people and evacuate members of targeted groups to safety. In his house he hid a woman who was a member of the targeted Kikuyu tribe, telling her if people came after her, to claim to be his wife. They came, she did, she survived.

Ken is exceptional, but he is not the exception. As the young people around me discuss micro-finance, team building, creating a budget, I think about an article I recently read entitled “Kibera youth always primed for violence.” Martyn Drakard a reporter from The Observer, a Ugandan newspaper, writes about the train track that run through Kibera being torn up in protest of recent tensions between the two countries. In it he claims:

“Kibera youth can be divided into several categories: those who traipse every morning to the factories five miles away hoping to catch the eye of a sympathetic foreman; those who stay in Kibera and run or are trying to start projects, such as selling water, managing public toilets and showers, disposing of waste; those who stay at home doing nothing; and the others who are ready at a moment’s notice to take to the streets or alleys in pursuit of some cause.”

But can the youth in this room where I am sitting be easily squeezed into any of these above categories? It is convenient when you are speeding through Kibera on a high-powered train or hurrying out of Kibera before sunset to miss yet another category of youth. The kind who, in the words of Kenneth, “Don’t let Kibera be on you. You be on Kibera.” You cannot see signs of Kibera externally. They don’t look poor, or “primed for violence,” but there is a fire within them to be on Kibera, on Nairobi, on Kenya to start opening pathways out of poverty and marginalization. To give them a platform for participation that is more permanent than the settlement in which they live. To pay attention to the youth before they tear up more than the train tracks.