The first day I visited the slums of Nairobi, I was accompanied by Nicholas Kangethe Mbugua. A “Youth Facilitator” for Undugu, he served as our guide and translator. As we visited various Street Associations, he helped explain to the youth what Digital Storytelling was and what self-advocacy work such as this could offer to these young people. It wasn’t until later I learned that Kangethe himself had been a “chokorra,” a street boy.

Kangethe (middle) a youth facilitator helps us connect with the street associations in the slums of Nairobi

Kangethe (middle) a youth facilitator helps us connect with the street associations in the slums of Nairobi

Kangethe was born just outside of Nairobi in Kiambu. He was the oldest in a family of four and, as happens all too often here, his father divorced his mother and left her to care for her children alone. This meant that when Kangethe finished primary school (which is free in Kenya) his mother didn’t have the money to send him to High School (which is not  free). With very little education, eventually Kangethe ended up homeless by the age of 19.

“I found myself in the streets. My street colleagues were smoking and taking drugs. English people say if you can’t beat them you have to join them. There was no way I could beat them so I had to join them.” He explained that eventually this life in drugs also lead to a life of crime. “I couldn’t manage to steal from someone when I was sober, only when I was high could I manage to do anything wrong. When you live that life, most of the time you are being taken to prison. When you get out, you have nothing to depend on, so you find yourself stealing again, and then you go back to prison.”

This cycle of recidivism was finally disrupted by a traumatic event. Kangethe was serving a sentence of 18 months for stealing a mobile phone. He was upset because his mother would not come to visit him in prison. Only upon his release did he learn that his mother had become very sick and died while he was in jail.

“My rehabilitation started from there. My mom didn’t have someone to call on. I am the oldest and I have to take care of the rest of my family, so I decided to quit that thuggish life.”

But Kangethe wasn’t sure how he was going to do this. Then one day, he encountered some project officers from Undugu who weekly visited the neighborhood where Kangethe lived. “I was interested in hearing what they had to say. Their message somehow touched me.” They told him what they tell every young street person they meet. Stop doing drugs. Find a legal way to make money. Find a group where you can pool your resources.

Kangethe joined a Street Association in his slum and began to earn money through washing cars. By saving just 10 shillings a day (about 12 cents) he was able to rent a place to stay with some of his fellow association members. Eventually, the group elected him their chairman.

It was around this time that Undugu started an innovative new program for engaging their street associations. In 2006, Undugu was visited by an organization from South Africa that had employed former street youth as part of their regular staff. Undugu was so moved and impressed by this that they wondered why they couldn’t do the same thing.

So Undugu called the leaders of all the associations together and asked them to choose four leaders from their ranks who would work as Youth Facilitators. These young people would become employees of Undugu and serve as liasons between the street youth and the staff at Undugu. Kangethe was one of the four nominated by his peers. “They saw I was serious in what I was doing. I had a chance to rehabilitate others.”

When I asked him whether he liked his job, he explained. “I can talk to the youths on how they can quit that life and be responsible, because living in the streets ends in dying and difficulties.”  He is now in the position to deliver the same message that was once told to him.  Stop using drugs.  Earn an honest wage.  Stick together.

The inclusion of youth facilitators into the Undugu framework is one reflection of USKs attempt to teach self-advocacy to the youth in Nairobi. Kangethe’s life is a testament to the effectiveness of such a strategy.

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.