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 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.

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.

 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.

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.

When I asked the chairman of the association how the people in the community regarded the youth group, he said, “They like it when groups like this form because the there are less problems in the community.”

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.

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.

When people use the word “poverty” they are almost always using it in a material sense. To be impoverished is to be without money or food, a place to live or work. By these standards this slum and the people it it could be considered nothing but “impoverished.” But this narrow definition does not take into account the idea of social, emotional, spiritual, or psychological poverty that is so much more destructive. And it does not take into account the sense of pride and accomplishment these young people obviously feel in taking that which is dirtiest in their community and transforming it into an activity on which they can take a stand.