Carolina For Kibera (CFK) and Nairobi, Kenya

CFK (http://cfk.unc.edu/ )is an effective community based program with an entity both at UNC and in Kenya, which has seen a rapid rate in growth since its inception in 2000. I believe that this is because its origins are unusually bold and people both in Kenya and at UNC work very hard to see the fruition of its goals; I am very impressed by CFK after spending a few days in Nairobi and seeing it firsthand, as well as discussions its members and volunteers, have given me valuable insight to supplement my own thoughts about developing an internship program at Carolina.
I am staying here with my good friend from Carolina, Aaron Charlop-Powers, who has been working here the last two summers.
I arrived here at 6 AM on Saturday after traveling from Uganda by bus overnight. At 9 AM, Aaron and I went to a village in Kibera to help with a morning cleanup – which consists of cleaning a FILTHY flow of greenish water streaming through the neighborhood. It is filled with all kinds of trash and waste. The goal is to unclog the stream as much as possible and then bag the trash and get rid of it. This is done every Saturday by different CFK affiliate community youth groups from Kibera, although its effectiveness is questionable because the trash seems endless. I was still very happy to see community youth organizing to help their community.
Kibera is the largest slum in East Africa and there are about 1 million people living there (more than ¼ of Nairobi’s total population). As described in a CFK sponsored book called Lightbox (available for purchase at http://bintipamoja.org/ ), which is about a CFK young women’s empowerment project, Emily Verellen describes the dichotomy of Kibera, the “The joy and suffering. Beauty and filth. Purity and disease.” In other words, there are so many inherent problems in a slum, however you easily find the inherent beauty in the people living there.
Kibera is a rough place where even residents get robbed (not too different from some neighborhoods in the US) and it has seen a high level of ethnic violence until the past couple years.
CFK officially registered as an NGO in 2001 after UNC alum Rye Barcott spent a couple of summers doing research in Kibera slums. When I say spent time here, I mean he actually rented a house in the community as thought he’d grown up here. For those of you who don’t realize the significance of this...for an American or any other complete foreigner this is unheard of because you become a target because you are assumed to be rich and much than likely, you are in relation to members of an East African slum. That move took guts to say the least. While living there, he got to know community members who were interested in helping the community and the organization took off from there. People attribute CFK’s growth to Rye, who apparently campaigned tirelessly to raise funding after returning to Carolina, as well as other former UNC students such as Kim Chapman (who has also been a great help to my internship program development) and the original CFK members efforts on the ground. Rye didn’t originally intend to start a program, but while here people told him that it was what they wanted to do.
CFK has a very strong Kenyan staff, an office next to Kibera slums, and the largest free clinic in Kibera which serves all of Kibera. CFK has four main components – the Binti Pamoja girls’ group, the clinic, a Kibera youth soccer league, and Taki Ni Pato (Cash is trash) youth group. Before reading about them, please note that these programs are much more intricate than I will describe – I just want to convey a general picture.
Binti Pamoja consists of 60 Kibera girls between 13 and 18 who have become very informed about reproductive health and sexual education through the program. They have become the educators because they organize community forums for youth to lead discussions and perform drama and musical acts to raise awareness about these issues. A typical community audience is about 200. One unfortunate aspect I have noticed in Uganda is that most women in the communities who I hear speak at meetings, etc. do not speak with confidence and act shy, as I would assume is true of Africa in general which is EXTREMELY unfortunate. I have noticed a huge different between how the men and women talk and act during community meetings in Uganda and the general difference is distrubing The culture is not one which encourages females to have strong opinions or to often say what they believe. The Binti Pamoja girls are just the opposite. (Empowered young women are great!) There are high rates of HIV/AIDS and sexual abuse and rape in Kibera which makes empowering women with appropriate knowledge and confidence all the more important.
The clinic was started a few years ago and is now assisted by the CDC (Center for Disease Control), the program manager for East Africa of which Aaron and I met with a couple days ago. Side note – meeting with important people with high profiles has been MUCH easier here. (example – last year I met the EU head representative and the US ambassador to Uganda). The funds to rent the clinic were raised by a couple of women from the community, Tabitha and Jane, who used money they earned from involvement in co-op groups to rent the offices. I think that Rye’s efforts in fundraising helped to sustain it. Tabitha died a couple years back so it is now called ‘Tabitha Clinic’, and Jane, who is GREAT, acts as the CFK ‘mother’, taking care of a lot of things. She seems to know everyone in Kibera as well. Just for an example of the amount of people they serve, I was told they saw 140 patients yesterday between the hours of 8 AM and 4 PM.
The futbol league has grown tremendously since it started. It was the pilot CFK program which was started to address 3 community issues - ethnic violence, youth unemployment, and public health. There are now over 5,000 members, between the ages of 10 and 30, who are involved in the league (the older men and women are trainers and coaches).
Youth are organized into teams, which are required to be ethnically diverse, and the members are required to help clean up the communities in shifts every week. They are also required to participate in reproductive health class a couple times a week and have more direct access to medical care through Kibera’s clinic.
‘Trash is Cash’ is a community youth group (age 18+) which started as an income generating activity as well as to address the environmental degradation of Kibera. Kibera actually means ‘forest’ and the land here was all forest until urbanization increased dramatically a few decades ago. In Uganda and Kenya, in the poorer areas, trash disposal consists of just burning the trash in large piles. There is not a sophisticated public system for waste management as there is in the US.
The group conducts the Saturday morning clean-ups in different parts of Kibera and conducts home sanitation visits in Kibera in which they collect trash and ‘sanitize’ the house. In other words, they fill cracks and do small repairs to upkeep homes and also do fumigations, etc. They buy cleaning products wholesale from SE Johnson, who is a partner in the project. This component is a very recent addition to their group and is part of a pilot program between a coalition of corporations. With the trash collected, they sort it and are given some money after turning in plastic and other recyclables to the private recycling companies. Food waste becomes compost and paper products are used to patch ceilings, etc. So, trash becomes a sustainable business.
CFK hosts UNC interns every summer whom pick a project that they think they can assist in based on their own unique abilities, etc. From what I’ve heard from people both on the Kenyan and American staff, it has been a challenge to find concrete work for interns to do that truly helps. This is the same issue which Jen and I have struggled with and we plan to do some serious brainstorming before returning home in the hopes that we think of some unique ideas. One possible scenario is that if we develop comprehensive descriptions of all of our potential intern hosts for potential interns, we could ask potential interns to come up with ways that they think they could assist those specific activities. For example, one volunteer with CFK decided to conduct creative writing workshops with the Binti Pamoja girls because she had experience with creative writing. Such a model is something to think about but any answers will take a lot of contemplation, discussion and reflection.

Ok Ok...one last story that I cannot leave out, although it’s not about CFK specifically...but amazing nonetheless.

When Aaron was here last summer, he just happened to be in the CFK clinic when a women from Kibera was about to give birth. He ended up in the clinic room and was giving the women moral support during the birth (holding her hand, encouraging her, etc.). He held the baby immediately after it was born – an experience I’m sure has become a major part of his life. (I’ve never witnessed birth, but I’ve often thought it must be like witnessing God). He asked what the baby’s name was, and they told him Aaron. Wow. Baby Aaron celebrated his 1st birthday yesterday and Big Aaron and I went the gathering at his house in Kibera. We ate some delicious homemade food and chilled with baby Aaron’ family. Both the parents are HIV positive but seem completely healthy (the father now works for the CDC at the clinic) however all of their 6 six children have tested negative. I feel very lucky to have had the chance to experience some of what Aaron has become a part of. You can check the full story at his last blog entry; you can find the link under my favorite links on the top of this web page.