the Friendly Heart of Nairobi

Kibera, Nairobi, is home to an estimated million living in poverty. A visit to the slum is not for the faint-hearted, and the smells of garbage, open sewerage, unrefrigerated meat hanging in disheveled tin-shack butchers, and dried sardines being sold by leathery-tough women on the side of the road, ravage the uninitiated nose.

On any given day you might see a gang of young men provoking someone for a fight, a line snaking through the streets outside the MSF clinic treating HIV; you might have to negotiate the foul-smelling sewerage trenches that flow openly down every narrow, dusty street and become like treacherous river rapids in the rain.

But if you can open your eyes and heart past these things, you will find unexpected treasures in Kibera.

The amount of colour is amazing, as is the youth culture present in Kibera. The young people have their own style, slang, music, dance, and art. And it’s inspiring.

Walk around a bend and you will find a business initiative to empower women – ladies busy sewing dressed in brightly coloured fabrics. You will find people marching down the street, advocating against domestic violence. You will be invited into strangers’ homes for tea. Walk into a pub and you will find people watching the soccer over a pint – for a couple of hours you could be anywhere in the world. Go to a live soccer match and see the young players proudly wearing their uniform, or playing the drums and dancing on the sidelines.

My two days in Kibera turned into two months working with a group of unemployed young men to start an environmental waste management project. Yes, the men spoke coarsely, had drug and alcohol problems, lost their tempers quickly. But they were also intelligent, enthusiastic, and brimming with ideas for implementing positive change in their community.

The people desperately want to share all of this with you, they want you to be a part of their world. In Kibera I learnt that sometimes when you give you get a whole lot more.