Day Three: On Solid Ground in a Shaky City

[This blog entry has been adapted from a mass e-mail sent to family and friends. Apologies for the personal tone.]

Hello dearest family and friends!

First thing's first: I'm alive and well, even in spite of the earthquakes. For those of you that haven't heard, there was an earthquake on the Tanzanian-Kenyan border, and its aftershocks have been hitting Nairobi for the past week. Yesterday the quake on the border registered a 6.0 on the Richter scale (that's high), with a proportional aftershock in town. I kid you not: I haven't felt a thing. Guess I'm too busy bouncing off the walls to feel the ground shake. :)

So, to the gist of things: I've been working in Kibera for three days now, and it's been nothing short of amazing. The students span the spectrum of ages, education and life experience, and yet are active, participating, and really really inspiring. Here are a few stories:

Peter is 24, and didn't graduate from high school. He completed grade 10 but was forced to flee his home in southern Kenya when his family's land was raided and stolen. Given his incredible entrepreneurial talent, he started a dvd shop in Kibera, and has been doing well supporting himself. He's noticed, however, that the market is getting saturated, so wants to focus his attention elsewhere. He hopes to start a mini-farm and become an inexpensive wholesaler to local retailers, to provide a more affordable food source for his community.

Roseline is 22 and did graduate from high school. She's currently employed in a pharmacy, and hopes to open her own mini-pharmacy to provide more affordable medicine to the community. Through her employer, she's learned the ins and outs of the business, has met prospective suppliers, and has saved enough of her own money to cover the entirety of her start-up costs, minus the first month's rent and start-up inventory. She wrote in her mission statement that part of the reason she wants to start her own pharmacy ('chemists', they're called) is to earn enough money to avoid resorting to 'evil ways', which was later explained to me to be sex trade work. Apparently in Kibera, that's not uncommon.

Peter and Roseline are only a couple of examples of the students we're working with (I feel like this is beginning to sound like a World Vision commercial). The honest-to-god truth is that all of their stories are really incredible, and that for many of them, all they need is some business training and no more than $100 US (about 7,000 Kenyan shillings) to get their ideas off the ground. There were 22 students at my site on the first day, and that's been whittled down to about 12 given drop-outs, but the 12 that remain are here to stay. I only hope that our microfinancing partner, Ebony Foundation, will come up with the capital, support and monitoring, to make sure they make it.

So that's what I've been up to lately. So far my role has been to support the UBC and Kenyan university students on my team while they teach their assigned workshops (we've covered Intro to Business Plans and Marketing I), and to provide mentoring in the afternoons to 3 or 4 participants. I take over the teaching on Friday - Finance I - which should be really interesting, given they're not the world's simplest concepts, but I'm really trying not to underestimate them.

In fact, on that note, here's some interesting facts about the Kenyan education system that I found just bewildering. Background: a 'C' in high school is considered a decent grade, a 'B' is really good, and an 'A' is nothing short of exceptional. The way it was described to me, 'A' students are the top of the top of the class. It used to be the case that the entrance requirement for university in Kenya was a 'C' in Form 4, your final year of high school. Due to over-enrolment, instead of building more spaces for more students, the government simply raised the entrance requirement to deal with the problem - to an A. And in Kenya, I'm told that if you don't have a degree, you're 'a nobody'.

Which means that Kibera and other slums in Kenya are chock full of solid students, students who in Canada would be averaging a solid B+/A-. These people aren't just intelligent and talented, they're also reasonably well-educated, but because they didn't get the opportunity to pursue post-secondary education - either because of entrance cut-offs or very steep tuition fees with virtually zero financial aid - they're in the slums, trying to get by. The injustice is palpable.

But I want to make clear that Kibera isn't doom and gloom. In fact, one of the most remarkable things about the place is that it really is a city unto itself - complete with its own law courts - and that other than the condition of the infrastructure, it could be any other city in Kenya. It's the mud walls, the corrugated iron roofs and the lack of basic infrastructure (water, electricity, etc.) that give it away. Nonetheless, it's there, it's bustling, and people are making do.

In other news, my journal is mad at me. It's frustrated that I haven't been able to put a half-decent entry together for it in a while, because I keep falling asleep while writing in it. I even went as far as to sit at the table in my room for a solid hour well before bedtime trying to make up for three days of neglect, and I still didn't make it. Just goes to show that the days have been long, and the nights have been short. Somehow typing seems to keep me up, but for the purposes of posterity, I'm going to have to start writing in the morning before school.

And last but not least, I'm thoroughly disappointed in the tolerance level of my UBC peers for the weather. No, it's not to hot. If you can believe it, a handful of Canadians from Vancouver, BC are finding Kenya too cold! In fairness, Nairobi is at a pretty high elevation, and it's 'winter' here right now, but I'm having trouble believing that the slight chill is anything more than a decent spring or autumn day in Toronto. I guess it's just these thin-blooded Vancouverites that have yet to experience the true meaning of winter in Canada (then again, as a bred-in-the-bone Torontonian, have I? :).

So, that's all the news that's fit to print. The food is great, the people are nice, and I recently purchased the Lonely Planet guide to Swahili, to satisfy my intense itch to pick up more of the language than just 'hello', 'goodbye', and 'thanks'. I'm in the process of mastering some basic verbs and sentence constructions, but until then, I'll just have to be satisfied with my expertise in the area of one through ten.

Until then, be well, lala salama, and chao! (Yep, for those in the know, Swahili has roots in Spanish.)

From Shakesville, East Africa,
Kevin K. (on behalf of the SE101 Team).