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).

Meeting the Partners

'Twas an early morning wake-up for some of the team members, and not
so early for others. We discovered that breakfast is from 7 am to
9:30 am, and as jet lag took its toll, some of us didn't quite make it
in time! Breakfast was nice and basic - toast, eggs, jam, the usual -
but Brent the caffeine fiend quickly noticed something amiss: no
coffee! And no tea! We quickly put two and two together -
Seventh-Day Adventists (who run the guesthouse we're staying in) don't
indulge in caffeine! Brent is currently plotting other ways to get his
morning fix.

A note on the guesthouse: we're staying at the LMS Guesthouse and
Conference Centre, and LMS stands for Literature Ministry Seminary (as
the bibles in our room informed us). We discovered rather quickly,
however, that it's normally referred to as the SDA House, when not
a soul had heard of LMS That made it awfully difficult to tell our
taxi drivers where to take us, although fortunately we're just up the
street from the Integrity Centre, a well-known civic landmark. The
place is great - clean, secure, and if you wait long enough for the
heaters to kick in, hot water showers - and we even have internet
access. The only hiccups were when Jim's closet door fell off, and
Kevin nearly flooded the bathroom because the shower didn't drain
quickly enough, but otherwise, home sweet home.

Our first order of business today was at 1 pm, when we met with our
partners from Daystar University and the Ebony Foundation. It was
great to finally meet the students we would be working with, until we
found out that they unfortunately were all in summer school, and would
only be able to collaborate on evenings and weekends. The student
president of SIFE - Students for International Free Enterprise - is
hoping to find more students who would be able to team-teach with us
during the week, but it looks like we might be on our own.
Nonetheless, we had the opportunity to walk through our workshops with
the students from Daystar, and was that ever helpful! We were able to
clear up the translation of some key words into Swahili, and learn
more about how business is generally conducted in Kenya and East
Africa. Within a short hour, we had already made huge progress in
tailoring our workshops to make them more accessible for our
participants. We certainly hope we'll continue working with Daystar
throughout the project.

At 2:30 pm, our next meeting was with our second site partner, the
Kimathi Information Centre (KIC). We met with Jose and Carthy from
KIC, and Kathleen from the International Development Research Centre
(IDRC), a Government of Canada outfit in Nairobi. Kathleen put us in
touch with KIC because she heard about our project through a friend
from Canada, since she's a Sauder grad! She graduated with a BCom a
few years ago, and has been doing some very interesting research over
the past six months on microfinancing, as well as the social impact of
cell phone usage, for her masters program at a university in South Africa.
In fact, she just came back from doing field work in Mozambique. It
was great to meet a Canadian working in Nairobi and find out about work
in East Africa that some of us might be doing one day!

And thank goodness Kathleen put us in touch with KIC - Jose and
Carthy were absolutely amazing! Their energy and enthusiasm for
the project was just overwhelming, and although only in their late
20s, both of them have done terrific work with local youth, pulling
off a nearly 200-person youth symposium with absolutely no budget.
All of the youth that we'll be working with at our second site in
Kimathi are a direct product of the youth symposium, and each already
have their own ideas about what business they hope to start! Based on
current registration, the stats for our Kimathi participants are as
follows: 1/3rd are women; the majority are 18 years old, with the
highest age at 35; most have high school education, a few have
university-level education; and they're all deeply motivated. We're
very excited about working with KIC and have high hopes for their
participants!

So, all in all, a very exciting and productive day. We met with each
of our partners, confirmed many of our arrangements and worked on
details still to be sorted out. We'll be meeting again with the Ebony
Foundation and Daystar tomorrow to confirm whether we'll be
team-teaching with Daystar students, and how many sites in Kibera
we'll be able to cover. Once final arrangements are confirmed, we'll
have a much better idea of what the next three weeks will look like.

And either way, Monday is game time!

Many of us are starting to feel a little nervous, since most of us
have pretty limited teaching experience, let alone teaching in another
country. After this week, though, we're sure we'll be pros - next
thing you know, Sauder will be offering us positions on faculty! In
spite of any anxiety, we're all very much looking forward to the
challenges and experiences of the next three weeks, and are very
confident that as a team, we'll do a terrific job, learn a ton, and
have an amazing time.

Wish us luck!

xo. The Social Entrepreneurship 101: Kenya Team.