Nairobi (Part One)

Preamble

While I have been documenting my trip throughout Europe for a little while now (and managed to get more than halfway!) I have run out of time to keep writing about it. Unfortunately due to backups and limited access to computing facilities I have to abandon that storyline for now and move on to more current endeavors.

Five days ago I traveled to Nairobi, Kenya to look at some projects in the area. The following blogs will rejoin my adventures, now in Africa.

Getting to Kenya

Following the end of my European adventure, I took a RyanAir flight to London Standstead and checked into a hotel in Clapham South called the EuroLodge Clapham. The accommodation was the most basic I could find above the level of a hostel, and cost $75.00 per night. The facilities were very basic but that was alright as I was only staying there for just enough time to get an Ethiopian VISA and do some laundry. While I was afraid that the VISA might be complicated and take longer than originally budgeted, it turned out to be very simple and straightforward. Very kindly, a friend of my sister’s had agreed to hold on to the bulk of my belongings while I was in Europe, and when I asked them where I could do laundry they offered to wash my clothes from Europe (I tried to explain that they might be a bit rank, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer). After four and a half days I set out for Heathrow airport at 6am.

Getting to the airport slightly more than three hours early for my flight I was able to get an emergency isle seat on my Kenyan Airways flight to Nairobi, which was fantastic, considering it was a 8.5 hour flight and my in-seat entertainment system did not work.

Arrival in Kenya

Getting to the airport, I quickly made my way off of the plane and headed towards the customs center. The Kenyan Airways flight had run out of customs cards, so it was a bit of a flurry to try and get my customs and VISA card filled out before the lines for processing became too large. Luckily though I was able to get the VISA forms done quickly and the lines were not too long. The interview for the VISA took about three seconds – the longest wait was for the official to place the sticker into my passport and stamp it. Waiting for me was a driver with a name card and before long I was checked into my hotel and asleep for the night.

The next day I had little to do as I was waiting for my sister Victoria and cousin Martha to come back from a game drive in a national park that they had gone to. With the extra day, I chose to get up reasonably early and hire the same driver, Memussi, to take me into the city centre so that I could see a bit of the safe areas of town.

Nairobi is a very Christian city and on Sundays the entire city is like a ghost town. This played into my favour as it made it very easy to walk around and view the city, although almost every shop was closed. I walked around for about a half hour, stopping into a supermarket (Tuskys) to get some clean drinking water. What really surprised me was the amount of security that was outside of every shop, carrying clubs in case of trouble. Further, almost every street corner had both police officers and Administrative Police (who wear combat fatigues) carrying new issue Kalashnikovs. I later asked Memussi why there was such a visible police presence and he explained that without them Nairobi would descent into lawlessness very quickly. After walking I met with Memussi again and headed back to the hotel.

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful, but I did go to a market that sold hand crafted work and also a plaza to get some lunch. The rest of the day was spent at the hotel.
Kibera

The second day in Nairobi Victoria and Martha arrived in from their excursion and we spend the day relaxing at the hotel and preparing for the following days of work.

Wednesday was our first day of appointments in Nairobi. We woke up at 8am and had a quick breakfast and met up with a member of the Chujio Water Filter Company.

Chujio, is a family business that originally focused on making clay stoves for heating homes and cooking in the Kibera slums. Over 18 years they perfected their craft and became experts in pottery, knowing the whole process inside and out, from acquiring the raw clay to packaging their final products. A couple of years ago though, they were approached by a member of the Potters for Peace and offered the opportunity to start a new initiative producing clay water filters, which they how now been selling for two years.

After meeting Wanja and she drove us to meet with her sister Wangari and a pastor from the Kibera Slums before we took a mutatu (a local bus system, privately owned) into the edge of Kibera.

Kibera is the largest slum in Africa. Started during the First World War by Sudanese refugees, the slum has grown to house approximately three million people. Walking around the streets of Kibera with Wanja, Wangari, the pastor, Martha and Victoria there was so much to take in all at once. Houses are mixed in with small businesses on every street and the houses are made of corrugated sheet metal and timers, maybe fifty square feet per house. The streets which have never been paved are only passable by SUVs and off road vehicles. Beside the streets are gutters which carry all of the waste water in the slums to small rivers that run throughout the Kibera. Water pipes, the few that work, run through these gutters and carry water full of bacteria and have spouts once and a while where residents can fill ten-litre jugs to carry home. As these pipes run through the gutters, whenever the piper break the sewage water flows into the pipes and causes sicknesses to whole communities. Every twenty feet or so there is a smouldering pile of ashes that are garbage fires as it is the only way of removing garbage (trash is also thrown into the gutters and rivers).

Kibera Slums (Picture courtesy of Victoria Martin Evans)

The pastor led us along the highways of Kibera to a couple homes where two of the Chujio clay water filters were located. The church priest lived there with his wife and family and used one filter to provide water for his family and for any of the parish who needed water. The other filter was in the house next to his where some young men wad the filter in their house. We were invited into both houses and discussed how the filters were being used and how it had impacted their lives. Both houses had very positive things to say, and while they had been suffering many illnesses before their introduction, they had had little sicknesses after, and none from water borne infections. After talking for some time we left the houses and went out into the church yard where we were greeted by many children who had just finished school for their winter break.

School Children on Winter Break

The kids were very excited to see us loved to have their picture taken. The kids would crowd around for the picture and then fight for a chance to see it on the camera’s LCD panel afterwards. We did this for a little time but eventually had to tear ourselves and head for a school that was still in session in another part of Kibera.

The school had five filters and had approximately fifty children in the classroom. The filters were in the rear of the building and we talked with the teacher and the Chujio sisters inspected the clay, finding a crack in one of them which had to be destroyed and replaced. The school had had this broken filter for a few weeks and had taken no steps to replace the broken part. This demonstrated the way that foreign aid can create very clear systems of reliance. The filters had been donated to the church and school by an American church foundation. The Kibera school had the means to replace the broken on their own but would not because they were waiting for the American church to give them a new filter. This donor model is commonplace in Kenya and after years of providing free services and items it has served to create systems of reliance on foreign aid.

School Filters

After visiting the school we walked back to the mutatu along the Kibera streets. While walking I learned that while it would not be safe to walk on these streets alone, it was very safe because the pastor we were with was well respected in the community and everyone knew not to cause him any trouble. I also learned that there were over seven hundred NGO’s at work in Kibera.

Taking the mutatu back to the place where we had parked the car it was hard to process everything that I had just witnessed. Knowing that it would take time to sink in I focused on the next part of our day which would be at the Pipeline settlement.

Pipeline

Pipeline Housing
(Image courtesy of Victoria Martin Evans)

We drove out to the pipeline settlement to visit an orphanage that had been given a number of filters. The area, which had originally been zoned as industrial area was illegally sold some decades ago to families needing an area to expand into outside of the city. As a result the conditions were deplorable. Pipeline had a few high rise apartment buildings that house people, but because it was industrial lands there was no infrastructure in place. The power lines that ran from building to building had been strung haphazardly. Each corner of the buildings was a rats nest of open high voltage wires, some within an easy reach of rooftop balconies where children played.

High Voltage Wiring
(Image courtesy of Victoria Martin Evans)

Water was another essential service that had no infrastructure. While in Kibera there were pipes running in the gutters, Pipeline had nothing. Water has become a private enterprise, where men carrying many ten-litre jugs on donkey carts would sell their water, which would likely not be treated. Taking the car into the centre of pipeline was tenuous. We scraped the undercarriage many times and Martha , Victoria and I offered to get out and walk so that the car could ride higher over the ground. Eventually we were able to get to the orphanage without leaving the car and we met with the manager. He gave us a tour of the dormitories and the play areas and we tried to take in as much as we could. I noticed though that they had a brand new computer in their office that had been donated and I chatted with staff for a little while as to how they used it. They said that slowly they wanted to teach all of the children living there how to use it but there was just too much of a demand to be able to do so at any meaningful level. We continued on and looked at all of their filters, and the manager explain how grateful they were that the filters had come along, cutting out all of the water borne illnesses that had been very common before. Each child was given a bottle that they could carry with them to school each day so that they would be able to have clean drinking water all day long, something that would not have been possible before they had the filters. After seeing and learning about the orphanage, we moved said thank you to the manager for allowing us to come and see his facility and made our way to lunch.

The Filter Factory

After leaving Pipeline, we were caught in massive traffic jams on the outskirts of Nairobi. While it is very common for traffic to be very bad inside the city, this volume was pretty extreme for the road we were on at that time of day. It turned out that because Hilary Clinton (US Secretary of State) was in Nairobi that day, entire section of the city had been completely closed to non-diplomatic traffic and had caused massive jams all around the city.

Eventually though we made it out of the city and followed up a winding road past the Canadian embassy (which was a huge building with high walls surrounding it), the UN compound and the American Embassy (the American embassy dwarfs the Canadian one, and has very serious security and “No Photography” signs every 20 feet). Lunch was served at the Red Java restaurant and after a tasty meal we continued on to the filter factory.

Pottery!

The factory was up quite a ways from the city in Lewa, a suburb. The elevation was at an elevation of something like 2100m (AMSL) and was in an area that had many tea and cut flower plantations. We arrived at the factory gates and went inside to meet all of the family that ran the business.

We were joined by Wanja and Wangari’s father, mother, sister, brother and nephew. The group of us went through the factory seeing the process from them refinement of the clay to the mixing, pressing, drying, firing, silver treatment and finally the packaging store room. Each member of the family had a specific area of expertise and they all worked as a team to produce the filters. In total there were twenty workers in the factory to produce the filters and stoves. After going through the entire factory, we were invited in their home (on the same property) and had some tea which grew in the plantations in the neighbouring fields.

Adding the Colloidal Silver

We chatted about their goals for their business and also about the marketing hurdles they were facing when selling the filters to the NGO’s. By giving the filters away, the NGO’s create systems of reliance instead of empowerment and was leaving their business with little opportunity. After hearing their business marketing plan we discussed the topic further, and Victoria (who has worked in marketing) took in as much information as she could so that later on she would be able to help foster connections with local marketing NGO’s. For my own part I will be taking a look at their online presence to see if I could pass along any tips or advice. At the end of the conversations the power (which had been rationed while we were there) was turned back on and we went back out to see the machines working in the factory. Finally however, it was time to say goodbye though and after a few group photos Wanja and Wangari drove us back to our hotel.

The Chujio Family Team

It was a very busy day with many different sights sounds and smells. I learned a great deal and am still processing it all today, nearly a week later.