Getting busy

As promised, I want to give some colour on the work I’m involved in out here in Nairobi. It is worth clarifying that I signed up for volunteer work in Nairobi via an organisation called International Volunteers Headquarters (IVHQ). This organisation affiliates with NGOs and charities on the ground in several countries. One of such NGOs is the Fadhili organisation, which I may have already mentioned in previous posts. Fadhili runs its own projects in Nairobi but also affiliates with sister NGOs who do not have direct links to organisations such as IVHQ, usually because they are too small. IVHQ essentially recruits the volunteers and Fadhili places them on various projects in the city and provides accommodation and other services.
Transform a person Africa (TAPA) is one of the Fadhili-affiliated NGOs and the main one I’m working with during my time in Nairobi. As the name suggests, its broad aim is to transform the lives of some of the folks who live in good old Kibera by providing education for disadvantaged children (some of whose parents are living with HIV and AIDS), sustainable sources of income for disadvantaged adults (mostly women) and for said sources of income to simultaneously help the NGO become self-sufficient

The TAPA educational centre is where most of our work is done. It’s situated right on the outskirts of Kibera and consists of a couple of offices (with the necessary mod cons) and a school building. The school is a nursery for 1 – 5 year olds who have been orphaned or considered vulnerable by virtue of their living circumstances (orphaned and vulnerable children – OVC, they’ve been labelled). Extensive research is done to ascertain whether or not one qualifies to be classified as an OVC. The school has about 40 kids attending for now, with plans to expand. Expansion is most likely going to happen through a combination of recruiting more OVCs and opening the school up to non OVCs who will be charged higher fees (apparently this is a model that has worked well for other NGOs but which can only be successful if the school maintains a high quality of education and cleanliness to attract the non-OVCs; for now there are only a couple of non OVC kids at TAPA). The children are taught basic Maths and English to a level where they will be considered fit to join the mainstream education system when they turn 6. They are fed 2 meals, have a couple of hours of sleep and have ample time for playing each day. For some of the children, the food eaten at the educational centre is all they will have for the day and they usually don’t take home any homework. The day starts for them at 8.30am and ends at 4.30pm. The children are an absolutely delightful bunch and I thoroughly enjoy working with them; most of them understand when spoken to in English though they don’t speak very much of it. The teachers teach in Swahili and English and for all intents and purposes, the volunteers act as teaching assistants so don’t usually have to control the class (vastly different from my experience in Zanzibar). Most of the kids are reasonably bright for their age and pretty much pick up whatever they are taught straight away; so as teaching assistants, we (the volunteers) try to spend a reasonable amount of time with those that require more attention, which hopefully means that each kid gets more out of their classroom experience. We also help to feed them at meal times, play with them and help in keeping the school surroundings clean. I have spent the bulk of my first week here working with the children

The project manager and founder of TAPA is a Kenyan chap who has spent most of his life working in the private sector and gave up that life to set up this NGO. He has an ebullient disposition, is passionate about the work and is very open to ideas and constructive criticism. His income generating ideas under implementation (and in some cases still work-in-progress) so far include the following:
1.Hand-made cards designed with authentic Kenyan curios, which get sold at hotels, churches and any other retail outlet that is willing to sell them. They are of reasonably high quality and produced by young women (mostly aged late teens to early twenties) from the slum. We (the volunteers) assist with the card production process, a process which taps our creative abilities to an extent
2.Sewing and hawking children’s school uniforms in and around Kibera – this idea is still yet to be fully launched though as I understand it, most of the equipment needed is being purchased and it should be rolled out fairly soon. The plan would be to train a handful of women in the sewing trade and start them off.
3.Subsistence farming for vegetables and other basic foods – this is a good way to help some of the families to afford a decent, well-balanced diet. TAPA provides the seedlings and other required farming gear. In fact some of the food prepared at the school for the kids come from this farming initiative
4.A micro-finance initiative to help some of the women with small businesses; essentially, they each have to contribute a small amount of money on a weekly basis from the earnings they make. They then have access to these funds should they need short term loans for their business ventures (said loans are given at reasonable interest rates). The businesses in question include: street food vending, hawking second-hand clothes, providing cleaning services (mostly for homes), hairdressing salons, etc

Most of these initiatives seem to be working very well and the families that are involved are seeing some improvement in their living conditions – at the very least most of them can now afford decent meals and are not looking to be kicked out of their homes any time soon. With adequate funding, perhaps more ideas could be implemented and some of these initiatives expanded to touch more lives. Of course, having self-sufficiency as one of its aims, TAPA should be able to get there either way

TAPA also affiliates with other organisations that do other forms of direct work regarding HIV and AIDS patients. As one can imagine, the disease is pretty rampant in the slum and one sad aspect of things is that given the lack of education and pervasive ignorance, HIV and AIDS patients are often stigmatised and even ostracised. They have to grapple with that in addition to poverty, mal-nutrition, unhygienic environs and the plethora of misfortunes that come with slum life. Some of these organisations therefore set out to help by providing counselling to those individuals who have been tested and have come forward to seek help. Unfortunately the stigma aspect of HIV and AIDS, as mentioned above, is one of the biggest factors why some people don’t even get tested. Not nearly enough people get tested, not to mention those that opt to seek help once they find out. Its even more sad to note that HIV testing AND anti-retroviral drugs are free in Kenya so there is actually nothing standing in one’s way of getting full medical assistance when afflicted with the disease. One obvious next step is to start widespread education on the disease in the slums so that these negative perceptions fall away and hopefully this will mean that less people will contract the disease henceforth