Two Brothers Kidogo

Daniel Nduati’s phone was ringing when he and his brother, Peter, met me in Dagoretti on a recent afternoon. I’d come to visit the rescue shelter the two young men had opened for children displaced by the new year’s violence, but an unrelated matter came up first.

“There’s a lady who says she wants to see us,” Daniel said, putting his phone away. “I don’t know who she is, but she’s just down the street.”

We drove to a nearby matatu stage, where a small, stout woman in a pink business suit climbed into the front seat, introducing herself with a sad smile.

“I have a friend,” Elizabeth said quietly, “who told me you could help my son.”

We drove off, bouncing along the pitted streets of Dagoretti Market with Peter behind the wheel and Daniel in the back with me. Everyone said hello. Peter said all his friends call him OP; Elizabeth nodded, then explained that her boy was addicted to drugs.

“Which ones, exactly?” OP asked.

“Gasoline at first,” said Elizabeth, “but now I think glue also. He used them a long time ago, but stopped for a while when we took him to the hospital last year. Now he’s started again.”

The two brothers took turns asking question, gently but firmly, the way you pull out a tooth.

“How old is your son?”

“Twenty.”

“When did he first start sniffing?”

“When he was eight.”

“Where does he get the money?”

“He charges batteries.”

“Your boy has absorbed these drugs deeply,” Daniel concluded after a few minutes. “They are in his blood, in his brain. He’s helpless now, and angry because of that. He is angry at you and everyone who loves him. But we can make him better. Tomorrow, we’ll come to your house and talk with him. And later we’ll bring him to stay with us for a while. He needs to be around other boys who have gone through this kind of thing.”

There are no shortage of such boys in Nairobi – Daniel is one himself. Though no hint of it remains in his smooth, quietly flamboyant manner, when Daniel was thirteen he ran away and spent four years on the streets of the capital, addicted “to every drug I could get my hands on.” He was seventeen before a religious awakening finally brought him into church and convinced him to move back home.

His return to his family led to a theological scholarship in Norway, from which he graduated in 2000 and came back to Kenya. Together with his brother’s help and the financial backing of private donors he’d met abroad, Daniel founded a shelter for street children in the shade of the Ngong hills: the Emmanuel Boyz Rescue Center.
Over the past seven years, Daniel and OP have ushered over three hundred street children through Emmanuel’s doors. Not a bad resume for two guys in their mid-twenties. But as 2007 gave way to a dark new year, the brothers realized that one Emmanuel wasn’t nearly enough.

“A few days after Kibaki was announced president,” OP recalled, “I called Daniel and told him: we have to act swiftly.” Calls had been pouring in from IDP camps desperate to find living spaces for their burgeoning populations. But Emmanuel was already full. OP squeezed a few homeless Luo boys in from Dagoretti, knowing they would be killed if they stayed on the Kikuyu-dominated streets… but the pressure to bring in more grew literally by the hour.

On January 4th, less than a week into the chaos, Daniel and OP rented a two-storey, five-bedroom house on Dagoretti’s Waithaka-Ruthimitu Road, and started driving in families by the truckload. They called their new home Emmanuel Kidogo.

“The first group we brought were sixteen street kids from Korogocho,” OP recalled. “They were so traumatized they forgot all about their drug habits.”

But as more victims kept flooding in to Kidogo, the silver lining grew increasingly thin. Leaflets signed ‘Mungiki’ began appearing on doorsteps throughout Dagoretti, including at Kidogo: All Luos and Kalenjin are our enemies, they read. You have 48 hours to leave before we burn your houses.

“We ferried in all the non-Kikuyus in the middle of the night,” Daniel said. “Once they were there, we warned them not to step outside. Man, it was tense.”

Eighty people were living at Kidogo at the height of the chaos. Many had left by the time I visited, driven by OP and Daniel to family homes outside Nairobi. But 30 boys remain for Kidogo is now a permanent home.

There is Jacky Karanja, the ten-year-old bearer of a vicious scar now running the length of his right leg. A street child from Dagoretti, he’d jumped on to a speeding lorry to escape a scene of tear gas, machetes and stray bullets; he escaped all these only to lose his grip and fall at such velocity that the pavement tore the flesh off his bone.

And there are the three Karioki brothers: Hosea, James and Joseph. Aged seven, nine, and eleven, they were tending cattle in Burnt Forest when the fields caught fire on December 30th. They raced back to the house in time for their mother to hide them in a cow shed. She then ran into the granary to distract raiders, who locked her inside and burned her alive while her children watched through a crack in the wall.

More than half of Kidogo’s children were orphaned in the post-election violence. “They’ve lost all trust,” said OP. “We have counselors who talk to them every day, and slowly they are opening up. But it’s extremely hard to get them to talk about what they’ve been through.”

With their past in ruins, it can at least be said the boys have a good shot at a positive future. The most immediate threat was resolved when Daniel and OP organized a meeting with the local Mungiki, convincing them to leave Kidogo alone.

“In fact,” said Daniel, “they’re now protecting us.”

Meanwhile, 28 of the boys are enrolled in school or vocational training, depending on their age. The remaining two are joined by a dozen kids from the neighborhood each day – Kidogo doubles as a kindergarten, tended by the pastor who now lives here after his own home was destroyed in the skirmishes.

“You know,” Daniel said, “we can’t wait for the government to step in and solve everything – we have to act now. We have to get these kids in school, and we have to teach them to love each other.”

“Only when we educate the children that we are all Kenyans,” OP added, “can we expect change. That’s why we’re focusing on the kids. They’re our foundation. If we give them the right information, in ten or fifteen years we’ll be living in a very different Kenya.”

Arno Kopecky is a Canadian journalist and travel writer currently based in Nairobi. After spending most of his twenties on a surfboard, Arno moved to New York city for an internship with Harper’s Magazine. Since then he has written extensively for Canadian and international publications like The Walrus Magazine, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, as well as Kenya’s own Daily Nation newspaper. He is an editor at Kwani?.

Fishermen

Watamu, Coast Province, Kenya, March 2008.

At 7am fisherman prepare their nets for the day’s endeavours.

Painter

Watamu, Coast Province, Kenya, March 2008

This is an example of what I would call accidental colour. The contrasting blue of the shirt and the yellow bucket against the white wall caught my eye while watching this industrious young man.

A house is a home

Njoro, Rift Valley Province, Kenya, July 2005
I came upon this woman building her new house while walking thru the outskirts of Njoro. Not only pleased with her new home and joyfully working at it, she seemed happy to have a witness, inviting me to photograph her. A house is a house is a home.

Street Scene

Nairobi, Kenya, August 2005
I wanted to make a photograph of the density of activity I had seen in many places. I liked the mixture of colours, the industrious number of people conducting business of every sort. As the street disappears in the background, into the late afternoon light, the trading continues almost as far as the eye can see.

Mercy’s Mission

For three days after the hurried December announcement that Kibaki was to be president, Mercy Gichangi sat in her house, stunned and afraid. As 2007 gave way to 2008 she could find no cause for celebration. All around her, chaos was in charge. Day and night she could hear shouts and wailing, could see bashed-in houses and torched kiosks, the result of angry citizenry on both sides giving vent to their feelings about the General Election. Many of those rioting, yelling, and beating were youth, and that touched Mercy. It was this that gave her the push she needed to come out of hiding.

She was sure her skills as a consultant, formed through a university degree in economics, a training stint in Leadership at the National Democratic Institute in Lavington, a Master’s in International Relations, and experience in Mandera and Southern Sudan would be of use. Stints in Mandera and Southern Sudan had tested and honed this expertise.

“I was particularly interested in gathering and mobilising young people to think differently,” she said. They are, after all, our future, which is very bleak if they are the ones taking to the streets, looting and burning their neighbours.

Mercy first made it to the PeaceNet meetings. However there was already a youth co-ordinator there. She had heard of another group, Concerned Citizens for Peace (CCP) through a news item on TV, and decided to try there. And it was here she found her niche.

“CCP struck me as more individual oriented rather than NGO focussed,” explained Mercy. “Their approach is that if you have an idea, they will support you, but you have to run with it. You have to do the footwork.” That was fine with her. She had plenty of ideas. And she was ready to run.

Together with other volunteers and with a force that belied her slight, pinstriped frame she set about creating a structure that linked the various young people initiatives she came across. A network of 30 youth leaders from 20 groups across the slums formed a network called Balozi wa Amani to help co-ordinate a slew of peace initiatives. They in turn teamed with a host of NGOs ranging from UN Habitat to the Mwelu Foundation. Soon Mercy was co-ordinating a group of 60 people that made up the new grouping Concerned Youth for Peace (CYP).

Everyone worked on a volunteer basis, and everyone worked with a fierce energy, tackling each event with greater urgency in their desire to help mitigate the rising tides of violence in the slums. They arranged peace meetings, and created a countrywide National Youth Violence Prevention week. They organised football matches in Korogocho, a fashion show in Kibera, peace walks in Dandora, theatre in Huruma, poetry in Embakasi, community dialogue in all areas – anything that brought both sides together and allowed them to interact non-violently. Event after event was planned in Dandora, Mathare, Kibera, Huruma, Kawangware, focussing on reflection and forgiveness.

“I became adept at seeing things from the perspective of these marginalised young people,” said Mercy. “It gave me a whole new understanding of the problems those living in poor urban settlements face. Gainful employment, finding relevance and all the frustration that the absence of these can bring is as much a part of the issue as ethnicity.”

Of the various initiatives she co-ordinated, she feels most satisfied at the outcome of one of the first, a Night Vigil. “We had people coming from all the slums to attend the open forum, to speak their minds, and to cry. It was very moving to see these young people come forward to elaborate their opinions as to the way out of the conflict.”

But it wasn’t all easy. For the first six weeks she kept a low profile as she organised events, afraid that her actions might make her a target for retribution. “Because I worked with people from all communities, I stayed out of the limelight I didn’t want to be harassed by those who felt I should only work with those in my tribe. It has been a time of such pain – there are many who have really hard feelings because they lost a relative, or a business – or everything.” Then there were those who took one look at her tiny frame and dismissed her for being too young, too inexperienced. It was sometimes very discouraging, she said.

In the recent past, , Mercy has worked with the Mediae Trust – makers of TV soap Makutano Junction, and Slum TV – who arrange screenings of motivational movies to show a special episode of the popular programme that directly tackles violence and tribalism. “We had viewings in the evenings to distract youth from more harmful activities,” she explained. “It’s a great series made by Kenyans for Kenyans and including all tribes in the production and the performances.”

“Even though our audience know that it’s actors, I see many of them in tears when they watch that episode,” she says of the many screenings that Slum TV have made of the special Tribalism episode around Nairobi. A snippet is available for viewing on YouTube:

Two months on and she has seen much positive come out of their work. “The best is always when I see someone begin to turn around through a community dialogue or a training day and say that this can’t be allowed to happen in our country. Then I feel great, as though I have in some small way been able to help bring about transformation.”

CCP gave me a network to work with, and, in setting up CYP, it allowed me to help my country in this time of suffering, said Mercy.

As she makes her way back to the relative quiet of her home, she knows that she has played her part in the effort to achieve that peace.

Shalini Gidoomal is a freelance journalist, writer, businesswoman and inveterate traveller, born, and currently living in Nairobi. She has worked extensively on various UK and international magazines and newspapers, including The Independent, News of the World, Today, FHM, GQ and Architectural Digest. She profiled five Northern Irish photographers for the book Parallel Realities, and has worked in Kenya for the Standard and Camerapix. Her short stories and non- fiction have been published in The Obituary Tango, Jungfrau and Kwani 04. She is editorial co-ordinator for the GenerationKenya45 project and festival director of Kwani Litfest 2008.

We apologize for the incorrect images when this story was first released on our site.

Vuma Kenya

Vuma Kenya is an events inspired initiative based on mobilizing citizens globally to create awareness and spread the message that together we can make changes. Founded by Harvard medical student Karimi Gituma, Vuma focuses on bringing people in the “diaspora” together with different charity organisations trying to reach out.at a grassroots level in Kenya.

She explained; ” When the violence broke out, I felt I must do something.” So she did, and 2 weeks later VUMA Kenya was born.

“Our slogan is A New Kenya Reborn. Vuma is the product of discussions and reaching out to people from all sorts of backgrounds, delving back to my childhood and highschool days reaching out to folks that I haven’t talked to in over 10 years but one thing that brought us all together was our uniform deep seated concern for the direction our country was headed and the need to DO something about it. Our country will not weather this storm another 5 years from now and it is our imperative to do something to change the tide, we cannot go back to “business as usual” our typical Kenyan response. Kenya is forever changed, our lives are forever changed and this whole fiasco has left an indelible mark on every fiber of the Kenyan social, political and economic fabric.”

Vuma launched their organization VUMA KENYA on February 2nd with a large benefit concert in Boston featuring some of Kenya’s finest artistes including Eric Wainaina. The money raised went to the Kenya Red Cross. Part of Vuma’s focus events include corporate and social meets, concerts and campaigns. They aim also to link and network groups interested in peace and humanitarian initaitives.

Vuma’s next major projects include panel discussions in the US on the Truth and Reconcilation Commission, and a partnership with CCP Kenya, which will see Vuma Kenya raising funds through their Ten4Ten campaign in their new role as founders of CCP-USA.

The Kenyan Diaspora Takes Action

GRACE, ‘BABY BRIAN’ AND THE HUMANISATION OF THE INHUMANE

It is a great pity we don’t know/ When the dead are going to die/So that, over a last companionable/ Drink, we could tell them/ How much we liked them –
Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Going Without Saying’

There are certain types of violence and suffering that can not be hidden: whole villages burnt to the ground, teargas canisters falling like obscene snowballs, people of ‘a certain community’ trudging in their tens of thousands to IDP camps. All very visible, very public, and we can tut-tut from the safe-side of our TV screens.

And yet, there is sometimes a violence that is so real and vile, so intense, that even the image-loving media will suppress evidence of it, for fear that such photographs will ‘inflame’ yet more wrongheaded passion, more violence. Such photographs circulate in small but dynamic whirlpools, from private email inbox to inbox, and on the obscure blogsites of the concerned. Like doppelgangers, you get to see them only if you are very lucky. Or unlucky.

But if there is tragedy of the type that I will come to mention, there is also, sometimes, extraordinary kindness and humanity. Occasionally and impressively, this is from strangers, and is of a sort that can not of course compensate for death, for loss, but which can at least remind us that we are all capable of goodness, that we can all exhibit virtue and care.

***

At the height of the post-election violence in Kenya, a disturbing photograph was snapped by a Reuters photographer. Certain international media houses ran it, but here in Kenya it was only visible to those with the correct internet associates. Let me, in an attempt to dissociate myself from the shock that I first felt on seeing this picture, try to unemotionally describe the scene. Perhaps bullet points are miserably appropriate:

• the flimsy door of a one-or-two roomed house is ajar, and through the doorway we see …
• battered old chairs, covered with net-curtain material
• a fourteen-month old baby sitting on one of those chairs, crying
• a teenage mother, the baby’s mother, sprawled face-up on the floor, dead, a large stain of irremovable red blood seeping across the bare concrete from her head

And that, visually, is that. Of course, the scene had a cause: a policeman’s bullet. Whether that bullet was fired in error or intent, we should let an investigation decide, perhaps. Presumably, though, the child, ‘Baby Brian’, is not aware of the niceties of the Kenyan legal system. What he seems aware of at the time of the photo is only the taste of tears and the indeterminate absence of something vital.

That might have been the end of it: once more, we might have just looked at this photograph, tut-tutted or shed a weakly cathartic tear, and moved on to the next image, forgetting Brian or his innocent mother, Grace. Probably, that’s what I was going to do in those post-election days of image overload.

No, such a story can not have a truly happy ending, not yet, but it can and does have a continuation that is something of a palliative. For all the right reasons, a Kenyan named Joseph Karoki featured the disturbing Reuters photograph on his Blogsite, josephkaroki.wordpress.com. Joseph didn’t want us to just ogle at this picture, to ooh-and-ahh or enrage – rather, he wanted to help Baby Brian and his family, and give others the opportunity to help. Along with other friends in Kenya, he traced Baby Brian and his remaining family to a village near Naivasha. Then, working with the family, he began to raise money for, initially, Grace’s funeral and (an ongoing project) an educational fund for Brian’s future. The details of how to donate toward this secure fund appear both on Joseph’s Blogsite and on the website of VUMA KENYA, a non-profit initiative based in the US.

Grace Mungai has since been buried, with the dignity that a stray bullet denied her. Deprived of life in what should have been her joyful teenage years and the early years of motherhood, Grace at least now has the cold comfort of lying somewhere more tender than a concrete floor. For that, she has her family to thank, but also the kindness of strangers who took all the indecency of that image and converted a little of it into kindness, into grace.

So, is there a hero who has emerged from this appalling situation? Sometimes it’s impossible to identify one figure when all the players exhibit something of either integrity or innocence. Perhaps, in macabre fashion, we can perform a version of an Agatha Christie denouement:

• Jeremiah, the father of Brian and the husband of Grace, certainly. He is the silent player, who does not feature in either the photograph or in my inadequate prose
• Baby Brian, yes. Not because suffering is noble, but because like all children he has the potential to grow into a forgiving young man. He can not grow by himself, no, for who can now wish isolation upon him? Rather, he can do it with the support of family and his new-found well-wishers who can prove right the old proverb that in Africa ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Sometimes, a global, web village
• Grace? Like so many others, she is an accidental martyr, missed by all who knew her well and loved her dearly, but also, no doubt, by those strangers who she herself must have at times shown kindness to.
• Us? Potentially, if we either act on this case, or if we ourselves do the right thing in difficult times
• Joseph Karoki and the VUMA KENYA diasporans? Yes, and obviously Yes, for they took what might have been a hidden shock and sympathy, and they acted upon it, realising that tears alone are inadequate. They combined pity with practicality, and so got something done. Something that reminds us that in those days when we rightly worried because neighbour turned upon neighbour, there were also strangers who turned positively to strangers, and who lent a hand, even across the reach of the Atlantic Ocean

Most importantly, to my mind, we are reminded that we do not ever have to suffer in silence when we are ourselves wronged, or accept that someone else’s suffering is ‘their own problem’, safely distant from us. Rather, we are humbled into the realisation, the healing realisation, that we all suffer when the innocent suffer, and that we can all, all of us, no matter how ‘little’ we are made to feel in comparison to the so-called ‘Big Men’, be better, be good, be human.

Stephen Derwent Partington is a teacher in Kenya, and a poet. He lives and works just outside Machakos and is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers. A collection of poems, SMS & Face to Face, was published by Phoenix, Kenya Email: stepartington @ yahoo.co.uk.

The Preacher of Peace

Soon after the post-election violence in Kenya started, Ochieng’ Nyawire took up the role of roving peace-maker in the streets of his Kiambui neighbourhood, armed only with his Bible and his prayers. He argued endlessly for peace, facing down angry police officers and equally angry neighbours as he preached reconciliation and calm even at the height of the violence. I asked him what led him to take up such a potentially dangerous role and he gave me one of those unsatisfying answers: basically, he said he did it ‘just because.’ When I prodded further, looking for some more existentially satisfying answer, he said it was ‘just his nature.’ However, he describes himself primarily as a preacher in the Christian Family Church “I am Timothy’s helper,” he said. The large Bible on the table before him was testament to his devotion.

Ochieng’ Nyawire is a 37 year old father of two boys. His Kiambui neighbourhood is one of the many impoverished urban settlements that dot the city of Nairobi and hold 60% of its 3 million people. Kiambui is in Eastleigh South Location within Kamkunji constituency. It borders the Airforce base on one side, Uhuru Estate on another. and Buru Buru Phase One on a third. It is divided into 4 subsections called Kosovo ( where Luos predominate), Sagana (Kikuyus ), Nyamira (Kisii) and Vihiga (Luhyia)

In relating his tireless activities as a preacher of peace in the different sections of Kiambui, Ochieng’ talks without anger and bitternes, even though he himself had been threatened with violence and reprisals during the worst of the violence. To him, Kiambui is a place where violent death takes place beside acts of unbelievable generosity and love. A life is lost and another life is saved, just as easily. In addition to narrating his own efforts to bring peace to his neighbourhood, Ochieng’ relates many incidents when he was sheltered by Kikuyu people who remained his friends. He sought them out purposefully when he found himself in the middle of a bout of violence in the wrong locale. He talks of these encounters with a simple matter-of-factnesss that belies the terrible events that have been taking place outside the flimsy mabati structure keeping him safe. .

“I was at home in Kiambui when the violence started on the night of 29th December, ,” Ochieng’ says.

When they announced Kibaki as President and had the swearing-in ceremony, I was worshiping with my wife, praying for calm in Kenya. People heard us and took it as celebration that “our” president had been sworn in. Missiles thrown at us. We were attacked. We remained indoors behind locked gates until the next morning. There was gunfire outside and a lot of noise and commotion. .

The next morning, I woke up and went outside my compound around six am. I saw terrible destruction all around me. Many buildings had demolished and razed to the the ground. There had been much looting of residential houses and business in the Kosovo area. Most of the structures that had been attacked belonged to Kikuyus and a few belonged to Kambas. I was heading in the direction of Sagana but there was a contingent of the dreaded General Service Unit (GSU) in the area.

The GSU and police had shot and killed a man who was apparently too drunk to obey orders. The man shot was said to be from the Luo tribe and the police officer who shot him was said to be a Kikuyu. . This made people in the neighbourhood very angry and raised tensions to volatile levels. I talked to the police and GSU and asked them not to use force on the people because it would only raise temperatures. I was afraid of what might happen.

Fortunately, the GSU listened to me. They had been telling people to stay indoors, but I also made them understand that people felt that it was actually dangerous to remain indoors, because they afraid that they would be attacked by the Mungiki militia.

I asked the police to patrol along the river that divides Kosovo from City Carton which is predominantly Kikuyu and to stop the residents of the other slum called City Carton from coming across the river. . The Police consented to undertake this patrol, but when they tried, they found that the residents had barricaded the way and would not let the police and GSU through. However, I went and negotiated with these residents, and after our discussions, they allowed the GSU access to patrol.

I could see that it was a very dangerous situation. The police and GSU had guns. I did not want the GSU to unleash violence on the people. It was like a tinderbox—any small thing could have set off even more serious repercussions. The people living in Kosovo are proud of their reputation of never retreating from a fight or a confrontation.

Negotiating for a peaceful resolution with the residents of Kiambui and the GSU went on for forty minutes. Many of the people in Kosovo were not happy with me. They did not want me to reason with the security officers. They were ready for confrontation. They felt I was trying to appease the police and colluding with ‘these people who have stolen the Presidency from us.’ They said I was toning down the issues too much. They felt that I should be war-ike and confrontational and not cede any ground. Some of them were saying loudly;

–Let them kill us!

But eventually I prevailed and things calmed down and the people let the police and GSU through.”

Ochieng’ Nyawire continues to pray and work for peace for all Kenyans and peace in Kiambui and its neighbourhoods. He practices what he preaches—a true Kenyan hero.

Betty Wamalwa Muragori is a writer who lives in Nairobi with her husband and three children. She also writes as the poet Sitawa Namwalie and is a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers.

Reflectors

Nairobi, Kenya August 2005
I came upon this scene after I had visited a auto repair place. The graphic quality of the red and white signs attached to the fence in some kind order caught my attention. The late afternoon light added to the richness. It was like a realist painting in a way, and I am always attracted to the way ordinary scenes and places, taken for granted by others, make great photographs.

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