Beyond poverty, a richness in spirit and dedication

Today was my second day in Kibera and in two days time the group of volunteers and I have
visited a number of private and public schools including the Red Rose School, the Kibra Academy, the St. Aloysius Gonzaga School and the Girls Soccer Academy. As we meandered through the narrow alleys of Kibera, we passed burning piles of garbage heaped against walls and waved at children running and skipping over streams of refuse and trash. It was clear from the outset that Kibera’s one million residents live in an environment that meets the four characteristics that the UN identifies as an operational definition of a slum—insecurity of tenure, poor structural housing conditions, deficient access to safe drinking water and sanitation and severe overcrowding.

However, my experiences so far have also revealed an aspect of Kibera which grim definitions and statistics cannot adequately express: the remarkable dedication of teachers and students to improving the way of life in their community. Take two teachers I met at the Girls Soccer Academy, Teacher Byrones and Teacher Musa. These two young men volunteer at the school six days a week for twelve hours a day to ensure that the girls at this public school receive a solid education. The school stays open after hours and during holidays so that students who do not want to return home or would rather remain at school to do homework in a room with electricity may do so. The Girls Soccer Academy is their home away from home, Teacher Byrones says.

Or take the the teachers and students of St. Aloysius Gonzaga School, a private secondary school that specifically seeks to enroll and fund children whose parents have been affected by HIV/AIDS. The Deputy Director of the school and other faculty look at the students’ KCPE(Kenya Certificate of Primary Education) examination results, administer oral interviews and conduct home visits to decide on the seventy students to be admitted in a given year. As we learned through an exchange of questions and answers, some of these students walk over two hours each way, sometimes after dark, to attend their courses in math, biology, history, physics, English, French and KiSwahili. Their motto, as painted in big, block letters on the school wall is “Learn, Love, Serve.” Their task: to work hard because “working hard pays,” as is written across the school’s chalkboard. Working hard is what will lead them closer to their stated career aspirations of journalists, doctors, lawyers, pilots, singers and surgeons.

The Red Rose students and teachers demonstrated this same active dedication to learning. When we first walked into the nursery, the Red Rose students, dressed in red sweaters and khaki pants, promptly stood up in unison and greeted us with an enthusiastic “Hello, nice to meet you.” I was immediately struck by the group’s high spirits and politeness. Later, they would gather round in the school’s courtyard, some of them slightly shivering in the chilly morning air, to sing “If You’re Happy and You Know It” and listen patiently to Ken Okoth and the Red Rose teachers graciously accept a financial donation from the faculty of St. Lawrence University in New York. As we walked around the Red Rose School during the day, songs of "Old McDonald Had a Farm" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" drifted from the classrooms into the courtyard.

As we headed out of Kibera, I reflected on what I had learned from my first couple days. I searched for lessons that lay beyond the acknowledgement that places such as Kibera are poor. And I arrived at this realization: While the Kibera environment lacks sanitation, a formal economy and secure housing, there exist teachers and students with a resilient spirit of dedication and an energy that bring a richness to the community. By observing how local teachers harness their time and energy to create a safe, secure places for students and how students work diligently to perform well in school, I realized that to view the urban poor as passive people merely in need of rescue is not an accurate or helpful paradigm through which to approach development initiatives. Instead, Kibera’s residents are a lively, participatory group that assume their individual agency to bring about positive opportunities. I hope that my role in the next six weeks can be to help foster these participatory approaches to education through the establishment of the computer lab at the Kibra Academy.