Going to Kibera

Hi, I'm Steve Goldberg and I'm excited to be traveling to Kenya this summer!

In this inaugural posting I am trying to do two things:

1) introduce myself briefly to the group
2) share some of my thoughts about our upcoming trip.

Who is Steve Goldberg? I teach 9th grade history at Cary Academy, a school with about 100 students per class. Our school starts in 6th grade, and the middle school is grades 6-8. There are about 300 students in the middle school and 400 students in the upper school. This is my second year teaching at Cary. I have been teaching high school for more than a decade.

Before that, I taught history at The Potomac School (that's where I met Ken -- we were colleagues in the history department).

I'm originally from Newton, Massachusetts (about 15 minutes outside of Boston) and I have lived up and down the east coast -- in Boston, Washington, DC, and the Triangle in North Carolina (I went to Duke for college).

Over the holiday break, my wife Jocelyn, my son Ben (he's 18 months old) and I just got back from visiting my parents in Florida, which was fun because Ben likes digging by the ocean and swimming in the outdoor pool.

In your introduction, consider letting us know what you did over your break.

As I think about our trip to Kibera, I'm not sure what to expect. I know that there are roughly a million people living in a space smaller than Central Park in New York, but I don't know what that really feels like or smells like or looks like in person. In the next few months, I'd like to learn as much as I can about Kibera, because that's where Red Rose is located and that's where we will be doing our service work.

But I think it's also important for us to get some context -- Kibera is a problem area, but it's by no means unique in Kenya, Africa, or indeed in the world. I'd like for us to use Kibera as a spring board to look at the broader issue of the growing numbers of urban poor in the world.

If you click that link you will get a full article, but the part I found striking was this excerpt:

By 2030, an estimated 5 billion of the world's 8.1 billion people will live
in cities. About 2 billion of them will live in slums, primarily in Africa and
Asia, lacking access to clean drinking water and working toilets, surrounded by
desperation and crime.

Already these slums are huge. According to Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums, nearly 80% of Nigeria's urban population, or some 41.6 million people, live in slums. The comparable numbers in India are 56% and 158.4 million. Many of these slum dwellers are also squatters, lacking leases or legal title to their homes.

Here's another example of an article that talks about the urban poor (from 2006).

The part of this article I found most interesting were the last two paragraphs:

By most estimates, 2007 will see the world's urban population outnumber the rural population for the first time, while those living in slums will exceed a billion. The U.N. predicts the numbers of slum-dwellers will probably double in the next 30 years, meaning the developing world slum will become the primary habitat of mankind.

"Urban poverty is one of the biggest stories happening on the planet," Mr. Bendiksen says, "but it gets ignored because it happens slowly, inexorably. Life as it's lived in Kibera will soon be the most normal way to live on earth."

I think this trip has incredible potential to change our outlook on the world. I very much look forward to getting to know each of you and to seeing what you folks are thinking about our trip to Kenya.