Excited to learn from Kibera

I think my focus for this trip has been a little too much on the poverty in Kibera. It will be eye-opening and challenging to see people living in difficult conditions -- without running water or electricity. But I recently read this article in the Boston Globe, titled Learning from Slums. It's about how "the world's slums are overcrowded, unhealthy - and increasingly seen as resourceful communities that can offer lessons to modern cities."

I hadn't really spent much time thinking how I might learn a great deal from the people in Kibera and how they make the most of their situation. As I've been poking around the web, I've found that Kibera is being studied by some of the top design schools in the country. It's a fascinating place.

This is one of my favorite quotes from that article in the Boston Globe:

"One of the misconceptions is that they're endless seas of mud huts," says
Robert Neuwirth, author of "Shadow Cities: a Billion Squatters, a New Urban
World," who spent two years living in squatter communities. "There's a
tremendous amount of economic activity - stores, bars, hairdressers,
everything."

When you think about it, and you're pessimistic, you can think "let's see -- a million people on 600 acres of land means about 1,500 people living on one acre" (an acre is about the size of a football field, including the end zones). For most of the people going on this trip, your family of four or five people live on about half an acre. By comparison, things are TIGHT in Kibera. And people are hungry.

But if you are optimistic about it, Kibera works. And people who come to Kibera, and to other urban areas, do so because it represents a step up from the rural poverty that they seek to escape. When you look at the growth in Kibera since the 1960s (see chart below)

You have to figure that part of that growth is population growth, but a good part of it is people migrating to Kibera. Why? It's close to Nairobi, so you can get a job (there are few if any jobs in many rural areas of Africa), and cities are vibrant places. Now, we'll need to think about how Kibera could be better managed, because it clearly could be better managed...

But there is a great deal about Kibera from which we can draw inspiration.

To get you started, please watch this provocative 3-minute TED talk by Stewart Brand about squatter cities. When he opens by talking about passing the 50% urban remark, he's referring to the fact that for the first time in human history, more people live in cities than in rural settings.

graph source: http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0227-population.html

Then, once your interest has been piqued, please watch this 14-minute TED talk by Robert Neuwirth, author of the book Shadow Cities (mentioned above in the quote from the Boston Globe). According to the TED site, he "finds the world’s squatter sites -- where a billion people now make their homes -- to be thriving centers of ingenuity and innovation."

He points out that by 2030, there will be 2 billion squatters; and by 2050, it will be 3 billion.

At about the 4:45 mark of the video, Neuwirth mentions ugali, the staple food of many people in Kenya. If you follow the link, you will see that, as of November 2008, the global economic crisis is making ugali less affordable in Kenya. This sort of inexpensive food is common in many areas of Africa -- a similarly inexpensive staple food in Ethiopia is injera.

At the 9:30 mark of the video, he mentions Toi Market. Unfortunately, his video was made in 2005, and the Toi Market was destroyed in the post-election violence on New Year's Day 2008. Here's a before-and-after image I found online.

Something we'll need to discuss in another post is the political situation in Kenya that led to rioting a little over a year ago...

But getting back to inspiration: here's another quote from the Globe article:

No one denies that slums - also known as shantytowns, squatter cities, and
informal settlements - have serious problems. They are as a rule overcrowded,
unhealthy, and emblems of profound inequality. But among architects, planners,
and other thinkers, there is a growing realization that they also possess unique
strengths, and may even hold lessons in successful urban development.

So while we may have some work we can do in Kibera, and while it would be great if we could raise some money to help folks at the Red Rose School do the work they are doing, I think we need to remain humble -- we're the outsiders coming to learn from the amazing people in Kibera.

I'll follow up with another post about the attitude of people in poverty, but I've read several accounts of how the children in Kibera are some of the most happy and enthusiastic children you'd ever want to meet. I experienced the same thing in rural areas of Ethiopia when I traveled there in the summer of 2006.

Let me end this posting with a question: How do these kids manage to stay so upbeat in such difficult life conditions? And what can we learn from them about how to live our lives in the affluence of the United States?

Those are my thoughts on a cloudy (though becoming sunny -- finally!) Tuesday in Durham, NC...

I'd love to see some comments!

March 7 Meeting

Jambo DC-area Kenya travelers!

As you know, in addition to your assembled group, plus Hadley from Dana Hall School in Boston, there are five people from Cary Academy in North Carolina who will be traveling with you.

I'm Steve Goldberg, a history teacher, and we have a senior, Therice Morris (pronounced Terrace), and three juniors -- Izaak Earnhardt, Daniel Bowden and Anna Plastina.

We're on a trimester schedule, and we just finished our second trimester. We actually have exams at the end of our second trimester (but not at the end of the year), so we just finished those. Students here are just beginning a two-week break, so they will not be back at school until March 23.

In an effort to get to know you folks in DC, we've each introduced ourselves on this blog (see the last entry -- click on comments to read the student intros).

It would be great if you could, in the next few days, also write brief introductions so we can get to know you a little. If you have trouble with posting to the blog, just email me your introduction and I will post it for you. My email is MrGoldberg@gmail.com

Also, if someone could take notes during your session today, and email me those notes, that would be great. I can share those notes with the students here, so we can build upon your thoughts about the two topics you're discussing today: 1) fundraising activities and 2) the day-to-day itinerary of our time in Kenya.

We'll try to see the same video you're watching about life in Kibera, and we'll also try to catch up with Ken to learn some basic Swahili, but there's no substitute for working with Ken...

I'll be updating this blog and/or sending you periodic email updates with information and questions about Kibera. Ken can answer most factual questions about Kibera, but I'm hoping we can ask some policy questions and some ethical questions that don't have a "right" answer. For instance, what should the Kenyan government do about Kibera? In order to answer that question in a sophisticated way, you'll need some background about Kibera and its history.

I hope to talk with you at some point during your meeting this morning.

- Steve

Blogs and other info about Kenya

Here's a 7-minute video about Kibera from 2005.

Here's a blog entry about Kibera from a junior in college who's spending the academic year in Kenya. He has a nice description of what he sees and how it makes an impact on him.

Here's a description of a librarian's experience near Kibera in 2005(he does not go into Kibera, which I presume is most people's experience when in Nairobi). I found this blog entry when I was looking for a satellite image of Kibera next to the golf course.

I'll add other good resources I find here. If you find any, let me know, and this can be the clearinghouse for information about Kibera, Kenya, and development issues in general.

Please don't post your intro here -- post it as a comment on the first blog posting. Thanks.

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.