To Nairobi with Fear
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Nairobi,
Kenya
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
The trip from Isiolo to Nairobi was a piece of cake, five hours on a comfy bus and on a paved road. It was wonderful to once again appreciate travel that was smooth and fast, we covered in five hours today more than we covered in yesterday's thirteen. The countryside grew greener as we rose to Nairobi's almost 3000m, with gentle green hills covered in grass and European-looking tall, healthy trees. Bushes and flowers showed a pride in people's surroundings, and this was the Kenya of my dreams, green and beautiful, not the dry, golden lands through which I had been passing before. After about an hour of travel we passed the equator, an exciting event for me as it marks my first passage to the Southern Hemisphere. I was so tired, however, that I marked this occasion by promptly falling asleep, despite my best wishes to enjoy the scenery. In doing so I completely missed the view of Mount Kenya, one of Africa's highest mountains.
I awoke as we started to enter Nairobi's suburbs. Most people will know that Nairobi is one of Africa's most dangerous cities, and I didn't relish the opportunity to get to know its streets. Looking out from my window I saw bad poverty and unfriendly faces, dirty streets lined with tin shacks and run-down looking buildings.
Originally somewhat artificially created as a natural railway crossing by the British, Nairobi has seen an explosive population growth as people migrate here from rural villages in the hope that they will find their riches here. Perhaps it is that when poor villagers see the "Big Man" drive by in their shiny car, they see that they are from Nairobi, and then believe that the only way they, too, can be rich is to send themselves or their children to Nairobi. On arrival they then find there is no work, and end up living in the huge slums which surround the city, growing exponentially bigger, now housing 1.5 million people. Nairobi's official population is 2.5 million, but this conveniently does not include the huge population in the slums. This means that they can announce positive statistics about the city, for example one is that 85% of its "population" has access to clean water and sanitation facilities.
This mass poverty, hopelessness, and sense of exclusion from a city they dreamed would provide them with riches causes many to turn to crime and violence to make their money. The results are terrifying. Everyone I met who lived in Nairobi (or Nairobbery, as locals call it) had a story of a friend of theirs who had been mugged, carjacked or murdered in the past few weeks. For example, Teague, an Irish guy with whom I stayed while there worked as an engineer in the suburbs. Twice in the past month their office had been broken into by a gang. Each of his two residences in Nairobi had seen attempted break-ins in recent times. In his office there was a (Kenyan) girl who had been robbed and threatened with at knifepoint recently while waiting for a bus to work in the morning. Only last week one of his surveyors had been missing for work for ten days. When he finally showed up he had a huge scar covering his forehead - he had been robbed of his phone and about $15 just after nightfall one evening, and because he had so little on him they brought an axe down on his skull. He lost so much blood that he nearly died. An Irish priest was shot dead only last Saturday after his car was stolen off him, as the penalty for carjacking is the same as murder - a death sentence. So, worryingly, as the punishments grow worse for crimes, the criminals increasingly murder their victims so that they cannot later identify their assailants. If they are caught they will be killed anyway, so there is a sick logic in their actions.
All this means that walking around Nairobi is an absolutely terrifying experience. At day it is not too bad, but at night the streets completely empty and to walk a kilometre in a bad area (and most areas are just that) would mean almost certainly a mugging and possible severe injury or death. Even when driving you are at great risk of being carjacked, when sitting in traffic, or when waiting for the ten seconds it takes for the askari (guard) to open the gates of the apartment complex. Thankfully I had no problems there, but it was truly surreal to feel so afraid for my life on a daily basis. I reflected that I would actually rather live under a regime like that of Myanmar where any political activity can be punished with death or imprisonment that here. At least in Myanmar you can be safe if you obey the rules, here there are no rules, and there is no safety, only luck.
I ended up spending five days in Nairobi, more than planned, but it was nice to enjoy the comforts of good food, company, and some excessive partying. Teague, a Kerryman, with whom I stayed treated me like a king, bringing me out to eat, drink, and meet people. I loved his company, he has a great sense of humour, and politically is almost Stalinist, which I always find most interesting. To top it all off he has many a tall tale to tell, having lived all over Nigeria for twenty years. In short, he was great company.
One afternoon I got the opportunity to visit the slums, in the company of some friends I had made who were Kenyan, one of whom knew the place well and had friends inside. Despite their reassurances of my being safe (although they made me give them everything in my pockets lest I be robbed) I felt absolutely terrified in this environment in which I was a complete outsider. The slums stretch over acres and acres of land, from outside one only sees rusty metal roofs covering the shacks. When inside the first thing you notice is the overwhelming stench of human waste and rubbish, which absolutely covered the muddy, wet tracks in between the shacks. Filthy open sewers ran in every road, past houses made from mud and covered with corrugated tin roofs. There were some shops, selling fruit or old shoes or barbequing meat that was a worrying yellow in colour. Goats, turkeys and chickens wandered around the streets, picking at the rubbish. We passed a crèche, a small 3m x 3m room which had about ten babies on its floor, they are minded for about the $5 a month. Also $5 a month is the cost of renting a room in one of the shacks, I was surprised to hear there is a culture of landlordism here, on what is technically government land.
The people, naturally, looked poor and underfed. Children greeted me with waves and "Howareyou!", women with smiles, but men with scary staring looks, I was glad of my Kenyan company at a few moments. We walked around for about an hour, going deep into the heart of the slum. At the end we called into one of the shacks, just a tiny, insufferably hot room, maybe measuring 5m x 4m, with a bed, a couch and a few chairs, around which a friendly family sat drinking a sort of weak honey and fruit wine made by one of them. I drank it so as not to be rude, ignoring my worries of what kind of water had been used in its preparation. It was nice to sit with them, if uncomfortable, but interesting to see their lives a little more. An old lady in the room, who was a little drunk by then, told me that she was proud of where she lived, which was good to hear. All in all the experience of visiting the slums was a good one for me - it is one thing to see scenes like this on television, but to see and smell them with one's own eyes and nose smacks you with their reality, and makes you actually think, despairingly, but at least one does think, instead of looking away and ignoring.
As I could barely leave the house to buy water or check my emails any hope of finding NGOs to visit was quickly abandoned. Lady Luck, however, was smiling on me, and I ended up meeting a lot more people than I have so far in this trip, and of a different kind than before. I have a friend from university who is now working as a sort of volunteer with UNICEF, and I met her for a few drinks one evening. It was great to chat with her and catch up, she had been traveling for the past year so we swapped some stories. I didn't want to share my views on the UN with her, as there was no point in shoving them down her throat, but our conversation did turn to that subject and even in only a few short weeks here she seemed to be able to confirm some of my worst fears about this organization. I have been reading "Lords of Poverty" by Graham Hancock, a damning and thoroughly well researched criticism of the international aid industry. It deals extensively with the failings of the UN, which I will briefly outline here.
The UN is massive, employing tens of thousands of people, and is split up into about thirty different divisions (UNICEF, UNDP, WFP, UNEP etc etc), which theoretically cover different "developmental" issues. The reality is that they squabble and fight to receive funding from the mother organization, which is then used to fund often overlapping project areas. The whole things is so big that most of the money is eaten up in its administration costs and never actually reaches those its supposed to help. Almost every part of it has been controversially wasteful with its resources, and their frighteningly bureaucratic natures have meant that aid usually arrives in areas months after it is crucially needed, and even then is usually misdirected as its nature (food, sanitation, development, infrastructure, health, education etc) is decided by suited men in offices in capital cities far away from the "disaster zones". Many of the workers have their hearts in the right place (and my friend is no exception in that regard - I was impressed with her resolve not to become part of the system), but too many see the whole thing as a career, and quickly forget who it is they are supposed to be helping.
I visited the UN in Nairobi, a huge complex of buildings stretching over acres of lovely gardens, pristinely kept, and closed in with well patrolled high security fences. I counted twenty organizations who have offices within the complex, for some it is their world headquarters. The whole thing felt like a university campus, with blocks of offices with canteens and coffee stations throughout. There was even a duty-free shop inside, UN workers have near-diplomatic status, they can buy their drink and cigarettes for almost nothing, and can even import big, shiny, foreign cars free of duty, which they drive with their special red UN license plates. The houses of the workers, which we passed on the way to the UN, can only be described as mansions, easily affordable even to relatively junior workers who are paid inexcusably well. The effect, of course, of all this is to push up house prices in the city, making things even more expensive for the local people who are supposed to be "saving", at least in theory.
I felt sickened at how removed all this shiny, feel-good, clean environment was from the realities of Africa, the images of yesterday's slums resonated strongly in my mind. These (UN) people will today sit at their desks and look at statistics, write each other letters and memos, push papers, talk jargon at meetings, fly at great expense to international conferences where they will stay in swanky hotels and talk some more. They will return home in the evenings in taxis to their mansions filled with African curios and paintings, where their houseboy will cook them a lavish feast, before they take another taxi to a bar, where they will talk with other ex-pats, never leaving the "Blue Zone", an area in which all UN workers must live, never truly interacting with Africa or her people nor really seeing her problems, but instead living in this bubble of western comfort and luxury, building "careers" for themselves and living far better than they could if employed in the private sector at home, all the time smugly content that they are helping "those people".
Thankfully I met some people in Nairobi who work for other organizations that gave me some hope that good work can be done. I was becoming so disillusioned with the whole aid industry while simultaneously increasingly worried by the ever worsening state of affairs for so many of Africa's people that the whole thing was starting to get me very depressed. One afternoon, though, I got a call from an Irish priestt who wosrks with the Catholic Missions in East Africa. To be honest I am very skeptical of any missionaries, especially as I have read of what are essentially forced conversions, which I consider to be equivalent to cultural rape (what right to we have to come and tell people that what they have believed for generations is wrong, even evil?), or the fact that many missionary groups still tell people they will go to hell if they use condoms, which is not helping the huge AIDS problem here.
Meeting this man, however, was a huge reassurance to me on both those fronts - he told me that they do indeed preach the gospel, but no-one is forced to come, if they so choose then good for them, a priest will say Mass wherever he goes anyway. He also said that with condoms they give all the information, and leave people make their own minds up. Moreover, the work as explained to me by him, by the Catholic missions, is easily the best I have heard of so far on my trip. The organization seems to be about getting "on the ground", and implementing health and educational projects, which are structured in a fashion that they will be completely self-sustaining and will continue to function when the mission leaves. He said that something like 80% of the schools in Northern Kenya, for example, are run by the missions. If they were not there one would have to wonder who would be teaching those children. The priests live in the villages, and not in cool city offices, they spend time getting to know the people, they learn their language, they try to understand their culture and problems.
I was incredibly impressed by this man, and it delighted me to have faith restored in this organization with which I had been so disillusioned that I hadn't even bothered calling into their offices during my trip. His deep understanding of the problems involved, coupled with his modest manner and his willingness to get "stuck in" are all characteristics I greatly admired, and would love to have myself some day. He gave me one piece of advice which hit home; not to try to come to Africa with pre-prepared solutions, or biases, but instead with an open mind. Those who come with solutions conceived in Europe usually fail - you need a deep understanding of an area, its people and problems before you will be able to do anything that really helps. This advice also extends to my views on NGOs, I will try not to be so quick to judge them (in a negative light) from now on, although I will continue to think critically, as it is only through seeing problems with them that I may hope to avoid those problems myself, should I work in the field later in life.
He introduced me to Noel Malony, the director of Trocaire's East African operation, they are Ireland's second biggest NGO. I had only been vaguely aware of the work they do, and when explained to me I was very impressed, to be honest. They are primarily a human rights organization, although they occasionally do some disaster relief work too. Crucially, the work they do is not carried out by themselves, but rather by their partners, who are local NGOs, who they fund. Trocaire receive applications for funding from these local NGOs, and if their strategies are aligned with those of Trocaire's they will fund them after first carefully assessing how good they are. They are then given funding for a provisional six-month period, after which they are audited and their work re-assessed before further money is released. He said that although sometimes some money disappears they generally manage to choose their partners well. I thought that this was an excellent system, it means that Trocaire get to push their own issues in the field while the work is carried out by local NGOs who will certainly have a far better understanding of the cultures and people on the ground than any European, thereby rendering them far more effective, especially when pushing human rights issues. It also means that Trocaire is a small organization in itself, and doesn't waste as much money in administration costs, it is more a manager of sorts (although I'd imagine Noel would strongly object to me using that term) of local NGOs who push issues Trocaire believe need to be pushed.
I was also really impressed with Noel himself, he is a very intelligent, level-headed man who seems to have an excellent understanding of all the issues involved, and was very aware of the possible problems and pitfalls in aid work. Meeting him and the priest have been an indescribably positive experience for me, and have caused me to have new hope that good work can indeed be done in this field. Their words have made me completely rethink my own beliefs and feelings on all the issues involved, something that couldn't have come at a better time, as I was becoming so disenchanted with the whole thing that I may have ended up going through my whole trip blinded by pessimism and a sense of negative hopelessness.
