It's hard to believe I've only been here for two full days, there is so much to tell all of you about already. It's early in the morning as I'm writing. its actually feels a bit chilly right now, its probably about 15 degrees actually. The people here would consider this cold though as this is about as cold as it gets. During the day so far though it has been about thirty degrees and a bit humid.
On our first full day here on Tuesday, they decided to give us a 'slow' start as many of us didn't sleep well the night before. A slow start meant a game drive for most of the day at Nairobi National Park! The National Park comes right up against the city, and is connected to the rest of the national park system down into the serengeti plains in Tanzania by a narrow wildlife corridor. During this time of year the herds of ungulates aren't usually in this area, but there is a severe drought right now so more of them have stayed up in this high area where there is usually water year round. We saw several large herds of wildebeest which we apparently wouldn't have seen any of another year. We saw a lot of different species, giraffe, hundreds of zebra, eland, impala, grant's gazelle, ostrich, buffalo, wildebeest, duiker, warthog, and lots of different birds. It was quite the first day. It really is amazing how close the park is to the city, I have all sorts of pictures of giraffes with large skyscrapers in the background!
Yesterday was a completely different day. We went to visit the UN compound in the morning and had presentations by the head of UN-HABITAT and the head of their slum improvement program. It was interesting to see the whole compound, and the presentations gave us a lot of background information for our afternoon. In the afternoon we went to visit the UN-HABITAT office in Suweto East. Suweto East is one of the twelve villages which make up Kibera, one of the alrgest slums in the world. In Suweto 60,000 people live in a two hectare area. The population of Kibera as a whole fluctuates betweeon 500,000 and 750,000. At the office we met the local committee that has been elected by the community in stakeholders meetings to represent them in the UN-HABITAT program. Suweto East is a pilot project for the Nairobi area. The committee and other residents have done all of the enumeration work and mapping that has to be done before upgrading can begin, partly to protect the rights of these people to the land they are squatting on. Projects that have promised to improve the housing in the past have turned out to be high rise apartment buildings that have been unaffordable and have driven people further into the slum area.
After our introduction we were taken on a tour of the village in small groups by the committee members. Its really hard to describe what the place is like. There is garbage and open sewers everywhere, the pathways between the currugated metal or mud huts are usually about eight feet wide at the most. The people are incredibly friendly, and welcoming and happy to show us their homes and businesses. There are 34 churches and almost as many school just in Suweto East. We went into a couple of the schools that we passed. Here it would cost 1000 kenyan shillings (60 kenyan shillings= 1 canadiaqn dollar), to send your child to primary school for the year, 6000 Ksh for high school. Rent in this area of Kibera is between 400-500 Ksh a month. Most people probably make about 60Ksh a day at the casual labour that thy find in the city.
The children we met at the primary school were wonderful. We met most of the standard two class who are five and six years old. They wer all eager to intoduce themselves and have their pictures taken. As we left to go back to the trucks most of them followed us holding our hands as we walked back to the office. I have so many stories form the short hour we were walking about, I will try to send all of you some photos soon. The most amazing part was the incredible sense of community, and resourcefulness I saw. The frustrating part was hearing at the UN who incredibly easy and relatively cheap it would be to drastically improve the living conditions of all of these people, and the rest of the billion people who live in slums around the world. All that is missing is the international political will.
Today is a day visiting the scientists who work here at ICIPE and developing our own research projects for the trip.
