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| Young people attending the Leadership for Hope in Dandora |
It felt like the Garden of Eden.
It felt surreal because the previous four days had been the opposite of most of these words. Our new Head of Kenya
Operations for Emerging Leaders was mugged at gunpoint and thankfully escaped
with her life; one of our associates house was violently burgled and his wife
escaped to the bathroom just in time but the guard dogs were all killed.
One of the director’s wives of Vegpro Ltd,
our first Kenyan partner, was shot dead. On Friday we were on the adjoining
district to two more terrorist bombs in Nairobi and the evacuation of British
tourists out of the country from the coast.
Each day for four days we spent four hours a day driving past the chaos
of humanity fighting for survival and existence in some of the toughest areas
of the city – hustling for a bit of money, ditches full of garbage, desperate
individuals picking through the rubbish for food, roads so bad that your body
feels beaten to a pulp by the end of it, training in the Dandora slum, the city
rubbish dump, swarming with foraging pigs and cranes and people eking out their
living from the garbage jungle, armed guards outside the training room.
And then there was the third world. The
cross-over world....
We delivered Leadership for Hope this past week to 350 youth
in the Dandora slum. The cross-over between these scary realities and the
reality of hope and the human spirit. 350 slum youth who have had very varying
degrees of education sat for three whole days. I’m told that has never ever
happened before. The cross-over between donors who give money to help these
places but who never actually come here, to our wonderful team who embraced the
world of Dandora. The cross-over between
youth crime and youth hopelessness to working alongside the most amazing young
people of the Dandora Uprising, who I trained last year, seeing them running
the event like a well oiled machine; a now mature, servant hearted group of
young people who I wanted to adopt for life. The cross-over from a world of
nothing, to seeing where Peter (leader of the Dandora Uprising and one of our new trainers), is going to build Dandora’s first ever library
for youth because he now sees himself as a leader. The cross-over of 350 youth who live in a
violent, often desperate slum, where no one dares to visit, to a place where
96% of the 350 youth said the three days have greatly changed their lives.
We lived in the three worlds this week.
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| Meet Joseph from the Dandora Uprising team - washing 350 chai mugs |
- TW
