Planting hope in the slums of Mathare

Julius Mwelu. Photo courtesy of Mwelu Foundation.

NAIROBI, Kenya- Otieno aka Tyson is not your 16- year-old desperate glue sniffing teenager in Nairobi’s sprawling Mathare slums. He is a standard eight drop-out but his command of the Queen’s language is admirable. He is overly proud about his accomplishments. And justifiably so. He believes that by not having accomplished the conventional formal education, all is not lost.

“I don’t think that I’m a failure by simply having not gone through high school,” he says confidently.

This precocious teenager has been through the worst possible any slum dweller can possibly go through. He lost his father when he was two and his mother when he was five. He started living with his aunt in a single room while going to school with erratic consistence. He helped his single mother brew chang’aa, a highly potent, cheap drink popular with the slum folk. This was their only source of livelihood.

Fortunately, he crossed paths with one Julius Mwelu while playing football for his club in 2002, and his life changed. Mwelu, an ex-gang member turned professional photographer was just about to establish the Mwelu Foundation a year later. He acquired the initial skills in photography and started taking photos in the slum and at 13, won an award in a Netherlands photo exhibition. Even though there were no immediate financial rewards, it was an uplifting experience.

“It was a competition, and teenagers from different parts of the world participated in it. My photo of a man collecting garbage in a dirty stream won the award,” says the excited Mwelu.

The Mwelu Foundation team. Photo courtesy of Mwelu Foundation.

Enter the Mwelu Foundation. Established seven years ago in the Mathare slums and registered only in 2007, the organization is one of the successful slum-based projects that have been covered by various international media for its impact on the slum child. BBC, Al-Jazeera and Netherlands Network have all run features on the foundation. Locally, the national broadcaster KBC and NTV have featured the organization in their special features.

“We especially want to train young children in photography, film-making, poetry and singing as a mode of expression,” says Mwelu. “This is a good way to tell their own stories to the world.”

Mwelu, 24, is himself a professional photographer and film-maker whose love for the camera has taken him to places and seen him win awards. He won The Young Reporter Prize of Prix Bayeux for the war correspondent for the photos he took during Kenya’s post-election violence. The awards pay tribute to journalists who risk their lives in times of war to take picture that communicate to the rest of the world. He was rewarded in the Friends of the Earth International Photography Competition.

He trains young children on photography and their pictures are then displayed in exhibitions in parts of Mathare and later in Europe in places such as Tilbug in Netherlands and in Belgium. The photographs mainly aim to change the perception of the slums as dangerous places where nothing good can come out of. His photographs have been in exhibitions in Germany, France, Britain, Spain and Belgium.

Mwelu himself was born and brought up in Mathare. As a child of a single mother, he had joined a gang in the slum but was saved from it when a visiting American woman, Lana Wong, who was running a project in Mathare visited their shack in the slum. That was in 1997, and Mwelu had his first experience with the camera.

In the ‘Shoot Back’ project run by the American, the youth were trained on photography and when one of the members dropped from the team, Mwelu was taken up. His desire and burning ambition saw his efforts rewarded. He later met a photographer from the Netherlands, Jasper Croen, and his photos were made into a book. He then left for the Netherlands, where he further trained on photography and film making before returning back to Kenya and continued with his photography in the slums mainly focusing on Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA).

In 2002, he decided to establish the Mwelu Foundation in order to rehabilitate the slum’s youth. The organization also produces low-budget movies that work almost spontaneously as Mwelu explains, “we meet briefly, brainstorm and develop a concept and develop a script almost immediately. The children handle everything and my role is to oversee that everything runs smoothly.”

 So far they have three movies to their credit; “Ghetto Girl”, “Flying Toilet” and “Inevitable Pain”, all of which were nominated for to the International Film Festival in October. “Inevitable Pain” was screened in various parts of Nairobi, including the French Cultural Centre.

Barbara Wagio, a resident of Mathare slums, is one of the 45 children, who are being trained by the Mwelu Foundation. Photo courtesy of Mwelu Foundation.

So far the foundation has 45 members mainly from Mathare slums. Some children who have gone through the foundation have in turn returned to help the younger ones in the project. Esther Waweru is one such former student in the organization. She now helps write scripts and produce their movies. She holds a diploma in computer engineering, and helps run the organization.

“In the ghetto most people live in desperation and believe everything is over. But we try to restore this hope especially to the young ones,” explains Waweru, who was also behind the production of the movie “Ghetto Girl.”

The organization also runs a mock parliament complete with a president, a vice president, six ministers and the opposition. They hold debates every Saturday afternoon where they discuss pertinent issues bedeviling their lives in the slums. The parliament is an interactive forum and reportedly disciplined that many a Kenyan would wish our National Assembly could emulate. The sessions are held in their headquarters along Juja Road, opposite Agip Gas station on your way to Mathare North.

In the recent past, they have also been tapping into the singing talent. “Singing is a vibrant talent among the youth from slums and can be very marketable. We teach the kids on a number of things about music in general,” says 22-year-old Billiard Okoth, who works at the foundation.

Okoth believes that changing the present generation is not an easy task, but he is hopeful there is something that can be done about the future generation. This is why they also encourage sponsors to help educate the children.

“The sponsor will pay the school fee directly to the school, and the child sends him or her progress forms at the end of every term.”

This is significantly different from other NGOs and sponsorship bodies where there is a common fund from which the children are assisted. This has often led to many organizations being accused of embezzling money.

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