January 21, 2005

Dear Friends,

It's been a while since I last wrote. I returned from Kenya Wednesday, after filming there for nearly a month. I have a lot to write about, and I apologize in advance for the length of this email.

The New Year was celebrated in Mathare with great joy. I was staying at the Good Samaritan Home New Year's Eve. Unfortunately, the power was out in Mathare, and because of fear of celebrations getting out of hand, we were all locked into the orphanage. At midnight, though, I heard the shouts of "Happy New Year!" from across the slum.

2005 brings the final year of school for Chalo. In October and November, he will take his Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education exam. If he receives a B+ or higher on the exam, he'll be able to go to a public university. Below that, it's unclear what will happen to him.

I went with Chalo to his first day of the new school year. I learned from him, and the deputy principal, that his grades had slipped in the final term of last year. He went from 12th in his class of 96 to 44th. Chalo works very hard, but he struggles with chemistry. It turns out he also did not have the proper chemistry text books -- the school doesn't provide them and they use a different book than the one from his previous school from which he transferred last January. He was borrowing books from friends, and he just didn't enough time to study them.

But also, Chalo is very social. He has quickly become one of the most popular kids in the school, both with his peers and his teachers. He was chosen to be a prefect, and leads the drama club, where he wrote the play that will be performed in the national high school drama competition this spring. He also still has a girlfriend, Nancy, though when I was visiting they were arguing a great deal. All of this contributes to his grades slipping.

Though it's very good, I think, for him to be so "well-rounded," university admissions are based exclusively on the results of his KCSE exam. If he doesn't score high enough, there are several private universities and many shorter post-secondary school courses in Kenya, but because Chalo is an orphan whose extended family is very poor, I don't know what his real options will be.

This is unlike many of his peers at his school, who know that even if they do not go to public university (and very few will) they will have some options because they have immediate family who will support them. In fact, most of Chalo's friends, except for Nancy, do not know that he is an orphan, that he lived on the street for one year, and that he grew up in Mathare at Good Samaritan. When I visited the school, though, I sometimes heard him talk as if he had the same future options as his friends do, and I just don't know what to tell him.

Chalo's background has provided the source material for his play. It is about the pressures of growing up poor in what is referred to as the "Dot-Com Generation." The play fictionalizes many of the problems that Chalo has seen and experienced with young people in Mathare. The most timely story-line in the play is that about the pregnant teenage girl, which seems to very closely follow the story of Njambi, Boss's younger sister.

Last time I wrote, I had recently learned that Njambi was pregnant, but because she wasn't talking with the adults at Good Samaritan, I knew very little more (she lives with Boss and their older brother Malonza in a little room in Mathare, a few minutes away from Good Samaritan). Since then, I've spent a good amount of time talking with Njambi, and she opened up to me, and Auntie, a fair amount.

We learned that she is due sometime in March, that she is seeing a doctor (Boss is helping her pay for it), and that the father isn't involved. Surprisingly, she doesn't seem too worried; some of her friends have already had children, and until recently it was fairly common in Kenya for 17-year-olds to give birth. The rise in education, and particularly the recent rise in education for girls has changed this. It's part of a larger cultural shift, particularly in the cities, away from traditional, polygamous culture where men would older men would marry younger women. Having more wives was a sign of status.

Polygamy and early marriage for girls has become less common in part due to Christian missionary work (though it does still exist within the context of Christianity -- the President of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki is a great example; he has two wives.) and through the increase in education of girls.

Teenage girls in Kenya are thus in a very complicated position. On the one hand, there is a tradition of marriage and sexual activity at a relatively young age, and many of their grandmothers are good examples of this. Parents, though, who are supporting their daughters' educations, clearly don't want them to become pregnant, and because of the strong Christian presence in the country they encourage abstinence over safe-sex practices (it also needs to be noted that since the beginning of the Bush administration, access to birth control and sex education has markedly diminished in Kenya). While the influx of popular Western culture (hence the "Dot-Com" moniker for this generation) has a more sexually lenient influence.

It's no wonder that Njambi had no answer for me when I asked her why her partner did not wear a condom. Fortunately, she is not HIV-positive.

These pressures are some of the themes of Chalo's play, and the behavior that often results from them is the frustration of Auntie's generation, who is struggling to understand this younger generation.

Auntie is having trouble dealing with Njambi's pregnancy. On the one hand, she wants to help, and often does help, single mothers. On the other hand, she feels Njambi squandered the opportunity presented by her education -- she can no longer be in school because she is expected to raise the baby. In Auntie's mind, Njambi wasted a year of education, and a year of money, that someone else would have gladly used.

So Auntie is making a marked effort to get as many of her other girls away from Nairobi, into all-girls boarding schools, as possible. A scholarship recently became available for one or two girls at Good Samaritan, and Lucy, who was at the top of her class after her first year at the local high school near Good Samaritan, was an obvious recipient.

Lucy currently lives with her HIV-positive mother in Soweto, another Nairobi slum (named for the township in South Africa), and when Auntie said she was going to go to a boarding school, she refused. She wanted to stay in Nairobi, and transfer from the school near Good Samaritan to a school near her mother. Auntie, though, insisted she go to a boarding school. Auntie refused to allow her most talented girl to stay in the slum, where the pressures are so complicated and large and the risks are so great. (Soweto probably has a higher HIV-infection rate than Mathare.)

After a protracted argument, where for a week it appeared as if Lucy might not go to school at all, Auntie won and Lucy will start boarding school in the next few days.

I am torn about this decision. I hate to see Lucy be pulled away from her sick mother. But even her mother agrees that getting her out of the slum is very important.

I'll be back in Kenya at the end of March, and I will be able to see how Lucy is doing in the new school. By that point Njambi will have given birth. And Chalo's play will be performed in his school.

A great deal will change in the lives of those at Good Samaritan in 2005, and I will continue to follow these stories.

Until March, thank you for your enduring interest and support.

Best,
Randy