A brighter slate

It’s just past 10pm and it’s pitch dark outside. The school next door is abandoned for the day and my neighbours radio lies idle. The only sound that distracts me from reading is the dull crack of branches smacking or the tit-ta-rak of the black crows that scrape and claw for grip on it. 

It’s disrupting reminder that the roof over my head, like that of the majority of the houses in Mnarani, is made from corrugated iron.

Unlike rural areas in Kenya where Makuti (like thatched) provides the shelter on mud-huts, corrugated iron dominates urban Kenya.  In Kilifi where it appears like a small pool of tin or as a sea of iron rippling through cities like Mombasa or an ocean of rusted, warped brown and dull grey as in the slums of Nairobi.

It’s the relentless peaks and troughs that wave through roof tops of many a Kenyan home which says a lot about the country – untold juxtapositions of a developing countries ups and downs.

Kenya is one of the poorest countries in the world.  One of the continents economic and business powerhouses with a growing middle class and sizable wealth. Where huge billboards advertise to the sprouts of a new generation but tower over a desperately familiar one.

Kenya is one of the few countries where Ford car sales increased in 2008, one of the fastest growing mobile phone markets in the world, where local businesses regularly win continent wide awards for being the best.  Where some incredible houses are built on some of the most fantastic beaches in the world and a country whom is home to  the planet's  most breath-taking wildlife. 

Kenya is a famine ravaged hell-hole where existence is scrapped from the bottom of natures empty barrel on a daily unrelenting basis.  147 least developed out of 184 countries, 30,000 girls involved in Child Sex Tourism, 3 million people face starvation annually, over 1 million living with HIV/AIDS, a political instability which struggles to forget that it is it that was the cause of 1500 deaths in 2008, up 10% of GDP lost on corruption and 40% of population unemployed.

 Perhaps it’s biggest problems are 1. inequitable role of women in society – A Kenyan woman will have on average 5 children in her lifetime and with such little income for the household to survive on, the family size place’s a huge strain on survival and on the ability of the family to send all children to school – thus it is usually the boys and it cements girls to the role of child birth and to that of a housewife. The cycle continues.

 Break this cycle, girls…women, will want more and will seek employment which will increase family income, reduce family size and increase the families ability to invest in their own development.

 The other enormous problem is 2. Corruption.  Pick up any of Kenya’s big two newspapers, any day of the year, any day of the week and you’ll find a story on 'misappropriation' of funds.

 The governments self-protecting attempts to control it are appalling.  And for those who naively say that Corruption is in all countries, Barack Obama (yes some of us still believe), who’s father is from Kenya, summed it up accurately for Kenyans and anyone else who cares to listen like this:

 ‘But while corruption is a problem we all share, here in Kenya it is a crisis  – a crisis that's robbing an honest people of the opportunities they have fought for – the opportunity they deserve.’

 These are just two of the huge obstacles for Kenya to achieve equitable growth.

And while it is in fact far from a reduction of corrugated iron houses like mine that will occur over the next decade as huge troubling urbanisation will see an increase in pools, seas and oceans of rippling tin, to believe Kenya can move away from the corrugated iron inequality of huge poverty and burgeoning wealth, of a land of immense beauty and of fierce earthly hostility, of a huge income generating income industry like tourism that offers visitors a potentially amazing holiday but sometimes horrendous misery for the locals, to believe that Kenya can move away from this, I think, you do not need to be a Utopian ‘make poverty history’ idealist.

Change will only come from within* and unfortunately not from wrist band wearing concert goers. Fortunately though, the voice which announces the growing desire for a change, a change that the son of this country showed everyone is possible, is getting steadily louder.

 It is a change that is wanted, and one that is hopefully slated.

 (*Like every economy, attracting skilled and educated professionals will support change, facilitate growth and this globalisation will feed the hungry civil society - hence the role of the volunteer J!)