Hi everyone!
This update will likely be one of the longest (apologies in
advance). I am more and more impressed every day with the things that Nyumbani
is doing here, so I wanted to start off the year by explaining it all
thoroughly!
Nyumbani, the umbrella organization that operates Nyumbani
Village, was founded in 1992 by Father D’Agostino, an American Jesuit priest. The
program first established Nyumbani Children’s Home, an orphanage exclusively
for HIV+ children located in Karen, Nairobi. Nyumbani later started Lea Toto, a
community outreach program that established clinics for HIV+ children and
family members in some of the most impoverished communities of Nairobi.
Nyumbani Village was opened in 2006 to provide a holistic
method of caring for members of the generations that were “left behind” by
Kenya’s HIV/AIDS epidemic: the children and parents of those who passed away
due to HIV/AIDS. In this part of Kenya, when the parents of a family pass away,
their children go to live with their grandparents. For some families, this
presents an insurmountable financial burden. Situated on 1,000 acres, Nyumbani
Village is home to around 1,000 children and around 100 grandparents who have
all encountered these tragic circumstances.
Scattered around the Village are 26 “clusters”, with 4
houses in each cluster. Each house contains a single family, which is made up
of 10 children and a single grandparent. While some of the children are the
biological grandchildren of the grandparent in the house, each family also has
children who are not related, but were orphaned due to HIV/AIDS and did not have
any grandparents to take care of them. All of the children and grandparents
come from the surrounding area, meaning that they are all from the same tribe,
Kamba. Almost all of the grandmothers (shushus) and grandfathers (umaus) speak
exclusively Kikamba, the tribal dialect. The children also speak Kikamba, but
they also learn English and Kiswahili in school, as these are the two national
languages of Kenya. All of the matters relating to the families and clusters
are handled by the Home Care department. Home Care is lead by 6 social workers
who are each assigned to 4-5 clusters, and oversee everything family-related
from distributing food to the families to dealing with conflicts within a
family.
Currently, Nyumbani receives funding from private groups
like Johnson & Johnson, as well as government organizations like USAID. The
Village is hoping to be completely self-sustaining within a few years. In order
to achieve this, there are many different programs run within the Village.
First is the medical clinic. There is a full-time medical staff including a
clinical officer, a nurse, a laboratory, a counseling center, and a nutritionist.
There is also the on-site Comprehensive Care Center for the ~100 children and 6
grandparents in the Village who are themselves HIV+. The clinic has a pharmacy
that is able to deal with a wide range of common household ailments, and there
are several more sophisticated hospitals in Kitui or Nairobi where children can
be referred if it is something more serious. The clinic is free for all
children and grandparents, but is also available for people from the
surrounding community.
There are 3 different schools within the Village. Hotcourses
Primary School is for children from nursery school age through Level 8 (the
equivalent of 8th grade). This is the largest school, with around
700 children. After Level 8, students have 2 different options for continuing
their education. The first is Lawson Secondary School, which has 317 students,
Forms 1-4. As with the clinic, school is provided to the children of Nyumbani
for free, but is also an option for a fee for the children from the surrounding
community.
The alternative to Lawson High School is, in my opinion, one
of the coolest parts of the Village. It is the Nyumbani Youth Polytechnic, which
is a trade-based school with somewhere around 140 students. The school offers
classes in carpentry, metalworking, tailoring, salon and beauty, construction, and
solar energy. Almost all new construction projects in the Village are conducted
with the help of Polytechnic students, including the current expansion of the
Polytechnic. In this sense, the school literally builds itself, which I think
is so impressive. There is a new program in the Village that allows for recent
graduates of the Polytechnic to design their own businesses, put together a
detailed proposal and budget, and apply to receive a microloan from Nyumbani to
help get their business underway.
The Polytechnic students who study solar energy help
maintain the solar gardens and solar panels that provide Nyumbani with 100% of
its electricity. There is no electric grid out here to tap into; all facilities
are powered by solar energy harvested on-site. Every cluster has solar panels
that power lights inside all 4 homes, and larger solar gardens harvest energy
that is used for lights and charging phones/laptops inside the administrative
building and the guest house. Solar panels also power the water pumps that
provide groundwater used for washing clothes.
As could be expected in a semi-arid climate in rural Kenya, water
is precious. There are two rainy seasons during the year. The first is the “short
rains” from November-December, and the “long rains” come from March-May. The
rain that falls during these months has to sustain the Village for the whole
year. Groundwater wells are helpful, but the most important are the shallow
wells dug around the Village, sand dams in the riverbed that flows through the
Village, and the Rainwater Harvesting (RW) program. RW is one of my primary
responsibilities as Sustainability Fellow. Started by Johnson & Johnson
(who also partially fund my Fellowship post), RW systems made of PVC pipe are
on every housing cluster, the administrative building, and the guest houses. Each
building has a 10,000-liter tank that holds water throughout the year. This
water is treated using ceramic filters, and is supposed to be used for drinking
and cooking. If water does not last through the dry season, there is a single
tap in the Village that is connected to the municipal water grid. Nyumbani pays
for this water per cubic meter, so water conservation throughout the year is a
top priority. My job is to monitor the existing RW systems to make sure they
are all working properly, and to oversee the construction of new RW structures.
This year I am hoping to add RW systems to the many greenhouses where we grow
produce for the Village, and on the barn where the Village keeps our livestock.
I have arrived in the Village during the busiest time of
year. Because most colleges and universities in the northern hemisphere are on
summer vacation, it is peak season for having volunteer and guest groups here
in the Village. As the Volunteer Coordinator, this means my first few days have
been nice and eventful. Guests in the Village are generally those who are
staying for a shorter period of time, anywhere from a couple of weeks to just a
few hours. While here, guests will become familiar with the goings-on in the
Village, and will help with short-term projects in the Sustainability or Home
Care departments. Volunteers must stay for a minimum of 2 months. While here,
volunteers will conduct their own, more extensive projects. For example,
currently there are 3 different volunteer groups in the Village. When a new
group arrives, my job is to welcome them, give them the tour (telling them essentially
what I’ve written in the first part of this post), and then make sure that
their projects run smoothly for the rest of their time here.
The first group is 4 graduate students from Columbia
University. They had initially planned on doing dental research, but ran into
issues gaining ethical approval from the Kenyan government. Instead, they have
been designing a dental health curriculum, and organizing a distribution plan
for basic dental supplies. There is a doctor and a medical student from Poland,
who are conducting medical screenings for intestinal parasites. Then there is a
group from Comillas University in Madrid. They have been constructing
high-efficiency stoves in each home. The stoves are made of bricks and clay,
and contain an Italian-designed metal plate that minimizes the amount of
firewood required to cook. I had the chance to spend the morning working with
them on Wednesday, when we constructed 5 of these stoves. It was hard work, but
the grandparents are really excited about the new stoves! I am really enjoying
being here with these volunteer groups. There will be times of the year when there
are no volunteers in the Village which I am definitely nervous about in terms
of loneliness, but for now I am enjoying the hustle and bustle.
I’ll wrap it up soon, but I’ll end by talking about some of
my daily routines and my living quarters. All volunteers live in the Guest
House, which is a building that has 7 bedrooms, each double occupancy. The
exception is my room, which I have all to myself for a year! There is an outlet
with a power strip in the living room of the house that people can use to
charge electronics, but, as is the case in the entire Village, there is no
running water. Each bedroom has an attached eco-toilet, which is essentially a hole
in the ground. To be more precise, it’s two separate holes in the group, about
6 inches apart. Without going too far into the logistics of using said
eco-toilet, I’ll just say that there’s definitely a learning curve.
Right outside of the Guest House is the kitchen. Because
propane is expensive and difficult to transport to the Village, all meals are
cooked over a fire. We eat all meals in the Guest House. Breakfast is usually
bread and butter or peanut butter along with chai and coffee. Lunch varies, but
usually is either rice or ugali (maize-flour and water), along with a vegetable
and either beans or lentils. Dinner is usually some type of bean and maize
dish, but on special occasions we will have meat for lunch or dinner. This past
Thursday, for instance, we had a goodbye party for a couple Kenyan interns who
were leaving, and we had a goat roast. It was delicious!
The other accommodation option (which I’m including as an
incentive to get people to visit me during the year!), is the recently-opened Kjer
House. It is absolutely beautiful. It is located in one of the highest points
of the Village, and is about as nice as any hotel or safari lodge I have seen.
It is almost fully finished, and will include its own solar generator complete
with hot running water, a refrigerator for cold drinks, and huge comfy beds. And
at $15 a night, I think it’s the best deal in Kenya. The long-term plan is to
open Kjer House as an eco-lodge to generate revenue for the Village.
Thanks for reading through this whole post! Or if you just
skimmed the whole thing, below are some pictures that show some of what I
talked about.
Feel free to email back with any questions you have about the
Village or my daily life, or just to say hey!
Miss you all,
Shan
Solar panels:
Main office building where I work:
Soccer field right in the middle of the Village. Lawson High School is back to the left, Hotcourses Primary School is directly behind, and the Polytechnic is back to the right.
One of the housing clusters:
Sunset from a walk to a nearby river
My room!
Kier House! This is where anyone who came to visit me would stay. Note how incredible luxurious it looks for such a reasonable price.
