VISITING THE LARGEST HIDDEN SLUM IN THE WORLD
David Stewart SJ the Director of the Xavier Volunteer Programme (XVP) recently visited a slum on the outskirts of Nairobi When dawn breaks here at 4 degrees south of the Equator, the verb is appropriate: it breaks, comes in a few minutes with hardly any sense of transition from night to day. But Nairobi's people are up already. Half the city seems to be walking, some of them jogging, along the broad bumpy red shoulder of the highway, heading for work or looking for work. Raking sunshine sharpens the African light and the smoke from wood and charcoal cooking-fires, and the filthy exhausts from death-trap mutate minibuses running on shoddy fuel.
This new day will be like yesterday. The sun will shine hot again and no rains will fall and the harsh struggle to live and support a family will be just the same, unless it's worse. Kibera, probably the continent's largest slum, will reek again as the temperature rises and the open sewers stagnate and stink. People struggle daily. There is no sign of an escape-route for so many in the slums, permanent refugee camps for these forced migrants from human dignity. Yet people are gracious, polite, welcoming. Some children will cry, 'Mzungu!' (white person) and ÔHow are you?', but will smile and giggle as they do.
There is much that would keep you from going anywhere near Kibera, on the outskirts of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. It's a slum, probably Africa's largest. It hardly appears on city maps and, even if it does, you would never gather that it is home to something between 800,000 and 1.25m people. It might be shown as a small suburban district of Nairobi, but the road into it is hardly signposted. The population figure is approximate because Kibera slum doesn't officially exist. Homes are tin-roofed shacks; pungent sewage streams run along the litter-blown mud streets and there is at best minimal servicing such as electrical power, let alone clean mains water. Social challenges are rife; sadly, there is a very high HIV infection rate. Even those young people who are not infected are still HIV victims and Kibera is full of them - children left without parents and without hope of a continuing education. Sub-Saharan Africa has more than 11 million AIDS orphans already. But nobody knows the exact statistic here because nobody knows even how many souls live in Kibera.
St Aloysius Gonzaga Secondary School, one of the world's newest Jesuit schools, was established here in Kibera in January 2004, in two simple rented rooms in the shacks. St Al's, as it has quickly become known, is there to bring quality education, in the Ignatian tradition, to the teenagers of the slum, many of whom are affected by HIV, because they are orphaned, because their parents are infected - or because they are infected. There are at least 10,000 secondary-age youngsters in Kibera, of whom three-quarters are not in school. The focus of St Al's is to provide bright primary school pupils, from very poor backgrounds, with the chance of completing a secondary education. In the Ignatian tradition, this is an ducation for life', in which the potential that lies within each young person is given the chance to flourish, for the greater common good. These young Aloysians may well be the leaders of the future.
An innovative feature of the project is that it is a partnership between the East African Jesuits and the Kenyan Christian Life Communities (CLC), a world-wide organisation of lay people living out Ignatian spirituality and principles in daily life. CLC groups meet regularly to share their prayer and their life, but then also move outwards in personal and shared mission. Some of the Kenyan CLC had been sponsoring 12 students attending a nearby secondary school until costs became too much. In late 2003 they discerned that they had to open their own school and St Al's was born.
They had one month to find money, rooms, teachers and select the first batch of pupils; the school year in Kenya begins in mid-January. Fr Terry Charlton SJ, the CLC National Chaplain and one of the key founders of St Al's, recalls the moment when the decision to start a new school was reached: 'I spent a few moments in prayer and experienced a call to step out in faith. It seemed to me that the project was risky and could fail, but there was so much possibility for good.'
Remarkably, it all came together in time and so St Al's began with a roll of 56 pupils in two forms. In 2006 there are 196 students, drawn from over 500 applicants, and in November 2006, St Al's celebrated its first graduations. A ratio of about 60% girls to 40% boys is maintained because girls are not normally given a fair chance in education. The curriculum over the four years of secondary education broadly follows a British model, leading to Cambridge A-levels. Teachers are all professionally trained and qualified; a strong extra-curricular programme has been built in from the beginning, ranging across sports (using donated equipment from Canada), music and dancing and participation in a Kibera community clean-up event.
Now there are ambitious plans for a completely new school. A better site has been obtained. Fundraising has commenced, and building could start as early as 2007. If this succeeds, the eventual capacity will be 420 students. It might even be possible that the British Jesuits international volunteer programme, XVP, send suitably qualified young people to St Al's for six-month or longer service periods.
St Al's, Kibera, recently became a partner to St Aloysius College, Glasgow, its namesake. Future editions of Jesuits and Friends will report on how that develops. The Jesuit saint who is the patron of each of these schools, St Aloysius Gonzaga, left the safety of the Roman College in 1591 to care for the victims of the plague in the streets of Rome, catching the disease himself and dying at the age of 23. Now he is the patron saint of AIDS sufferers, as well as of young people. May his prayers and intercession bring success to St Al's, Kibera and to all the wonderfully gifted young people who study there.
