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Kenya: Kibera Slum, Nairobi
Otieno is a night watchman who lives in Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa. He works six or seven nights a week and sends some of the proceeds back to his village where his wife and five children live. This small amount supplements whatever his wife can raise from the small plot of land, which has decreased in size with every new generation. Once a year, he goes home on annual leave and spends time with his family. He takes with him what little money he can but expectations exceed what he can provide. He occasionally thinks about moving the family to the city but school fees are too high and his three-metre square mud and iron sheet rented room would be too crowded. He is not sure he wants his children to grow up in the city. He envisages the day when he will retire from the security firm and go back to his rural home.
Mary is 17 and still in school. She lives with her parents, two sisters and an aunt in a two-roomed house in Kibera. The rooms are very small and she has no privacy but she knows she is better off than most. Her best friend has just told her that she is pregnant. She was living with her parents, brothers, sisters and uncle in a single-roomed house. In the end she needed to get out. She now lives with a man in another part of Kibera but wonders how long it will last. She thinks he has a family in his rural home but he won’t talk about it.
Mary and her friends all dreamt about going to college, getting a decent job, moving to a better place, but some gave up on the dream a long time ago. It is easy to lose hope and sometimes the pressure to get out of the home is too much and succeeding in school is difficult when there is no place to study. Her mother sells charcoal for a few shillings from the roadside and cooks for her father who returns each evening from casual work in the industrial area of the city. Sometimes he has had no work and brings no money. Sometimes he says he has no work but the smell of alcohol tells another story. Her parents speak of returning to their rural home, but Mary has no sense of belonging in the village. Her future and hope lie here in the city.
Mary and Otieno are both fictional characters but their stories echo the experience of tens of thousands of people living in Nairobi’s slums or informal settlements. Urbanisation has changed many things in African society but perhaps most telling is the reconfiguring of family life as ancient social patterns give way to the new realities of the city. It is not just an issue for the urban poor. Rich and poor alike find that their connectedness to rural roots and traditional society are weakening; extended families give way to nuclear families and traditional roles for children, men and women are renegotiated in the dynamics of the city. Of course, change inevitably results in loss but also the emergence of new possibilities. For some women, the release from traditional roles is liberating – bringing with it the possibility of new horizons. For some – particularly the affluent – cities offer opportunities for recreational activities as a family, whilst for others intertribal marriages break down old barriers.
It is in the midst of this shifting cultural landscape that the Church is called to discern God’s leading and respond with faith and renewed imagination. That is not easy. In some communities in Nairobi, female-headed households – devoid of a permanent male figure – are the most common expressions of family life. How does the Church affirm values of marriage and yet create much-needed communities of hope, love and acceptance in contexts where those commodities may be in scarce supply? How do you pass on some of the values of traditional society in contexts where the generations have separated – creating cultural, geographic and even linguistic distance between youth and the bearers of tradition: the grandparents?
In the context of the city, marriage and family become terms open to greater plurality of meaning, where roles are more negotiated than fixed. Perhaps one of the great challenges of urbanisation is that the social capital of family, village and clan are no longer as available in the city. Loving the neighbour, who in the village is my relative, is very different to loving the stranger who is my neighbour in the city. As traditional ties are lost, increasingly people look to the Church as their ‘neighbour’. Churches are having to find ways of supporting families where traditional systems of support are no longer in place. When faced with very diverse expressions of ‘family’, the desire of churches to protect values that are feared to be threatened or lost, risk actions which may hurt or exclude the most vulnerable.
St Jerome Anglican Church in Kibera particularly noted the challenges facing many young people. Overcrowded homes provide little space or opportunity for study and so many could not compete with colleagues in other areas of the city and dropped out of school even before completing primary education. In the competitive market of the city, they found themselves with stunted hope and little opportunity. The church’s first response was to establish a homework club as a safe environment to study. From the start, the parents were involved. With a generator for electricity and a donation of text books, over 60 children find that for five evenings a week they have a place to study. For those like Mary it is a chance to cling on to dreams.
The club soon found that study was not the only need and it now provides recreational activities, Christian teaching and guidance. In some ways, the Church finds itself involved in shaping the lives of young people in ways which were once left to the wider family. For many families with only one parent, the income is not available for schooling and so children simply drop out for lack of funds. Where possible, the Church now finds bursaries to assist girls to pursue secondary education. For other young people, an apprenticeship programme has been developed, enabling some to gain employment. Again the training is linked to Christian discipleship as people discover what it means to live with hope in every dimension of their lives.
Cities can appear to be the scourge of families, particularly when urban life seems so synonymous with the decline in the patterns of traditional living which have sustained communities for generations. But the city is also the place where the stranger can become the neighbour, where new expressions of community can flourish and where the hope, security and love, which are the marks of family life, can be nurtured and felt in the midst of the diversity of urban life. It is for those like Mary that churches such as St Jerome’s seek to support families in the challenges of city living, helping build and strengthen communities where hope becomes not a dream, but a thing of substance.
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