White Thoughts.

Everything is an ecosystem; everything we do has an impact somewhere, and affects the lives and well-being of other living creatures. At the other end of our action lies Africa, where climate change and unsustainable living habits directly change the world of thousand of people. Plastic, metal and paper wastes cover the streets and the fires made out of these piles fill the air with dense smoke that make you out of breath.
Since we got here and introduced our way of living, our innovations, Africa bears a scar of underdevelopment and underachievement of what we believe so strongly in, like our medicine, our democracy, our sanitation. We therefore all travel with a sense of responsibility towards these people, who we know suffer indirectly and directly from our everyday action here and at home; we need to fix what we fucked up.
But our way is not always the best way, and sometimes the involvement of keen and motivated and oh so generous NGOs bring deception and a feeling of treason towards the whole east to those people that have been promised many good things.
There are two major slums in Nairobi, each housing around a million informal settlers living in conditions of extreme poverty. The most famous of all, Kibera, has been visited by stars and holds many UN-Habitat pilot projects, like road and infrastructure construction, sanitation block implementation...These project were put in place after the examination of the needs of a neighborhood in the informal settlement (Soweto-East) by UN, when they decided than a road would allow better access for external help. For the construction of that road, some hundred of house/walls were demolished. It's been three years, and the UN workers are nowhere to be seen. A deep feeling of treason and anger towards everything Western is shared by the settlers, who were promise so much. Meanwhile Mathare "suffers" from low recognition of the international community. The projects build there are bottom-up, and not top-down. The community sets up projects they know are needed, and build a strong sense of giving back. We don't know best. These people do, and when walking through these two neighborhoods, Mathare breathes hope, cooperation and unity. Kibera felt hopeless. And even though the two have the same living conditions, and neither succeed better in bringing the community basic needs, love, joy, friendship, collaboration and emotional help of these people is best served by initiatives from their neighbors.
In Kisumu, the selected first and original city of the Millenium Cities Project (M.C.P.), the community has come with similar intiatives. The Jua Kali (meaning hot sun and damn, it is a burning sun) group bears a 1000 steel workers. It is a giant open air garage, made of informal settlers that changed their living conditions and escaped a little bit poverty by uniting and setting rules. It is not even close to be rich, or secure, but the little bit they achieved in ameliorating their living conditions by themselves is uplifting for anyone visiting them. They've been promised some security infrastructure from M.C.P., that they await with great excitement. It might not have been a promise, but even just the discussion of a possibility that is not followed-up can be detrimental for their faith in external aid. I really hope they will receive what they deserve and what has been told. Because making impossible promises to people that were hopeless is a major cheat. And apparently it is a major Western habit.