2012–06–05
We were asked to go with Beldina to Manyatta, Kisumu’s biggest slum, while we were still trying to figure out how to split our time between the MVP team and the Millennium Cities Initiative. Beldina is the nice woman running the MCI in Kisumu, who has welcomed us more as sisters than as interns. So in our very first day she took us to Manyatta, just for us to have an idea of what a day in MCI was and to start meeting some people. And it was totally great. And it provided us with the first reflections for the summer. Manyatta community had prepared an event to launch a cleaning initiative in their neighborhood. The first activity consisted in sweeping the ground outside the houses and small businesses, armed with traditional brooms, plastic gloves and masks. First reflection. It’s great to see how many people got involved, men and women, even if it was more a symbolic thing than an actual cleaning. Second reflection. The fact that the ground was totally full of trash (recent and very old, making part of the ground), made us realize how many problems of all kind could be solved if there was a bin outside each of the houses and a basic system to collect them all a few days per week. The lack of such a system in Manyatta has apparently make people live among their trash for years.
