Features > The student from the Third World slums
The student from the Third World slums
Of the 3,000,000 people who live in Nairobi, two thirds exist in slums. Sammy Gitau, who grew up in the slum of Mathare, was just one of 300,000 people crammed together in a tangle of makeshift shacks. Life was brutal. Organised crime in the form of gangs was the anarchic law, and disease was rampant. Gitau grew up with his 10 siblings in a home without running water or electricity, a place where plastic bags flung into open sewers were used in lieu of toilets.
When Gitau was 13, his father &mdash who made money selling moonshine &mdash was beaten to death with a hammer. As the eldest, Gitau found himself propelled into the position of breadwinner; a life and death responsibility. To support his siblings, he began stealing and dealing in drugs, his already sporadic education becoming nothing more than snatches of learning. In one of his rubbish rummages, though, his eye was caught by a burst of colour that reminded him of his favourite football team, Manchester United. The crest was actually that of Manchester University, and the booklet a prospectus. Inside were details of a development course that mentioned Kenya; to study there became his dream.
After a brush with death from a drug overdose, Gitau decided to use his experience to help other slum children, and set up the Mathare Community Resource Centre, fashioning classrooms from donated containers. More than 20,000 slum children, to date, have passed through the centre. And when EU officials spotted his efforts, and heard about his fantastical desire, they helped him apply to Manchester University. In December 2007, Gitau, at the age of 35, graduated with an MSc in international development project management. But what happened next?
"I promised I'd come back to Kenya and continue working on the project in the slums," Gitau says, four months later. The slum he returned to, however, was in chaos. "Everything was falling apart," he says. "The Kikuyu tribe was being massacred — that's my tribe." When young men started talking about revenge, and came to him for answers, Gitau persuaded them that revenge was not the answer. "It was an achievement," Gitau says, "but I was stressed."
He rolled with the punches, though, and plunged straight back in to the unpaid work he was doing before. Yet it was the simplest things, rather than his new education, that made some of the most immediate changes. "One of the things that really helped me was the second-hand projector I bought in the UK," he says. "They've been watching movies like Oliver. To see people laughing, I know that what I've achieved is to bring a smile to their faces." www.Marifa.org
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