Work Details

I am such a sellout. In my defense, I didn't have much of a choice, but nonetheless, and a sellout. After just spending the last 4 days and three nights in a hotel on the beach, I feel like a contributor to the cycle of poverty in Mombasa. MUHURI hosted a workshop for VIP stakeholders in the prison system - commissioners, magistrates, Officers in Charge - from all around Kenya, and the some 60+ of us were all hosted in a gorgeous hotel on the beach. It was absolutely lovely, but it's so bittersweet, living a life of luxury with hot showers and a beach-front view, then coming home to cold water in a bucket for bathing and being cautious of how much food I eat.

Thought I should explain a little bit about what I"m acutally doing here, since it's been 3 weeks and I have yet to do so. I'm an intern for Muslims for Human Rights (MUHURI) who is a very well known, very estabilshed NGO that works in the Coastal Province of Kenya. They have three different projects going on, and Im working on the newest component of their Prisons Reform Project, the childrens outreach program. Street kids in Mombasa are being rounded up by the police, charged with loitering or some trumped up accusation of crime, and since Kenya's legal system really lacks the means to deal with youth offenders, most are thrown into prison with adults while their trials are going on, usually for months at a time. As you can imagine, the worst happens to them in these situations, so MUHURI stepped up a couple of months ago and is getting them into a Remand Home with other youth.

This is all completely not what I thought my time would be spent doing, but I work with one other paralegal whom I adore, named Rweidah (pronounced Roo-ade-uh, but we call her Roo), and travel to all the prisons, screening new children remands and working to get them into the remand home. This place, mind you, resembles nothing of a home. It's really 2 cinderblock/tin-roofed buildings with 2 more under slow construction on 1/2 an acre of sandy land. There's one tree on the whole lot and an unguarded gate surrounding it all. The kids sleep on 4" foam mats on the ground in one of the buildings which has a wall dividing the girls and boys side. Of course, there are more kids than sleeping mats, so most share or sleep on the hard-wood floors. My first visit was an odd experience: there's absolutely no structure to their days, and at 10:30 that day, they had yet to have breakfast. At night, they're locked into the sleeping rooms because the home doesn't have night security, so they leave them there alone locked up. If it rains, which is often, they generally go back to their dorms and sleep. The day before I arrived, MUHURI provided some paper and pencils for them to draw with, and I've never seen kids so excited to show off their artistic skills, bombarding me with Kiswahili descriptions of their amazing sketches.

My project is going to be converting their "dining hall," which is really an empty room with removable benches, into a multipurpose room. We'll have a work weekend and paint the whole thing, giving the kids the chance to paint murals on the walls, and get a chalkboard, bookshelves, and tables so that volunteer teachers can come and continue their education while their locked up for months at a time. Roo also does rights workshops, educating the kids on their rights in and out of court so they are not charged again, since most of these kids are 'repeat offenders.' Understand, though, that the streetkids have run from something...some are IDPs, displaced by the post-election violence, some come from abusive homes, other from various circumstances that leave them few options other than surviving on the streets, which they're very good at. They're a great group of kids, and will have the chance to school me in futbol this week :) Once again, when I get computer access at work this week, I"ll try and upload photos.

Would love to hear some summer updates. Hope you're finding plenty of time to relax.
Thanks for reading.