Creating Community Ties to Improve Lives by Emily Kovar

Another important component to my work in Kenya was the time I spent with the street youth at Tumaini Day Center. Their resilience, tenacity, and curiosity are traits that can be found anywhere, but the way they exhibited those qualities while simultaneously surviving through their own unique life challenges, is something I have never witnessed before. The young men were so anxious to learn everything that was presented to them. They had a ferocity to acquire education and experience-they wanted to absorb everything possible. These boys are unlike any young person I have ever encountered. During the workshop I helped present on integrated pest management, I was only able to communicate about half of the concepts in Swahili, but that did not keep them from inquiring further into aspects of the talk they did not understand. Through team efforts of the boys who understood different parts of my presentation and my own broken Swahili, we were able to piece together the majority of what I had attempted to  convey earlier. Their desire to learn overcame any language, race, or gender barrier that separated us.

The admirable work done with Eldoret street youth at Tumaini Day Center is complemented by the incredible opportunities Imani Workshop creates for HIV+ men and women in town. It was a true privilege to have representatives from this organization frequent the IU House to sell their products. This allowed me to develop a friendship with one of the managers there. She helped me not only improve my Swahili, but also helped me visualize what an effective local NGO could look like. The operations were indisputably inefficient, but that was exactly their intention. By deliberately designing products that require meticulous construction and numerous hands to create the single item, Imani Workshop could hire more people than the average organization making similar products. To keep costs low, they sourced their materials from recycled items from the local hospitals and made other resources from scratch as often as they could. These organizations are encouraging examples of how local communities can use their own capacity to build themselves up with little to no outside assistance in order that they may retain their autonomy. Tumaini and Imani both utilize their resources and agency to create community ties and improve the lives of their neighbors.