Nyumbani Village – Part 1

As some of you may already know, I’ll be coming home for a few weeks in April to do some talks raising money for and awareness about Nyumbani Village. In getting ready for that I’ve been working on some presentations about what the Village is, its history, and why I think its such a worthwhile project. Continuing in the spirit of actually writing something about what I do here, the next several posts will be a draft of one of these presentations. If anybody notices factual errors, things they’d like elaborated, etc. please let me know.

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This is the story of Nyumbani Village; what it is, how it came into being, and how a 22-year old kid from Buffalo wound up building rainwater tanks there.

Nyumbani Village is located in Kenya, about three hours east of Nairobi, but the story really starts some 1500 miles away in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In 2001, just when I was starting eighth grade, seventeen street children were shot dead by police as they were scavenging for food. As AIDS decimated the adult population of sub-Saharan Africa, the number of orphans in countries like the DRC skyrocketed. There were no government or private organizations in place to help these children, nobody to feed them or care for them. And so they died just trying to stay alive. These children weren’t necessarily HIV+ themselves, but they were killed by the virus as surely as if they had been.

In Nairobi, this article caught the eye of a Jesuit priest, Father D’Agostino. In 1992, Fr. Dag, as he was known, started the Nyumbani Children’s Home in Nairobi, which today houses 106 HIV+ children ranging in age from just a few weeks to university students. In 1998, he started Lea Toto, which is an outreach program that currently cares for over 3000 HIV+ children and their families living in Nairobi’s vast slums.

Fr. Dag realized, as he read the article, that something more would have to be done if Kenya was going to avoid similar tragedies erupting on the streets of Nairobi. HIV affects far more than just those individuals who are infected with the virus. And so the idea that became Nyumbani Village was born.

The Village was created to house all those left destitute by the AIDS epidemic; not only HIV+ children but those un-infected children who had lost parents to HIV as well as some grandparents left destitute by the deaths of their children. Currently, it houses 736 children and 72 grandparents.
For a child to live at the Village, they must be a double orphan (both parents are dead), destitute, and with no extended family support available. For the grandparents its the same, destitute and with nobody who’s able to support them.

Those criteria apply to everyone in this photo, and then some

Instead of placing these children in an institutional setting, Nyumbani Village tries to recreate, as much as possible, a traditional family life for these children. To that end, each grandparent lives in their own house with 10 children, of both genders and of varying ages. In the homes, the children and grandparents prepare their own meals, do their own chores, grow some of their own food – as most any other family in the area would. They attend primary and secondary school in the Village, or train in a practical skill at the polytechnic. There is a clinic for when they’re ill, playing fields, a small shop, large farms. It truly is a village.

A primary school classroom

A girl helps with the cooking

Preparing some sukumawiki for dinner

In some ways, very different from the kitchen at home. In other ways, very similar.

Students at the Polytechnic

Some of the Polytech students' masonry projects

And the boys who built them

[For more pictures from around the Village, see here]

There is another important side to Nyumbani Village as well, one focused on tackling an issue that permeates almost all foreign aid to places like Africa. To illustrate this problem, I’m going to tell a short story about a well.
In 2002, the year after the incident in Kinshasa, the civil war that had ravaged since 1991 Sierra Leone ended. A war noted for its exceptional brutality, it left over 50,000 dead, thousands more crippled with the loss of their hands and other limbs, and millions forced from their homes. Infrastructure in the country, power and running water especially, was completely wiped out. Even today the capital, Freetown, is powered mostly by private diesel generators.
The international aid community flocked to Sierra Leone as soon as the war ended. Hundreds of organizations worked to bring food, medical attention, and other forms of relief to the stricken population. One of these organizations (UNICEF, I think) had a project building hundreds of wells in the Kono region, which is on the country’s eastern border with Guinea.
I first saw the well in question, in 2009, several years after it had been built. I was on an Engineers Without Borders trip working with a nearby clinic in Koidu. The well was not far from the clinic, in a small community who’s name I don’t remember which was mostly inhabited by those who’d had their hands amputated by the RUF during the war. There was nothing special about the well – concrete-lined and capped with an India Mk. II hand pump to extract the water. Which, some months back, had broken.

Being a group of engineers-in-training we figured that we would take a stab at fixing it. After all, that Princeton education had to be good for something.

Attempting to fix the well in question

As it turns out, that something is not pump repair. We determined that the sealing ring on the inlet valve had worn out and needed to be replaced. But we didn’t have one, and the community didn’t know where to get one, and so for want of a $1 part there’s a good chance that pump is still, to this day, broken.

That’s the story of the well – it was built, people used it, and now its broken. I tell that story because to me it underlies one of the big problems in international development, and illuminates one of the reasons I find Nyumbani Village to be such a compelling project.

The problem, The Broken Well Problem, to coin a phrase, is, as you’ve probably guessed by now, this: Lets say UNICEF builds a well. (Not to pick on UNICEF; they’re a fantastic organization and this could apply to any NGO). They even spends a few days in each community training a few people on how to maintain and fix wells, so they can throw the word “sustainable” into the title of the project proposal. But they’re a big international organization, with finite resources. When the next crisis emerges, they devote less resources to keeping up the wells or maybe they have to leave the area altogether. And then, as all mechanical systems eventually do, these wells start to break. Even if that guy with three days of well maintenance training correctly diagnoses the problem, chances are there is no supply line to bring in new parts, and little or no money to buy them if there was. I visited the office nearby where they kept a careful record of all the broken wells in the area, but there was nothing they could do about them – they had no way to get spare parts.

To put it simply, the problem is that all aid eventually comes to an end. And when it does, the community is generally stuck with the same problems they started with. Maybe even worse ones.

Solving this problem is the other half of Nyumbani Village’s mission. They’re dedicated to creating a self-sustainable, locally run community that will endure even after the foreign aid stops coming (which they expect to be 7 or 8 years from now).

Sustainable is probably competing for the most over-used adjective in the English language these days – everything, especially when it comes to development projects, is “sustainable”. Its gotten to the point where that word has lost most of its meaning, and I’m loath to use it here except that I can’t find another suitable modifier. I’d say Nyumbani is an “eco-village” except that the crunchy-granola stereotypes associated with that term seem inappropriate applied to place where nobody’s ever heard of granola. I’d say its “organic” if that term hadn’t been overused even more than “sustainable”. I’d say “permaculture” if anybody knew what the hell that meant. But since I’m stuck with “sustainable”, let me emphasize that I mean sustainable in every sense of the word – environmentally, financially, and organizationally. Not in the sense that training those three guys to fix wells in Sierra Leone made that project “sustainable”.

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To be continued. . .

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