Dear Readers and VAP supporters! We take this opportunity to thank you for your continous donations that has really madei signifant mark in the many lives of the young girls here in Nairobi.As we are approcahing the christmas season,we have organized a Mrembo (Beauty) girls soccer tournament to wrap up this year.The tournament will involve all the schools that have been participating in the Mrembo (beauty) program as well as other teams from the community.The tournament will characterized with sexual health reproductive awareness activities that has been the core activity of Mrembo program. As you enjoy reading the attached newsletter,we wish you and your families a great christmas holiday and a happy new year full of prosperity.Again thanks alot for your continous and unwaering contribution. Enjoy!
Dear our esteemed readers and donors,
First I would like to express my utmost THANKS for your generous support that has really made us to be a successful organization that has been walking the talk of our core mission and vision. Attached please find out our quarterly newsletter that has all the activities that has been happening within the community that we serve. All these couldn't be possible without your unwavering support.While you read this newsletter, I want to wish you all the BEST in your endeavors.
Yours Project Director
Nancy Waweru
Last week I attended the Mrembo project graduation ceremony - which prepares girls for adolence and arms them with the wisdom about their bodies that will help them make better life choices.
VAP's founder, Enouce Ndeche, grew up in the slums of Kamukunji and played soccer addictively. I’ve known him for 3 years. Last year, I remember asking him where he got the idea to start this organization:
“I was volunteering with special olympics and one of the counselors gave me the idea – that one can impart life skills through sports.”
And for the last 7 years, Enouce changed his focus from getting noticed as a footballer to getting his fledgling organization noticed by funders. He’s had a few lucky breaks, but it have been a long hard slog from obscurity in a slum seldom heard of by outsiders.
Over the years VAP has gotten it’s fair share of capacity building support from CARE’s sports for social change network, and the occasional foreign NGO worker that visits the project and donates from his or her own pocket. VAP got introduced to GlobalGiving in 2006 along with CARE’s whole network of Kenyan sports organizations. But since then, it has been Enouce who has had to approach anyone he could think of to keep funding his projects. He can name SafariCom Foundation, SONY, Coaches Across the Continent, FIFA, and now the Anti-Corruption Commission among his supporters. But none of these sticks around for long, and none has provided VAP with funding for more than 3 consecutive years.
This isn’t an anomaly; this is business as usual in the NGO world. And although the money VAP has earned by reaching out to individiuals through GlobalGiving has been a modest piece of the whole, it’s been the most consistent source year after year. That’s because as unlikely as it is for any one person to give every year, the same percentage of 200 supporters will give each year. Nancy added that their sports & HIV project was largely funded through GlobalGiving in between grants.
Enouce attracted Nancy Waweru Ndeche 4 years ago to VAP, and she has been their programatic backbone. As a program manager, Nancy keeps VAP’s two dozen coaches and community volunteers on task and on budget. Nancy also says she loves the monitoring and evaluation side of her work – figuring out whether their approach is really working to change lives.
While Enouce is a middle-aged goofy, smiling kid with great rapport with youth, Nancy is the quiet inspirational leader. She encouraged Enouce to expand VAP’s programs beyond just sports to raise HIV awareness. Now they run a life-skills after school program for 100 girls aged 8 to 14 in two Majengo slum schools called the “Mrembo Project.” Mrembo means “Beautiful” in kishahili and as Nancy explains it, “The media reminds girls constantly about their outward beauty, but unless we help them realize their inner beauty, they will grow up making poor life decisions.”
The inner beauty is something special to behold, and I’ve had the honor of seeing it at Mrembo’s graduation ceremony today. We’re here handing out certificates to 100 girls who attended weekly thursday night classes about their bodies, boys, sex, aids, rape, and what to expect when they become teenagers. Liz, a teacher and Mrembo counselor, hands me certificates as Opo (one of the VAP coaches) calls each girl’s name. I shake hands with each girl and give them the certificate. Each one smiles and courtseys politely, but it is I who feel inaequate and full of gratitude for being invited to be part of this special moment. If you know what it takes to achieve this, you would too.
In addition to her work, Nancy is also a university trained swahili teacher (my teacher, in fact) and a mother of a 2 year old kid. In addition to worrying about where the money will come next month to pay her “coaches” (who mentor hundreds of youth) their $150 stipends, she found the time to travel to these schools and lead the classes herself for the first few months. She didn’t do it because anyone told her it was a good idea, or awarded her a grant, or took duties off her already full plate; she did it because it needed to be done and nobody else was gonna do it. It is that “funders be damned” attitude about starting a program that I admire in Nancy. I’m here for all of 2011 to run the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project, of which VAP is a part – but would I have the guts to do this if I had to also get a second job to make ends meet? I doubt it.
Kudos to those who trailblaze new programs where not a single funder comes forth to ease the path – like Nancy and her team at VAP. The Mrembo project happened because a mere handful of people made it happen. What they raised ($1,600), they earned all through GlobalGiving. What they couldn’t raise, they simply did without.
The peer educators put in extra time at no extra pay to help – like when they counseled a traumatized 8 year old girl whose best friend was raped. After graduation, Head Teacher Liz wrote her mobile number on the chalk board. “I’m 24-7 if you ever need to talk to someone about rape, menses, HIV, or anything, call me,” she says. This is the face of “innovation” – it’s a labor of love, not intellectual creation. Every time a mother is there to listen to a neighbor’s kid or offers a shoulder to cry about the challenges of growing up poor in a town where aggressive guys are trying to have sex with you before you even know that sex is, you’re looking at “International Development.” Only it isn’t international anymore, or really development – it’s dealing with problems on your street. And I hope by sharing what that looks like, I can make it easier for others to keep on doing what they’re doing.
In their final Mrembo session, as part of the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project, the girls wrote stories about the challenges they face. One girl’s story went:
“Thanks to Mrembo project for teaching me about adolescence and rape and reproductive health and HIV. I want to end my bad behavior going to airstrip with boys. Now I want to find my second virginity. I was wrong but now I understand. I will give up prostitution forever.”
Another story from a girl under 14 went:
"There was a girl who was my best friend and was known as Elizabeth and we was in the same class which was class six. She have two songs and she is in a bad friendship now.
One day Eliz and I, we went to a place where was a group of people and they was some boyz who was boyfriends of Eliz. I ask Eliz, 'Eliz where are you going with that boy?'
She haven't answer any thing but Eliz, she went with a boy by bad new she slept with that boy and she get a pregnancy which was the second pregnancy. She gave up with education."
These stories are from young girls, not teenagers, yet they've witnessed rape, faced pregnancy and early marriage.
According to Nancy and Liz, these girls were quiet at first, but over 18 months it became clear they’re exposed to much more than anyone could imagine. Anyone who thinks sex-education doesn’t matter to an 8 year old needs to come here and see the Mrembo project in action. And yet it only reaches two schools, when perhaps hundreds need it.
After graduation I spoke with the Principal of this “informal school.” In 14 years of operation, they’ve gotten no government funding and they only ask the parents to pay 300 Kenyan shillings a month ($3.75). Still, half the parents can’t even scrape it together. The head teacher said, “so what can he do? I will never turn away a smart student who is working hard. It is a dilemma.” Money has to come from somewhere, but it never comes. He showed me receipts for teacher allowances – 2000 shillings a month. He admits this $24 is too small to be called a salary, but he can’t give them any more. Teachers are here because they too want the community to improve – and giving kids an opportunity through education is worth the work, even if it doesn’t pay.
Their efforts can sometime attract the wrong kind of attention. During the ceremony he made a speech about how when he took over this school 18 months ago, there were a lot of programs that he had to throw out, but that Mrembo was one of the few that remained. There were people coming here to deliver ARVs, but eventually their supply of aids-fighting drugs dried up. By the time he’d taken over the school, these people were still coming – and bringing white people to the school to show off the work they claimed to be doing, but it was a sham. He said, “Eventually I couldn’t lie to the whites anymore. No one was getting any of the medicine as these people were saying. I tossed them out. But Mrembo has been here every Thursday night for months, teaching these girls.”
It saddens me that the world is full of do-gooders that sacrifice for others who live and work alongside freeloaders that try to cash in on that generosity (by convincing whites to give them money for ARVs they’ll never distribute) – but at least I feel there are ways to know who is who. And I’m asking you on behalf of Nancy, Enouce, and all the rest who have always been making a difference – if you can spare some money (perhaps $10 a month) for Mrembo – that you do so today. Their money has dried up, and Mrembo won’t happen next fall without money for sanitary pads and transport.
It turns out that one person got the Mrembo project off the ground financially. One anonymous donor (of the 14 total) gave $1000 last year on GlobalGiving. With part of that money VAP bought a mini fridge, stocked it with sodas and sold them, raising 800 shillings each month this way. According to Nancy this monthly $10 has helped them distribute sanitary towels to the girls, but they had to stop in May. The Principal also drove home this point today, noting that girls without sanitary pads miss about 60 days of school each year.
This postcard is from a visit to VAP's Mrembo Project on May 26 20111.
Having moved to Kenya just a month ago, I was delighted to attend Mrembo’s first peer educator training on February 4, 2011. I had attended a Mrembo session a week before, and seen how well the peer educators interacted with the girls. The peer educators are passionate and 100% committed to improving girls’ lives where they live, by equipping girls with information, skills, and confidence that they would otherwise not have.
The Mrembo program was a vision of Nancy Waweru, the project director, who has experienced a young neighbor die during an abortion, and has seen numerous girls make mistakes that they would not have otherwise if they had had good role models. Nancy has recruited 13 amazing peer educators for the Mrembo program, who are now all good friends and support one another.
Nancy stressed during the training that the goal of Mrembo is to have interactive activities that initiate discussion. The information should be simple and clear, and there should no lecturing!
Mrembo is now underway, with a goal of reaching 1,000 girls. With these dedicated leaders and peer educators, Mrembo is sure to be a success.
Majengo slums is one of the slums where prostitution is on rampant. Girls as young as 11 years old exchange their bodies for as little as four dollars.
Mrembo program held a three day -November 22, 23, 25 seminar for a group of thirty six girls at Undugu Institute which is located at the heart of Majengo Slums. This came after the head teacher of Undugu requested .It came to his attention that some of the girls from the institute were engaging in prostitution. A group of six peer educators spoke candidly to the girls on topics like Relationship Sex, and Life Choices .One of the activities carried out was pressure limbo which shows how the pressure for sex increases as one grows older. And how one can avoid succumbing to the biological, social and economic pressure.
“The prevalence of young girls engaging into commercial sex is at an alarming rate here in Majengo, and most of these young girls are getting into the trap. We need more awareness programs like Mrembo so that these young girls would be informed on the repercussions.” Said Elias Ngari head teacher of Undungu Institute.
“My participation in the mrembo seminar has really equipped me with necessary life skills knowledge, information and ideas on how to stay positive and focused to achieve my dreams as a girl and also inform others”Said 18years old Sofia, a student at Undugu.
Mrembo program would additionally like to thank the schools and community centres that we partner with as well as thanking all our individual donors, corporate and not forgetting those who have been donating through Global Giving.
Project Reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
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