Africa, My Passion

by Corinne Hofmann

  ‘It was all because of one seven-year-old street child that I got to know any of them. He approached my husband and me one day on the street. We could see he had been wounded and we took him in. Eventually we adopted him. But even so, he ended up back on the street in an attempt to find his little brother. That was how I first came into contact with the women who lived out on the streets. At first it was very hard to get to know them, to gain their confidence and trust. It would never have happened without the child. It took us four years to find his brother. It turned out he had been thrown into jail when he was just four years old – can you believe it? It took ages for us to get him out and then adopt him too. The poor child was delighted to get out of jail and have a mother again. Every child needs and wants a mother, no matter what colour, size or shape she might be. The main thing is to have someone you can call “mother”, someone to love you.’

  We thank her for telling us her story but we have to say our farewells because there is a Jamii Bora project to see a few hours’ drive away.

  In my eyes, for all the work she has done to help people out of poverty, for the intelligent and ingenious model she’s devised to loan money to the most desperate people in society, giving them a chance to improve their lives, Ingrid Munro deserves a Nobel Prize.

  KAPUTIEL TOWN – AN AFRICAN MIRACLE

  We’re off to visit Kaputiel Town, a unique township inhabited by former tramps, beggars, prostitutes or just poor people escaped from some slum or other. What makes them special is that they have all picked themselves up by their bootlaces and escaped poverty. Now they live in houses of their own, each with three bedrooms, running water, a bathroom and electricity. Hearing about it in advance makes it sound like a fairy tale and I’m eager to see it in real life.

  The countryside gets more open and more beautiful the further we get from Nairobi. We’re heading towards Masai country. Before long we come across the first nomadic herders with their cattle. My heart leaps: this is my Africa; I can feel it deep down. We pass hundred of grazing camels – I’ve never seen so many together before. The contrast with the hectic pace of life in Nairobi, which I’ve had to get used to over the past few weeks, is a huge relief. Far ahead in the distance we can see the flat, snow-covered summit of Kilimanjaro. Just the sight of it makes my heart beat faster and the palms of my hands go damp as my mind drifts back to 2003 when I climbed the great mountain. Looking at it now, so majestic in the distance, I can scarcely believe I once stood on the top of it. That was an adventure I shall remember all my life, even if it really was too much for me. As we ascended the peak I wondered for the first time in my life what on earth I was doing. That’s not to say that I wasn’t proud of myself afterwards. That experience, just like my trek through the semi-desert of northern Namibia, was just another challenge I had to rise to.

  We climb out of the car to feel a strong warm wind blowing in our faces. Already there are several women waiting to meet us who all throw their arms around us in greeting. There is also a tall Masai man among them. It’s difficult to understand what they’re saying, though, because the wind blows their words away and I can’t exactly stick my ear in the face of the mzee, which is what they call the most respected elders here. As far as I can work out the big Masai man seems to be the local leader. He is wearing a grey suit with a green hat and has an attractive, noble face. He stands there, his eyes watching me calmly and attentively, as he waves his stick in one direction then another, telling us, ‘That’s going to be the administration building, over there is the well, and that’s the primary school beyond it.’ He pauses for a few seconds and then adds, ‘There are already a hundred and fifty families here, about six hundred people. When all the houses have been completed and all the infrastructure is up and running, there should be some two thousand families here.’

  While he’s talking a Masai woman comes up and greets me, wearing the traditional ornaments around her neck and bangles on her arms and with a brightly coloured shawl around her shoulders. All the other women just stand around listening. The atmosphere surrounding here is very pleasant. The people in this township come from different ethnic backgrounds but live together like one big family. It seems, however, that it’s a pleasant break in their daily routine to have outsiders come and take an interest in their community. They are all obviously proud to live here.

  To live here, they have to meet certain criteria in order to be considered for a house. They all have to have come from the slums and be able to pay back all their loans through their own income. They also have to save up some capital of their own. A three-bedroomed house with a shower, running water and a few hours of electricity a day costs 150,000 shillings [€1,500] unfurnished. It may seem cheap but for the people here it means they have to work hard and save. They also have to pay a small amount of interest on their loan over ten to fifteen years. When I think back to the stories I’ve heard of women who’ve taken a year and half to save the equivalent of just €35, I can hardly imagine how these former street women and beggars managed it. But then those still living in the slums have to pay their landlords rent to keep a roof over their heads, even if it is only a rusty piece of corrugated iron, and the shacks they live in will never belong to them. The worst thing is that the real price per square metre in the slums can be more expensive that in better-off districts.

  Three Fishes – the foundation stones of Claris’s house

  First of all I’m taken to a shop belonging to a woman called Claris. She’s been part of the project from the beginning, back when it was just the fifty beggar women. She’s a sturdily built woman of about fifty with a round face, short curly hair and hard-looking eyes that reflect a life of hardship and deprivation. Her temporary shop is in a building that is intended one day to become the township supermarket. She uses the front room as the shop and the back room as her store. There’s shelving behind the counter with tubes of Colgate toothpaste, toothbrushes, soaps, Vaseline, deodorants, washing powder and even Always sanitary pads ‘for the modern woman’. Another set of shelves has tins of Kimbo lard, bottles of oil, packets of maize flour, rice, biscuits and matches, all stacked high. In front of the counter there is a jute sack full of little dry fish, with a tin can, which is obviously used to measure out each portion to sell. Next to the fish are sacks of kidney beans, tomatoes, onions and potatoes, while in the cooler rear of the shop are piles of cabbages.

  All of this obviously reminds me of the four years I spent back in Barsaloi among the Samburu when I opened a shop of my own. Back then it was the only shop for miles in the wasteland and I sold the same sorts of things Claris has on display here. I had to weigh out several hundred tons of sugar and flour by hand every day because it wasn’t packaged up back then the way it is now. I didn’t stock toothbrushes or toothpaste because the Samburu used a special wooden stick to clean their teeth, which didn’t stop them from having the whitest of teeth. And none of the women would have had a clue what to do with a sanitary towel. But maybe that has changed now too.

  Claris tells me proudly, ‘My sons and I make a good living out of this shop. I have Ingrid to thank for it all. I had been living on the street for fifteen years before she came to my rescue, inspiring me to save money so that eventually she could give me a small loan. She always had faith in me. I started out really smalltime, with just three fish, which I fried and cut up into small pieces to sell. And now look what I’ve built up from those humble beginnings.’ She waves an arm expansively around her shop before adding, ‘And that’s not all. Oh no. I’m lucky enough to have a lovely house too. Come and see. I’ll tell you how I met Mama Ingrid and what happened next.’

  Her house is very nice indeed, clean, filled with upholstered furniture, a table and chairs and a wooden sideboard, all covered with little pink or white crocheted throws. We sit down in the living room, the mzee opposite me. Before Claris can start to tell her story, the women clap and sing in praise of Jamii Bora.

  ‘Corinne, I was married but my husband turned me out be
cause I only gave birth to boys. Five boys was too many, he said. Boys only cost money. You couldn’t get a good price for them when they got married, unlike girls. He threw me and the children out of the house and we ended up on the streets of Nairobi, while he found himself a new, younger wife. I told myself, “Well that’s it, Claris, you’ll die out here on the streets.” I met up with other women in the same situation as me. There were some fifty of us, all with children, all struggling just to stay alive, year after year.

  ‘One day this white woman, Ingrid, came along and gave us some money: sometimes it would be fifty shillings, sometimes a hundred. We looked forward to seeing her because to us she meant money, and money meant food. She always brought along her little adopted street child who was keen to make friends. It was through him that we got to really talk to her, because none of us spoke English, but we wanted her to keep giving us money. After a few weeks she brought along another woman who could translate into Swahili. Ingrid told us she couldn’t go on just giving us money. If she gave us money on a Monday, by Wednesday it was all gone. One day she would go back home to Sweden and then there would be nobody to come and look after us. She told us we would have to change our lifestyle. We said, “How can we do that, when we have nothing? No money, no home, nothing but the streets where we sit and beg. Give us more money, give us shillings.” But Ingrid was convinced there had to be a way to get us off the streets. She would come up with something.

  ‘A few days later she came and told us a lorry was going to come to take us all to Soweto. “Soweto?” we said. “Where’s Soweto and what are we going to do when we get there, with nowhere to live?”

  ‘“You’ve no choice,” she replied. “The government is no longer prepared to tolerate you out on the streets. There are some VIPs coming to Nairobi and they don’t want them to see beggars on the streets. If you don’t go, you’ll be put in jail. They are putting up a big tent for you all to live in.”

  ‘None of us trusted her. We thought, maybe she’s just going to tip us all into some river. Then the lorry came and they told us that if we didn’t get in, we’d be taken off to jail. So we went to Soweto and all lived together with our children in this big tent. But you have to remember, we had all come from the streets: we had no sense of decency or respect. We spent all the time arguing and fighting among ourselves in front of the children.

  ‘After two weeks Ingrid decided things couldn’t go on the way they were. She found a separate nook or cranny for each of us. We got shacks or huts, a bed and a blanket. But she was adamant that we had to do some sort of work. “All of you must have some skill, something you can do to earn money,” she told us.

  ‘I said to her, “I come from near Lake Victoria and I know lots about fish.”

  ‘So she gave me some money and I started out with those three fried fish. Ingrid told me that every day I had to save a little and give that money to her to look after. If I did that long enough, she would lend me twice what I had saved. I wasn’t at all sure I believed her but I tried hard to save, even though it was very difficult with the tiny sums I was earning. But by the end of a year I had saved a thousand shillings and indeed she lent me double that. I could hardly believe my good fortune. I bought more little fish, fried them and sold them. At last my children could afford enough ugali to eat. A year on, I had 2,500 shillings saved, and Ingrid lent me 5,000. Before long I was able to borrow 10,000.

  ‘I can tell you, Corinne, it felt like a dream come true to have so much money in my hands. Obviously I had to spend more paying off the bigger loans, but the more I had to sell, the more money came flooding in. I got the idea of setting up a shop and with the next loan I rented and set up a market stall. Business was good and more and more of my customers wanted to know how I’d done it. I found myself giving interviews, telling people my life story. Eventually the man who owned the stall had enough and threw me out. He was jealous and thought I was being paid to talk to people. Back out on the streets I started up again frying fish and selling them, but that was no longer enough for me, so I prayed, “Dear Lord, please help me so I can get a house of my own and open a shop. Please, Lord, have mercy on Claris.”

  ‘And indeed I managed to get to the next level for a loan and got 150,000 shillings [€1,500]. With that I was able to get hold of four tiny pieces of land with stone houses on them. By the time I got to the next level I had enough to two equip two of the little houses as a restaurant offering fish, ugali, vegetable and soft drinks. One of my sons still runs that restaurant as manager. One of my other sons has got a mobile phone shop and another one is learning to be a tailor. Son number five has a stall on the market place finding jobs for housemaids. Not one of my children ever went to school but even so today they are successful businessmen. Over the years I’ve put ever more money aside until eventually I could afford a house like this,’ she says, beaming with pride.

  ‘The boy who wants to be a tailor works with me here in the shop. But when he has time, he gives other lessons in cloth cutting. We want to share our good fortune. And let me tell you, Corinne, nowadays when I go back to where I came from they all treat me with great respect and say things like, “Whatever happened to Claris? How did she get to be so rich?” They don’t understand. To tell the truth, I don’t really understand it myself. Sometimes I have to ask myself, “Are you really the same Claris who used to beg on the streets?”’

  She breaks out into laughter and we all join in.

  Hers really is an amazing rags-to-riches story, one to warm your heart, especially when you hear her tell it. There’s something infectious about the woman’s courage.

  ‘When I go back and see people in the countryside,’ she says, ‘I invite them to come for tea and tell them my story. They all treat me as if I was a government minister.’

  We all burst out laughing again.

  ‘Some of them even come down here to see this big house I have, because they can’t quite believe it. They gape at my fine furniture, and I sit there and tell them, “Yes, this is mine, my house, all earned and bought without a husband. Claris’s house!” The mzee nods and smiles and all the women standing around us burst into applause.

  ‘I tried to motivate as many people as possible back home on the shores of Lake Victoria, to get them to join up with Jamii Bora. But for most of them the office was just too far away. But then I had a chat with Ingrid and today there’s a branch up there too, all because of me. I’m really happy about that and sometimes I go up there to tell other people my story and encourage them. It’s just amazing what I’ve been able to do with my life thanks to this organisation. Even my sons sometimes can’t believe it and pray to God that it will all continue.

  ‘There’s one last thing I want to say: I am determined to help others and be charitable. When I see hungry children or old people back home in the Rift Valley I always give them some maize flour, because I can never forget the times when I was dependent on others. That is my way of giving thanks to God for getting Claris off the streets. And another thing: if my husband back then hadn’t thrown me out I would never have achieved all this. I’m rich and my boys have all done well. I have had good fortune. May God bless Mama Ingrid and Jamii Bora so they can carry on helping people.’

  Once again everybody is singing and clapping as we make our way to the house of the next woman I am due to interview.

  How Jane got out of prostitution

  Jane wears a flame-red sport shirt over her skirt and her thick hair stands out in a halo round her head. She is young with a genuine, open smile. But she has a scar running from her forehead down to the side of her nose. It is most noticeable when she is speaking. But when her eyes light up and she breaks into laughter, you hardly notice it at all. Jane’s house is superficially similar to Claris’s but the decoration is more striking. Pink is the dominant colour. The furniture is all covered with pink throws while the walls are decorated with white embroidery hangings. There’s a modern electric sewing machine in one corner.

  We sit
down on the upholstered furniture round the table to listen to Jane’s story. I continue to be amazed at how frank women here are in telling their life stores. They aren’t put off even by the presence of the elderly Masai gentleman. It seems nobody here is embarrassed by anything.

  ‘I had a traditional wedding in Nakuru when I was just eighteen,’ Jane starts by saying. ‘I had my first baby when I was nineteen – a little girl. A year later I was pregnant again. My mother took ill when I was heavily pregnant and I had to go and help her with the housework. So I had my second baby in her house. A week later my mother was dead. First of all I had to organise her funeral before I could return home to my husband with the two children. But when I got home I got a terrible shock. While I’d been gone, my husband had married another woman and brought her home to our house to live with us. At first I tried to get along with my “co-wife” but she was very rude to me and my children. After six weeks I took my two little girls and moved out, travelled to Nairobi and found somewhere to live in the Mathare slum.

  ‘But with two little girls to look after I couldn’t get a job. Nobody would hire me and so as a last resort the only thing I had to sell was my body. Lots of young mothers end up doing the same thing. I got together with some other women – there was just over two hundred of us – and together we did it properly: we started a properly organised sex business. I lived with five other women in one house and we all helped each other out. It wasn’t an easy life but we made money. From 1995 to 1998 that was how I lived, doing this job, even when I got pregnant again. If you don’t work, you don’t eat.