Feature article I wrote for the January 2009 issue of The Lutheran, the member magazine of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
Where school is a safe place
In Nairobi, Kenyan Lutherans keep girls off the streets
By Stephen H. Padre
This is a story about people, a plot and a plan.
The people are girls and young women, most of whom have lived or spent their days on the dangerous streets of Nairobi’s slums.
The plot is five acres—land that will be the site of new school facilities for the girls.
And the plan is how the Kenya Evangelical Lutheran Church is helping build the potential of both the people and the plot for its country’s future.
Ten years ago, Helen Nafula, now 20, spent her days begging to help her family meet basic needs. “Life was not good there,” she said, describing street fights with older children, robberies and police roundups.
A teacher from Pangani Lutheran Children’s Center — begun by the KELC’s women’s department in 1994 — found Nafula. She brought Nafula to the center with her mother’s permission. In the ensuing months, Pangani staff got her back in school and on the path to a stable life.
That’s the center’s mission: to take highly vulnerable girls, aged 5 to 12, off the streets and shepherd them through a yearlong rehabilitation process. Staff and volunteers from local congregations take a holistic approach, the core of which is to help the girls resume their education. In the safety and stability of the center, girls learn skills ranging from how to care for their bodies to sewing.
Today 105 girls from preschool to high-school age are enrolled at the center, supported by the regular budget of ELCA Global Mission and by special gifts to the ELCA World Hunger Appeal (800-638-3522).
Nafula, connected to the center for a decade, knows she has been transformed. “It changed me from nobody to somebody,” she said. Previously she had no direction in life, she said, but “nowadays I have a vision.” The center, she added, helped her learn to make decisions about her life and to choose what is good.
Finding a good job, Nafula said, will help her to ensure her family leaves poverty behind. To that end, she is finishing high school and wants to study law at the university. The law, she added, is a way to “help people to solve problems in society.”
Lucy Wambui, 7, was brought to the center when violence erupted in early 2008 following Kenya’s December presidential election. Fighting forced her family from their home. In October 2008, Wambui was still at the center while her family remained in a temporary tent outside their old neighborhood, waiting until it’s safe to return.
For now, Pangani provides a safe place for Wambui. On one afternoon last fall, young girls raced or jumped rope while older girls sat in small groups in the shade socializing. All anticipated a trip the following week to a camp on a lake north of the city. The camp offers fun, relaxation and in-depth skill-building on such topics as avoiding pregnancy and how to socialize with boys.
Based at a Lutheran congregation, the center has a dormitory and drop-in center in two other buildings scattered across a Nairobi neighborhood. The congregation’s sanctuary functions as a classroom for the girls during the week.
The center will move to more spacious quarters after leaders develop the five-acre plot, bought in 2002 in a nearby suburb of Nairobi. Using a grant from the ELCA, the center has already installed water utilities at the new site, which will also include a vocational training center for older girls.
Mary Mshana, the center’s director, said the plan for a new building is part of the church’s vision, not just for Pangani but for the country. “Supporting children is supporting the nation because that’s where change starts,” she said.
