A couple weeks before christmas, a large group of tin shacks went up in flames and burnt to the ground. This piece of land is about a hundred metres from the Mathare Environmental Youth Centre. It was soon after discovered that the homes had been occupying public land when consulting a city council map.
The thinking gears went into immediate effect and Kaka the community leader decided that the land must be reclaimed for the public. All the youth of the area were told they should start to play football there and refuse anyone who wanted to start construction. If you see the picture above, at the bottom someone has already started construction claiming they owned the land before.
Here are some renderings from a Canadian architect named Jonah Marrs. These will be the basis for our proposal to get funding to continue this project.
On January 18th we started to clean the surface so that the youth can occupy the whole area.
It was very dusty but a lot of youth turned out to help and had things going in no time.
All ages of youth were getting their hands on shovels. It was a great way for them to identify with the area and start a feeling of ownership of the area.
Mr Kaka the mega community leader showing the kids how its done.
The area where the homes had burned down still had a lot of charcoal dust that made it very difficult to breath when shovelling. No guts - No glory is all there is to say.
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