A Valley of Hope in Nairobi
by Clarice KingHow does a sixty-six-year-old woman get to the slums of Nairobi? How does God give a non-expert in urban community development a vision for work among the criminals, ex-offenders, and drug addicts of the Mathare Valley?
My journey began in Newark, New Jersey in 1978 with volunteer service in Essex County Jail. By 1983, I had worked in three other county jails and completed a year's internship at the Edna Mahn Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton, New Jersey. Here was my Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria.
In 1984, I was introduced to Africa Inland Mission (AIM) and commissioned as one of their inner city missionaries. In that same year I began working with the Achor Drug and Prison Ministry Project started by the Community Baptist Church of Love in Paterson, New Jersey. Achor was a fitting name for the ministry. God had promised in Hosea 2:15 to make that "Valley of Trouble" (Achor) into an open door of hope.
In 1993, at the age of sixty-one, I found my "ends of the earth" and a second Achor, the Mathare Valley slums. With a young woman I had discipled during her incarceration at the Edna Mahn facility, we journeyed to Nairobi, Kenya for a two-month volunteer program under the supervision of AIM and the Africa Inland Church. I have been there since.
In what sense is the Mathare Valley another Achor?
The Challenge of Mathare Valley
Mathare Valley is not the largest of Nairobi's slum areas, but it is the most densely populated. Five hundred thousand people are squeezed together, living in tiny shanty-type mud huts about eight by ten feet, in an area three kilometers long and a little less than a kilometer wide. Within it live people full of frustration, resentment, anger, fear, and hopelessness. Mathare Valley is a mini-city within the city.
Many slums have light industries (or jua-kali), in which a person displays goods or even sets up a little business in the open air.
Dressmaking and tailoring are very popular in Mathare Valley, along with hair dressing and kiosks (small shops), including butcher shops, vegetable stands, and small restaurants (referred to as "hotels"). Tasty dishes are served almost anywhere you walk through the Valley. Even second hand clothing and shoes are sold here. In some areas with electricity, enterprising young men have turned kiosks into video halls, where children and adults go for entertainment for a few shillings.
Several churches are now emerging and many of them have started informal nurseries and primary schools. There are also several privately owned dispensaries located in different areas of the Valley.
For many who live in Mathare Valley, this is their metropolis. Many of the younger children have not even been out of the Mathare Valley. One of our young men told me that as a little child, he did not know that there was any place other than Mathare Valley. It was his own little world until he started secondary school.
Mathare Valley has its commuters who leave the Valley very early in the morning for jobs downtown and in other parts of the city. Some are construction workers, janitors, gas attendants, cooks, domestics, and guards in businesses and private homes. Some work in offices, banks, churches and non-government organizations (NGOs). A few older people have even bought and sold property outside of Mathare Valley: they have land and homes in the rural areas.
Even though I had ministered in the slums of New Jersey and visited slum areas within New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, I was not prepared for what I saw on my first visit to Mathare Valley, I can recall some college students from New Jersey who visited us in the Valley in 1996. As we took them into the area where our Project is located, one of the young women began to weep. As we went further down into the Valley, her weeping turned into uncontrollable sobs as she passed piles of garbage like miniature mountains. Unattended animals, toddlers, children, and adults were rummaging through these garbage heaps. What a shock it was to her, as it was to me on my first visit. A putrid, foul odor is ever present because of the garbage piles and the open sewer trenches filled with animal and human waste. These flow everywhere and seem to encircle each dwelling place. A pastor who has a church within the Valley took an individual who lives in Nairobi to visit one of his projects. As the visitor was leaving she said to him, "I would rather die than live here."
Along the banks of the Nairobi River that flows through the Valley, carrying with it all types of garbage and waste, men and women, young and old, are brewing chang'aa. They use the disease-infested water to make the deadly brew. Chang'aa, an illicit brew made and sold in the Valley, is considered an alternate way to make a living instead of mugging and robbing. Many of Achor's young men and women are involved. The young women sometimes brew it and sell it, along with their bodies, in their tiny huts. Many of these huts are turned into bars for customers, to pay rent and buy the family's meals.
Mathare Valley consists of four levels. The first level is near the main road and has stone buildings much more costly than the shanty huts. They have rooms for small businesses and for living quarters. The second level is a combination of stone structures and shanty mud huts. On the third level are a few stone structures built by individuals and tiny mud shanties. It is on the rooftop of one of these structures that Achor is housed.
Then there is the fourth level, which is at the bottom of the valley. Here the little shanties located along the river are even more tightly squeezed together. During the rainy season the river will overflow, homes are destroyed, and entire families are swept away by the raging river. Waste from the buildings of the upper levels rushes down into this section of the Valley, adding to the already accumulated filth and human excrement.
Because of these unsanitary conditions, infant and child mortality rates are very high. Typhoid, cholera, hookworms, and dysentery are common diseases among the children. And even though there are several private clinics and dispensaries, most give very poor medical attention to their patients.
There is a high rate of prostitution, drug addiction, and alcoholism, along with a low level of literacy, the major cause of unemployment and idleness among the youth. All this has contributed to Mathare's high crime rate, along with the presence of many criminals who use Mathare as their hideaway from the law.
If I were to compare Mathare Valley to the slum areas of the U.S., I would say that they all have the same negative elements. There is child neglect, abandonment and wife abuse, drugs, and alcoholism, prostitution, school dropouts, rapes, murders, fear, rage, frustrations, and a high crime rate. All these elements are a part of inner city living regardless of where that city is located. It is not a problem only among a certain ethnic group. What makes the "third world" countries the hardest hit is the unbelievable poverty that easily exceeds what can be found elsewhere.
Reaching the Unreached in Nairobi
Missions' aims are to reach the unreached and the Mathare Valley contains many of them. There are churches all around them yet they are still unreached. And beyond the Valley there are others also.
Refugees
Nairobi is now overflowing with many refugees from her war-tom neighbors of Rwanda, Somali, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. They are all crowded into an already overflowing city along with many who have migrated from the rural areas of Kenya looking for a better life, but experiencing the same disappointments as immigrants in the US They face despair and even greater poverty than in the rural areas they have left.
The Street Children
And there are the barefooted street children in tattered, filthy clothing, roaming the main streets of downtown Nairobi amidst lavish skyscrapers, hotels, and modern buildings. Daily they seek any path they can to survive. Mothers with infants strapped to their backs or sucking from their breasts sit along the curbs begging, alongside the blind, the lame and the con artist. Dangerous criminals also stalk the streets looking for easy prey.
Many projects and ministries have been developed to aid the street children, orphans and HIV-AIDS children. Organizations like Childlife, UNICEF, Compassion, World Vision, and Undugu are just a few that could be mentioned. In many of the slum areas, churches have set up nurseries and informal schools, training projects and feeding programs. Some have even provided education in general health and hygiene, small business loan projects, special projects for single mothers, and dispensaries. Several homes for orphans and live in projects for street boys and girls are located in the slums as well as in rather plush areas of Nairobi. But the plight of the children in this capital city is ever worsening.
Criminal Population
People's hearts go out to little children with their swollen stomachs and their tiny bodies showing evidence of acute malnourishment, and rightly so. They must be given every chance to survive into adulthood. But society usually feels no compassion for the criminals, those whom I have termed the "Whosoevers."
In every slum, every ghetto, and even in our suburban and plush areas all over the world, there are the "Whosoevers," the unreached whom God also wants us to reach. But, for many reasons, people's hearts will not go out to them. Folk feel that they don't need projects to help them, only prisons to restrain them for awhile. But when their time is up, they will be back out, even more dangerous than before. It is in the world's slums that they are most evident. They cannot be ignored.
The Ministry of Achor Mathare Valley
In this setting there is a place of hope. Achor Mathare Valley is a multifaceted program for recovering drug addicts, ex-offenders, and women who are or have been involved in criminal activity. The Achor project is a Christian ministry that deals with all the needs of the individual - spiritual, physical, emotional, economic, social and educational. The name Achor (which means trouble in Hebrew) comes from Hosea 2:15: "And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope: and she shall sing there as in the days of her youth, and as the day when she came up out of Egypt."
The project builds around a transformation period of no less than eighteen and no more than twenty-four months residence. The length of time is determined by the person's spiritual growth and adjustment to his or her new life. During this time residents are taught a trade and instructed daily in Bible studies. Door-to-door evangelism, open air crusades, youth fellowship meetings, and keshas (overnight prayers) are a part of the program. The more a person is exposed to the Word and surrounded by spiritually stronger peers, the more easily transformation takes place.
I prefer to use the word transformation instead of rehabilitation because Jesus does not want us to be the way we were, but the way God intended us to be. Rehabilitation means to make again as one was - but it's the way we were that caused the trouble in the first place. It is God's will that a change of our thinking and character takes place completely, making us new creations in Christ, our minds renewed in a spiritual transformation (Romans 12:2).
When people know who they are in Christ, they are able to deal with the hardships, the disappointments, frustrations and circumstances of their surroundings. As one young man told me during an interview, "I want to be able to see beyond what faces me, and realize God's purpose for my life." This he has been able to accomplish during his stay at Achor.
There is a great need for economic strength among them, and so small business assistance is made available when residents have successfully completed the program. A small amount of money is saved for each of them every month so that when they graduate, they have something with which to start a small business. Others have been able to complete and even continue their education because of sponsorship that the Lord has provided through individuals who have visited the project. At the present time we do not have any local funding. The project is operated with a small pension that I receive monthly and from funds generated through our carpentry and tailoring workshops.
A pastor once asked me why I did not try and develop a project for orphaned children, which gets funding easily. People properly feel that they are investing in the future and giving a child a chance. "But what chance is there for a person who has been involved in crime most of his or her life?" This is a question several people have asked me over the many years of ministry to the "Whosoevers." "A project to aid criminals and addicts? People just would not be interested." To try a project such as this in Nairobi was unheard of. There aren t any detox facilities for such people or even halfway houses. People just don't want to give to people they fear may one day harm them or already have.
Could this have been one of the reasons Jesus wept over the city (Luke 19:41)? He knew there would be places where darkness would so prevail that his people would overlook them. Even sadder, people would be more concerned about their own protection and safety than about reaching out and praying for those bound in sin and the conditions of our cities (2 Chron. 7:14).
A Ministry That Brings Change
"Moreover the law entered that the offense might abound, but where sin abounded, grace did much more abound" (Rom. 5:21).
I would certainly say that within Mathare Valley sin is abounding. But God's grace is abounding that much more. You can see it in the lives of those twenty-four young men and women involved in the program thus far. As some of our young men and women reflected over the past years of their lives, they all shared one thing in common. They were all without hope before experiencing the abounding grace of God. Some of them had thought that they had entered into a place of no return. But after hearing the gospel taught and preached to them on a daily basis, and being trained in practical skills, they were able to return to their Creator.
Making the ministry work has not been that difficult. These men and women only wanted a chance. And they were more than eager once they found out that they were the ministry themselves. There could not be an Achor Mathare Valley without these young men and women. And I readily let them know it. Founders, directors, and managers can only see to it that things run smoothly and that there is enough funding. But it is the young men and women to whom the Lord ministers daily that make a ministry.
Achor's goal is for all those who come to be transformed and in Christ become self-reliant. They in turn will become the ones responsible to lead others to Christ. It is like dropping a pebble in a pond. So many ripples will spread out around the area where that one little pebble was dropped.
I consider myself a very tiny pebble that God has dropped into Mathare Valley for "his own purpose" (Phil. 2:13). The only purpose of the evangelist, missionary or discipler is to duplicate him or herself, willing to become insignificant pebbles in whichever stream God wills to drop them. God does not call us because of our abilities, but because of our availability and obedience to him. It's not because of what we may achieve but rather what God can achieve through us in spite of our limitations.
From 1994 right up until this present time, God has been doing a new and wonderful thing in the lives of the Achor interns. We are located in the area where they used to mug and do drugs. Under the direction of Pastor Dan Ogutu, who teaches Bible studies at the project and conducts crusades within the Valley, these young people are mentored in the church he pastors. They have continued to grow in the Lord in spite of the negative surroundings. They attend the many youth group fellowships he has developed and assist in the many crusades, witnessing to crowds of young people. Pastor Ogutu has made some of them youth leaders within the church, capable of leading the Sunday morning services. Many of them attend weekly keshas (all-night prayer meetings) which, along with various cell group gatherings in homes of different church members, are a very strong contributing factor to their continued spiritual maturity.
A Taste of Triumph
On April 4, 1998, the first graduation ceremony of Achor Mathare Valley took place. There were twenty-four graduates. Thirteen were already alumni, having started with us in 1994. They were now firmly planted in the Lord as youth leaders in various churches, attending school, or now working and earning an honest living.
One of the young men from this earlier group was sitting for his final exam at Moi University, having completed four years of study in computer information science. Another is attending Kenya Polytechnic, studying mechanical engineering. Still another, the youngest of the group, had just completed high school a few weeks earlier. One of our young women was starting her third year of high school. Two others, a mother of two and a young man, had been able to start their own little businesses. Another inherited land in one of the rural areas of Kenya and is growing tea there. Three of the original group have stayed on as staff members at Achor.
Now others join them, more of God's plantings, his trees of righteousness (Isa. 61:3-4). There is Mbugua, imprisoned many times, burned and beaten almost to death by mob justice in 1995, now witnessing daily to those who come to buy things from his little kiosk. Nahashon has been able to complete college and is using his skills to encourage his peers in achieving their potential. Alice, in spite of many difficulties, now earns a living by selling vegetables to support herself and her two small children. Paul Oduor and Joseph Muthami have received their certification in tailoring and carpentry and are now instructors, teaching these skills to others. Joseph Wateri and Joseph Maina, both encouraged by Nahasha, have continued their studies. They assist in our literacy classes. Paul Otieno, prepares to leave for London to participate in a summer program ministering to street children. Will John Makwata one day become a great evangelist?
These are the reasons I sang on that graduation day, "How Great Thou Art." Twenty-four reasons why God turns the valley of trouble into a door of hope.
Clarice King has served with Africa Inland Mission International since 1984, first in an inner city ministry in Paterson, New Jersey and, since 1993, as director of Achor Mathere Valley in Nairobi. Achor is a multifaceted program for recovering drug addicts and ex-offenders. It provides spiritual growth in Christ, peer group counseling, educational assistance, and assistance in small group business development.
From Urban Mission, published by Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, June 1999. Used by permission.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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