Silje Drevland - Mathare, Kenya

  Sometimes you make decisions you just know is gonna change your life. It can turn out to be a good, challenging or even a bad experience, either way you will learn from it. For me, going on exchange with AIESEC turned out to be the greatest experience I have ever had, and what was supposed to be an 8 week internship turned into 15 weeks in the beautiful country of Kenya. 

A city that can seem chaotic, unstructured and dodgy at first, Nairobi can be enough to give even the most experienced traveller cold feet. Another intern and friend of mine from Germany was never picked up at the airport, so his first meeting with Kenya was being hijacked by a «taxi driver», taken to an ATM and robbed with a knife, before being dropped off in a bad end of town at night. But still, even with horror stories like this one, I feel Nairobi has an undeserved bad reputation. The same rules apply here as for the rest of the world's big cities; be attentive and take your precautions, and you should find Nairobi to be a beautiful, colourful and enjoyable place full of warmth and friendly faces, and an easy place to feel like home. The story of my friend's carjacking happened more than a year ago, and he is still living in Nairobi working for a Kenyan company, with no plans of returning to the «safe» environment of Europe. 

My first meeting with the slum area Mathare and the school where I was gonna work was no less than overwhelming. «Don't you feel like a rock star?» my aiesec buddy asked me as we were walking through the slum. And I did. Kids came running at us from every direction, smiling, laughing, shaking my hand and asking «Mzungu! How are you?», their mothers sitting in front of their houses greeting and welcoming me with a friendliness I found to be characteristic of Mathare. But the generosity of infectious happiness and the materialistic situation did not match. Being a teacher student and having experience from working in the Norwegian school system, I was shocked to see the conditions of my school project. 340 students were cramped together, most of them on the dirt floor, in a small number of rusty shacks scattered around an area of the slum. The supplies we had access to were restricted to chalk and blackboards, plus a small collection of old and torn books. But even with these huge limitations, the kids, to my surprise, turned out to be extremely bright and attentive! Somewhat opposite to what I have experienced in Norway, where you have almost unlimited access to school supplies but the kids can be a real nightmare to teach.

Teaching subjects and spending time with the school children was definitely the most fun and rewarding part of working in Mathare. And they loved asking, seeing pictures and hearing about Norway, as many of them have not even travelled outside of Nairobi. What was more of a challenge was working with the staff at the school. To be a «mzungu» (white person) is in Kenya synonymous with having money, and the school director never tried hiding the fact that they wanted us to buy things, both for the school and for them personally. Wanting to improve the learning conditions and the school situation for the kids I started a small-scale fund raising together with the three other interns who worked at the school; a boy from the Netherlands, a girl from Australia and a girl from China. And with the money we got from friends and family back home we managed to do alot. We bought enough desks for all the kids, an additional classroom, school books, sports equipment, two latrines, and even a small school library with story books, in addition to doing some fixing and janitor work ourselves like painting the school buildings. But still the staff always kept asking for more, and didn't seem to realize that our means were limited. We also had some confrontations with them about the use of corporal punishment. Because, although forbidden by law since 2002, caning is still being used by teachers all over the country. And even though we had a long talk about it and the director promised us that they would stop using caning as a way of punishment, the kids told us later that all the teachers, the director included, continued to use violence against them when we interns were not around. The frustration, anger and helplessness we felt over the system sometimes could be extremely demotivating. But to focus on the positive achievements and progress we made helped, and I still feel that we left the project in a better condition than when we first came, which is the most important thing.

If you love travelling, Kenya is also the perfect destination. And to be part of the fantastic Aiesec Kenya network, you get more opportunitites to experience the diversity of the country than you are able to take. I spent the weekends and holidays going on safaris, hiking, white water rafting, travelling the coast, attending aiesec conferences or just having fun in Nairobi together with all the other interns. Living in an interns house is an outstanding chance to get to know amazing and talented students from all around the world. After Kenya I have friends for life living in every single continent, something I feel is the true essence of Aiesec. The internship has also taught me better to see opportunities insted of challenges, and how everything in life in the end comes down to one thing: accept the things you cannot change and change the things you cannot accept. But without a doubt, the best thing of my 15 weeks in Kenya were the people.