Sometimes walking early in the morning,
I feel so afraid because it looks like a peaceful place
but it is the most dangerous place.
Here in Kibera we don't think about death
because it always happens.
It was not my plan to give birth into that community.
I feel so afraid raising my child,
bad things happening around.
They thought that marriage was the only solution
for my life after I gave birth.
But for me, I had my own thoughts.
You know, when Gabby was five months I went back to school.
I was still breastfeeding him.
The teacher denied me like, 'you can't go back home.
So if you want to study,
you have to leave that breastfeeding'.
Gabby used to wake up in the morning and start crying.
Sometimes you don't have milk.
Sometimes you don't have even anything to give.
I had to make him suffer to go back to school.
Kibera is an informal settlement.
We call it sometimes a chocolate city because of the roofs,
when it's raining, it looks like chocolate.
Nowadays, I hear people saying
it's one of the biggest informal settlements
in the whole world.
It's very rich in cultures,
in people who come from different tribes
and from different parts of this country.
And there are so many people who are all chasing
good living condition.
They have to work extra hard.
Within Kibera children go through a lot
that sometimes schools help them to overcome.
Some children are in very abusive
domestic living conditions.
And schools used to act as safe haven for them
because when they're in school,
they're bit out of their chaos that is happening
for them at home.
Our space, this is an afterschool center.
It's a safe house for children.
So children from different schools
come here to interact and play together
and also just be children.
We run programs,
the first one being the arts program.
So we do classical ballet, modern dance, African dance.
I was born in poverty,
I never went to school myself
but I was able to find myself through dancing.
I loved the discipline - it calmed me down.
It slowed me down.
It tamed me.
Because it's about the body shape.
And so I use it as the foundation for every dance we do.
Because it trains you, your inner self, it trains your body.
Ballet becomes the core.
So you find the children,
they're always present, with their neck straight
and their back straight.
And when they train that when they stay here -
it's magic what you see.
It gives you confidence.
You can stand in a class and not know the answer
and no one will know
because it gives you the power of presence.
I have been dancing ballet for five years.
It really inspired me.
The dance gives me confidence
and I always feel like I'm top of the world.
It's a little hard sometimes when you can't
get the steps correctly
but me, I don't always give up.
I always try my best until I get it right.
Sometimes girls face many challenges in Kibera.
But you have to believe in yourself
and you have to be strong
and everything will be possible.
We have a group of students
coming in from America today
and they're coming in to just listen to us
and then go back home.
Hi. I'm Mike Wamaya.
And I'm a dance teacher
and also a social worker based in Kibera.
So basically, I've been able to redesign
the mindset of dancing here.
And how we use dance
because I think dance is about solutions
to the community problems
and not about showcase and competition.
My students are able to learn that.
And we've now grown to this very powerful community here
where now girls can speak and girls can shout.
We run a sexual reproductive health
and rights program
that supports mainly adolescent girls
with access to menstrual products.
But also, training on leadership
and also on teenage pregnancy prevention.
In between, we do a lot of talking and mentorship.
My office, there are always like open for children
if you have an issue that you want to address.
So whatever you have in your mind,
you let us know and we will all find a solution for it.
We're gonna do a big warm up,
come to first position.
And now we're gonna reach to one side.
In.
Our ballet program
has a combination of both boys and girls;
a majority being girls.
The girls depend on the boys to lift them up.
The girl has to shine.
5, 6, 7, go.
You have to work so hard to lift that girl up
and that helps the boys to understand
that it's actually a collective responsibility
in making the women rise.
Poverty has so many ways of disrupting us
but good education can build resiliency in you
and so my aim is to use dance as a tool
to make children have their self-realization.
To make children know who they are
and what they want for their future
and that everything is in their hands.
When schools closed the first few months,
we shut down.
We were not able to sustain the rent
because we had no funding.
Our one donor, they shifted focus
into like providing Covid healthcare equipments
to their own country.
What do you do?
Everything has to stop.
We struggled so hard to just keep the space open
because we knew how important this space was
for our students.
In Kibera, like people live on daily basis.
So we wake up, we make the money to eat on that day
then we go and sleep.
So if we don't do it even one single day,
it has a repercussion at the end of the year.
Majority of our parents, the ones I directly work with,
they work in middle class people's houses.
And so when the Covid pandemic came in
almost 90% of our parents lost their income.
Also children used to have access to a meal in the school
but now when the schools are not there
the children were left to no meal at all.
There were no peer support groups for the young girls
so they were way more vulnerable.
I had girls who could not go into their houses
when their stepfathers are there
or the person who is taking care of them
as a father is there
because they don't feel comfortable.
The male people use it wrongly and they take advantage of it
by luring some of these young girls with a bit
of money here and there
and eventually for sexual favors.
And then they dump them and run away.
In that Covid period some of them ended up pregnant.
And so the girls went out and they found
so many other young girls who are pregnant.
And we started slowly bringing them into this space.
And one who walked in was Winnie.
I got to know Mike
when I was five month pregnant.
I don't have a home.
I don't have anywhere to go.
I don't have a family.
What can I do?
Mike told me, 'you can't think about abortion
and you can't think about killing yourself anymore.
I'm here to help you.
And I'm here to support you.
So take this money and go and eat something'.
He even called my mom one day.
Started telling her like, no matter how hard it is,
I know that in this society
we need to help each other.
We need to lift each other.
So don't worry, Mama Winnie, don't worry.
It will be good.
To me, when a girl was pregnant,
my biggest worry was maternal death.
I reach out, try to talk,
and find help and promise them that we are together;
because when they get pregnant
they get so ashamed of themselves.
People would always brand a teenage mother with failure.
And that should not be the case
because the case should be, there is a mistake somewhere
and we need to solve something.
There is actually a problem with all of us,
you know, with the entire community.
And I just assured her like you know what,
we will stick together.
For me, what I want
is to go back to school.
Because I've seen how life is hard here.
And without education, I can't do anything.
One day my hopes will come true.
And that's me taking away my family from that place
and giving them a better future.
It helps me understand, like there's still life for me.
The myth and the whole mindset that we have here,
that when a girl wakes up, the first thing they need to
do is to make sure that the whole house is clean
before they're able to even open a book.
That's sad but it is actually
the reality of the ground here.
The housework is so much, is so enormous
that they don't even have time to study.
At home the chores that I have
is to wash the dishes, clean the house
and wash my uniforms, my siblings uniforms, yes.
But I'm the girl.
I'm supposed to do the work.
I study to help my family,
I want to lift my family up.
And I also want to build my momma a big house.
She makes me believe in myself that I can do it.
When my mom doesn't have the tuition money
I always stay at home.
So when she get the money,
she always give me the little she have
and I always take it to school.
The beans is ready,
we are just want to start cooking porridge
but the water is, is not...
We see a lot of outcomes in girls.
We have girls who are now in university
and initially they never thought they would get
anywhere close to university.
I have students who I used to teach when they were
very small
and they now dance in the US.
It opens up doors.
So it gives you the pride
because the moment you realize who you are,
nothing holds you back.
Nothing.
I used to hate stirring porridge.
Like where it was a punishment to me.
Because I'm grown up now, I know how to stir,
I feel so happy doing that.
The only person that I've met in my life
that believes in me, it is only Mike.
And I think my son too.
And I, myself.
Michael tells me, 'Never give up.
Never, never give up.
Let us continue with the journey.
It is just a rock.
It is just a distraction in your way'.
My dream is to become a news anchor,
a mentor, a teacher and someone who can help others
in future.
I want to see Gabby having a good future
and start to make Gabby's education look very light.
And make him feel like he is someone's child.
The father refused him.
Maybe in future, he will never ask for that man
in his life.
He will just ask like, 'where's my mom?
I want to see my mom.
I want to see that friend of mine who is called my mom'.
Go get porridge.
What I want to do is I'm, I'm creating
a mindset of possibilities.
No one will come from somewhere to solve our problems.
We have to face our problems and solve them by ourselves
because the solution of our problems lies within us.
So I hope I'm able to influence
majority of my students to think that way.
And that's my biggest goal.
Everyone goes in. Now listen up.
We have our friends.
We gonna do a performance for them.
So we have a production we are doing.
We're gonna show you part of it, which is now called Walks.
Yeah .
You thought of a move in your head
and you come here and we practice it
and it becomes a very beautiful thing
that everybody claps for it.
That's innovation.
And when children learn that from the beginning,
you can take the whole concept and translate it into school.
If I didn't know something yesterday
I would try my level best today
and I want to sit back and listen and follow
and when I'm now good at doing it,
I reach out to somebody else
who I see is not able in doing it
and show him how I was shown.
And together we are rising.
I always say, I need to save other people.
I need to raise other people.
But understand that life, you have to move on.
You don't have to cry forever.
And you know, the time that you leave your studies
and say like, I don't have to go to school -
that is the end of your dream.
That is the end of your benefit in the society
and that is the start of your problems.
I need to tell other people,
this is the solution that I did
and you need to do the same.