Kayole, Embakasi Division
Imani Children's Home - Movie Night. The thing I love the most about technology is that it is a universal language. Jury rigging my Canon videorecorder into the back of one of the gnarliest monitors in Kayole - 60 orphans watching black and white dailies from the first shoot with them. And what I compeletly missed was that the show needs to be comedy. Kids laugh at a completely different set of variables than adults and the shots that I would have cut are now keepers. Big bums, falling over, stuffing food into their mouths - making tv with African kids is going to be fun. Even the one year olds get in on it although balance is a bit of an issue with them.
Falling asleep on the roof of the orphanage in the mid-day sun listening to crack blast Kenyan rap - clean white sheets flopping overhead is some kind of slum heaven. 400,000 people live in Kayole in the most fasinating inter-dependant network of trade, child care and transportation. In Soweto - Joburg they told me about these things called SPAZAS - secret fake stores in people's homes where one lady sold soap and the other sold flour so everyone wouldn't constantly have to leave the slum to get daily stuff. But now Soweto isn't really a slum anymore. I met the guy whose about the get a McDonald's franchise and there's an Indian woman building a four star hotel. Ten years of BEE and things are getting better for blacks in the Republic.
In Alabama they say 'blacks' and not Africans. In South Africa they say 'black Africans' but you don't hear that in Kenya - if you even said it you'd have someone's sister on your case with one of the coldest stares on earth. So could the old-fashioned language itself be part of the problem? Angola was given one of the most isolated languages on earth - Portugese so what were they going to do with that? Thank god for Brazil I guess - they're pointing their bows back that way now - Angola is the 2nd biggest provider of oil in Africa. Am trying to figure out if going to Luanda might be worth my time. The port looks amazing and I met a woman who knows some kids who might want to make some t-shirts there.
I think of the old slave routes that bled so many Africans off the continent and imagine now the arrows going in the opposite direction, back across the Atlantic Rim for what was left behind. There is a prison in Tennessee called Angola - one of the worst in the country they say. I read they have a radio station that broadcasts issues like faith and salvation and that they are trying to get a tv station going too. When I head back to Alabama I will have to visit Angola and show them photos of Luanda. Two sets of Africans both living in Angola on opposite sides of an ocean. And all those 'black' men sitting beyind bars in Tennessee - what if their families had never been shipped across the ocean and instead had stayed home and raised their families there, built schools and highways and grew food and fished for dinner? What would Luanda look like today?
Imani Filamu - kids making movies in a Nairobi slum. Is the world ready for this kind of systems thinking? Can we finally end the work of all the charities and NGO's and humanitarian groups who were supposed to be going home anyway see if Africa is ready to stand on it's own 2 feet?
Free the capitalists! Lend us capital and we'll save the world better and faster while paying taxes in the process. The Undergrowth.
World Premiere - "Moja Moja" by Sam Oliver (on the CBC Sunday April 30 - Moving On)
Falling asleep on the roof of the orphanage in the mid-day sun listening to crack blast Kenyan rap - clean white sheets flopping overhead is some kind of slum heaven. 400,000 people live in Kayole in the most fasinating inter-dependant network of trade, child care and transportation. In Soweto - Joburg they told me about these things called SPAZAS - secret fake stores in people's homes where one lady sold soap and the other sold flour so everyone wouldn't constantly have to leave the slum to get daily stuff. But now Soweto isn't really a slum anymore. I met the guy whose about the get a McDonald's franchise and there's an Indian woman building a four star hotel. Ten years of BEE and things are getting better for blacks in the Republic.
In Alabama they say 'blacks' and not Africans. In South Africa they say 'black Africans' but you don't hear that in Kenya - if you even said it you'd have someone's sister on your case with one of the coldest stares on earth. So could the old-fashioned language itself be part of the problem? Angola was given one of the most isolated languages on earth - Portugese so what were they going to do with that? Thank god for Brazil I guess - they're pointing their bows back that way now - Angola is the 2nd biggest provider of oil in Africa. Am trying to figure out if going to Luanda might be worth my time. The port looks amazing and I met a woman who knows some kids who might want to make some t-shirts there.
I think of the old slave routes that bled so many Africans off the continent and imagine now the arrows going in the opposite direction, back across the Atlantic Rim for what was left behind. There is a prison in Tennessee called Angola - one of the worst in the country they say. I read they have a radio station that broadcasts issues like faith and salvation and that they are trying to get a tv station going too. When I head back to Alabama I will have to visit Angola and show them photos of Luanda. Two sets of Africans both living in Angola on opposite sides of an ocean. And all those 'black' men sitting beyind bars in Tennessee - what if their families had never been shipped across the ocean and instead had stayed home and raised their families there, built schools and highways and grew food and fished for dinner? What would Luanda look like today?
Imani Filamu - kids making movies in a Nairobi slum. Is the world ready for this kind of systems thinking? Can we finally end the work of all the charities and NGO's and humanitarian groups who were supposed to be going home anyway see if Africa is ready to stand on it's own 2 feet?
Free the capitalists! Lend us capital and we'll save the world better and faster while paying taxes in the process. The Undergrowth.
World Premiere - "Moja Moja" by Sam Oliver (on the CBC Sunday April 30 - Moving On)
posted by Sue Stanfield at 4:45 AM
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