[Editor’s Note: Starting Monday through next week, the New Canaan YMCA’s Julia Douglas will publish daily updates and photos of her observations and experiences from Kibera, the world’s second-largest slum, located outside Nairobi, Kenya. Sign up here for our daily newsletter to receive her posts first thing each morning, along with New Canaanite’s always-local news feed.]
L-R: Julia Douglas, Anne Goebel, Nicki Jezairian, Carolynn Kaufman and Mary Coleman. Credit: Michael Dinan
Mary Coleman, membership director at the New Canaan YMCA, said she’s always wanted to participate in Peace Corps-type work.
An especially well-traveled person already, having visited places such as India, Japan, China and Korea, in addition to Europe, Coleman believes that volunteering to provide manpower abroad would be “very fulfilling.”
“To participate and give back and learn and understand, and to better relate to the community again what it is we are doing here at the Y,” Coleman said Thursday afternoon from a meeting room at the South Avenue facility, with four other women who on Friday will leave together for a 10-day excursion to the largest slum in Africa. “I’m hoping it will be very sobering, life-altering, and that I will bring back some important messages to my family and the community.”
Coleman—along with 10 other people including the YMCA’s Nicki Jezairian, Carolynn Kaufman and Julia Douglas, as well as Anne Goebel, a Stamford Hospital nurse who serves as the Y’s wellness nurse coordinator—on Saturday night will arrive in Nairobi, Kenya, and travel the following day to Kibera, a slum of one million people living in an area about the size of Central Park.
Under a partnership that dates back to 2007, the New Canaan YMCA has worked with a child development center in Kibera that provides food, clothing, classroom materials, medical attention and other essentials for hundreds of kids who live there.
And live there in unimaginable squalor—according to a fact sheet on the Y’s website, shanty houses of mud, cardboard and tin have no running water and shelter about four people in 24 square feet spaces. Seventy percent of the Kiberan population are children, including 50,000 orphans, and they face diseases such as malaria, cholera and AIDS, according to the Y.
Over the course of nine years, working with the center in Kibera, called Facing the Future, or “FAFU,” the New Canaan YMCA has sent volunteers to help build three new buildings, including a larger child development facility and a health store that provides access to medicine.
This year’s group, during an approximately 10-day trip, will create a playground there (purchased with Y membership contributions), in partnership with an organization called Kids Around the World, Jezairian said.
Asked what her expectations are, Jezairian said: “To be able to bring the culture and Kibera back to New Canaan and infuse it into the YMCA and into the community.”
The groundwork for some of the infusion already has been laid, as kids at West School collected four boxes of school supplies that the Y volunteers will take with them into Kibera (in duffel bags) for delivery at FAFU. The Kibera-bound volunteers (their applied to sign on for the trip, and it’s funded by special donations at the Y) also have reached out to kids in the wider New Canaan and Norwalk public schools and will bring letters with them to the African children.
Goebel noted that Stamford Hospital has donated medical supplies that she’s bringing with her to a health clinic, where she hopes to provide support during the stay.
The women will start taking malaria pills tomorrow, and have had shots for diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, malaria and hepatitis.
Kaufman said part of her inspiration for signing up to do the work was meeting FAFU founder and executive director Simeon Ajigo.
“Ever since meeting him and hearing his story and how he started the school and his mission and our partnership with the school, that made it more real, made it really exciting, so when this opportunity came up it seemed like a really great chance to go and see it,” she said.