From street boy to graduate student a tale of hope

NAIROBI, Sep 7: Slum child, street boy, latrine cleaner, thief, drug addict; Sammy Gitau nearly died of a cocaine overdose and was twice beaten almost to death by mobs.

Not exactly a promising beginning.

But now the 34-year-old inspiration to the lost children of the Nairobi slums is preparing to attend a graduate degree course at Britain's University of Manchester.

Even this most recent episode in a life that has taken him from degradation to redemption has a fairy-tale quality.

Gitau found the prospectus for the course in development project management in a dustbin. But with only two years of formal education, he never thought he would be admitted.

Then an English friend helped him convince the university he was what it calls ''a highly exceptional man'' because of the way he escaped the ravages of his early life to create pioneering social projects in four slums in Kenya's capital.

Even then the drama was not over. British immigration authorities refused him a visa a year ago, saying his lack of previous education indicated he was not a serious candidate.

Seven months later an immigration judge overthrew the decision, describing it as ''thoroughly unsatisfactory and insupportable,'' and a visa was granted to attend the course.

Gitau was born in Mathare, the oldest of Nairobi's four big slums. It is home to an estimated 300,000 people crammed into tin-roofed shacks alongside fetid open sewers that can make the unaccustomed visitor gag from the stench.

OVERFLOWING SEWAGE

In the rainy season, the earth trenches sometimes overflow into plastic surface water pipes and flood the houses. Cheerful, grimy children play in a river where sewers discharge.

Conditions are similar in Nairobi's other three major slums, including Kibera, considered the biggest in Africa and home to more than 600,000 people. Kibera found fame as the location for parts of the 2005 film ''The Constant Gardener''.

Some 60 per cent of Nairobi's 2.3 million people are estimated to live in slums and squatter communities -- some of the most unsanitary and insecure places on earth.

On a recent morning in Mathare, four burned bodies and a headless woman were found. Pigs feed on piles of rubbish, sewage and sometimes aborted foetuses dumped in the open.

Gangs sell water to the inhabitants at five or six times the rate paid in affluent districts. Others steal power from overhead cables running through the slum and then sell it on.

This is the world where Gitau has spent all his life, making his escape from crime and drugs all the more remarkable. Today, his training projects, run on less than 100 dollars a month, are seen as a model for effective grassroots aid. ''As a person who has grown up in this community, I believe the answers and the resources required to transform the community are within the people themselves,'' he says.

Operating out of donated cargo containers converted into classrooms, Gitau and volunteer helpers teach carpentry, tailoring, computer skills and baking. While he is away, three of his assistants will run the projects.

Gitau, who will start his studies in mid-September, says he needs training to manage projects, write proposals and win funds, especially as he plans to extend his work into Kenya's rural areas to stem the flow of young people into the slums.

''Manchester is the institution that has realised they can empower me with the education that I need so that I can complete the work that I have started here,'' he said.

DOWNWARD SPIRAL

Gitau's own downward spiral began when his father, who brewed illicit alcohol, was killed in a hammer attack in Mathare. The 13-year-old became the family's breadwinner.

''I saw him die in my hands. It made me hate a lot of what was happening and I moved from the slums to the streets. ''The only thing I could do was to learn how to steal. I got somebody to train me. During those years we became notorious for snatching in the city centre,'' said Gitau.

Like many Kenyan thieves, he got caught by angry mobs. Three times he was beaten, twice very badly. ''I thought I was gone, I was dead.'' He moved to selling drugs, then became hooked. ''I have experimented with so many things ... I became a kind of human laboratory.'' Gitau said grimly.

He overdosed on cocaine and fell into a coma. He recalls hearing hospital staff say he would die. That changed his life.

''My idea was how can I do something that will stop children going through the same kind of life I went through.'' When he emerged from hospital his old friends made fun of him.

''But I told them I know the road you are following and I know you will either die or end up worse than me.'' Gitau's journey through the worst experiences of slum life has given him a powerful hold over even the wildest residents.

During a recent visit, a dozen young street gang members fooled around with a football while sniffing from glue bottles.

Wearing filthy clothes and an eccentric collection of hats, several were high and looked menacing until Gitau sharply told them to leave the glue alone and they faded into the background.

A deeply religious man, Gitau knows how close he came to not surviving his early years.

''I am the luckiest man in the world because the majority of people we used to live with, we did a lot of nasty things with, are dead.''

REUTERS