Polite Notice: One last video interview for the road

My colleagues at Fahamu gave me some lovely going-away presents. As a farewell gift to them, I quickly cut together this one-on-one interview between George, the programme officer overseeing Fahamu's Pan African Fellowship, and Firoze, Fahamu's recently retired director.

Polite Notice: Baby elephants will make your day

The Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi houses orphaned baby elephants (and rhinos - but these are elusive). 

I went to visit them on a Sunday morning. I edited this short video, taken with a point-and-shoot camera, with a program called VideoSpirit Pro (trial version). I'm not sure I fully understood the software because the audio cuts out under a few clips. This is definitely not Final Cut, but the elephants are cute anyway.

When a baby elephant (anywhere between birth and three years) is found alone in the wild, the Wildlife Trust is called in to rescue it and raise it at the orphanage before helping it to re-integrate into the wild. 

The re-integration process takes from age three to age eight. All of them, regardless of where they are found, are re-integrated into herds in Tsavo National Park. At the moment, there are 19 elephants at the Trust and two rhinos.

Some of the babies were found at the bottom of wells. They can fall in and their mothers are unable to rescue them, so they are left behind. Nearby people will hear them crying and call the wildlife authorities. Many elephants were orphaned by poachers who killed their mothers for their ivory tusks. A few were left orphaned when their mothers died from starvation in drought-affected areas of the country.

When they are old enough, they will slowly re-integrate into established herds in Tsavo. This process takes a long time because the baby elephants must develop a new "mistrust" for human beings after spending their infancy with them.

Watch and smile! These elephants are under 18 months old.

Polite Notice: Muthurwa residents are taking their case to court

Muthurwa is one of Nairobi’s oldest estates (by estate, I mean a sort of housing complex). More than 3,000 families live on what – by my totally unofficial estimate – is less than a square kilometer on the east edge of Nairobi’s downtown. 

Muthurwa was built by the Kenya Railways Corporation just after the Second World War to house its employees. When the railway was privatized a few years ago (thank you structural adjustment), residents had to start paying rent. Management of the estate was passed on to a separate entity, which has announced it plans to sell the land. Rows of houses (single-room dwellings) have been marked with large Xs for demolition.

I attended a community organizing meeting on Sunday, 24 October. (It was mostly in Swahili, but instructive nonetheless.) The residents are working with the rights NGO Kituo Cha Sheria to bring their case to court and put a stay on the demolition. (They already managed to stay the demolition once, back in July, when they were given three days – three days!! – notice to vacate their dwellings. They are living on borrowed time now.)

Under Kenya’s new constitution, the residents can plead with the court that their right to housing is being abused. As Priscilla from Kituo Cha Sheria told me, if they can’t save the houses, they at least want to fight for a dignified eviction. The residents need time to find new places to live.

Muthurwa is very conveniently located. Transport from the next affordable estate, one resident told me, would cost her 70 shillings (CAD$0.83) each day. She can’t afford that. Many of the residents either run small businesses in Muthurwa, or work in or near the downtown core.

Patrick is helping the residents organize. He works with Bunge la Mwananchi, a social movement in Kenya that was prominent in the run up to the constitutional referendum on 4 August this year. Bunge la Mwananchi mobilizes all sections of the grassroots for various causes. Here, with the help of Kituo Cha Sheria, they’re helping Muthurwa residents take their case to court.

On the Sunday I visited, the people elected 11 representatives to be their voices in court in November when they will go before the judge.

Last month, the water corporation shut off the water in Muthurwa. In July, several outdoor toilets were destroyed and a row of houses torn down. Muthurwa’s electricity was cut off around that time, too.

Polite Notice: iMovie ain't no Final Cut, but it will do the trick

I shot and edited a series of interviews for the launch of Fahamu's Pan African Fellowship Programme. This is an exciting project where ten young Kenyan grassroots activists will get training in activism, work in established NGOs and help strengthen their respective movements.

These interviews were shot on an HD handycam and edited with iMovie. Now, it's definitely less sophisticated than Final Cut (you can't split the audio tracks, for one, so all the background sound is there, and it's pretty loud) but I think it does the trick.