Journey from the streets of Kenya to the SJU Classroom

In the Hawk's Nest cafeteria, Michael Mungai Nyambura weaves his way through the lunchtime rush. His red puffer jacket and dark-rinse jeans blend with the ocean of crimson and grey t-shirts. Tugging a camera out of his backpack, he rests it on the table. His nearly-black eyes glance downward, directing attention to his footage from his previous summer in Kenya.

"I hope you've already eaten," he warns, "You will lose your appetite."

On the camera screen no larger than a cell phone, a miniature Nyambura wanders through the streets of his hometown of Nairobi, Kenya. A dusty toddler whimpers from her perch on a heap of scrap. Pixilated boys dance for him with bottles of glue dangling from their lips. Another boy hunches over and picks at his toenails with a bloody safety pin attempting to scratch out wriggling parasites.

For Nyambura, this is home, and these boys are his family. Here in the United States-even in the French-fry-filled cafeteria-he carries them with him.

The footage on his camera records Nyambura's summer in Kenya with St. Joe's graduate Mark Orrs. Together, they amassed 45 hours of raw footage, which he will edit into a documentary about what it takes to change the lives of Nairobi's street children. Many refused his help.

"These people are in a mess, and they just don't want to come out of the mess. And they know they are in a mess, but they are hooked. They are addicted to the mess they are in," Nyambura said.

Still, he stays optimistic. He of all people knows the power of the media to change lives.

Just five years earlier, Nyambura stood on the other side of a video production as the subject of Christof Putzel's 2001 documentary "Left Behind". The film, winner of HBO's Best International Student Film, captured the lives of the "chokora", the Kenyan children forced to live in extreme poverty on the streets,

In the documentary, Putzel interviews the boys as they hold grimy bottles of glue to their lips, sucking in the fumes with blank eyes. They are unwilling to surrender their bottles for more than a few minutes, even in exchange for food. Getting high dulls the hunger pangs, and, at times, the memories.

At fifteen, Nyambura had been one of them, forced to drop out of school and live homeless on the streets. Even now, his life as a "chokora" clings to him.

Living on the streets, Nyambura convinced himself that he could have chosen a different life. "I told myself, 'Next time I get an opportunity, I am going to jump. I'm going to claim my opportunity when I find it,'" he said.

For Nyambura, "Left Behind" offered that opportunity. Students from Connecticut College, inspired by Putzel's documentary, raised the money to send Nyambura to high school, where he eventually ranked third in his class, according to Putzel. A similar experience brought Nyambura to the United States. In 2005, two students-inspired by "Left Behind"-visited the orphanage that he helped to found. Impressed, they encouraged him to apply to St. Joe's.

A few months later, the University awarded him a four-year scholarship that brought him to the United States to study economics with the hope of bringing change to the region.

From the moment he stepped off the plane, America affronted his African sensibilities. The environment was too clean and the roads too smooth without the bumps and potholes of Africa. The rich food overwhelmed his tightly-rationed stomach making him sick. At night, he could not sleep-the bed was too soft.

Rather than surrendering his Kenyan identity on campus, Nyambura bridged the gap between his roots and American culture by founding a new student organization, called "Harambee." The group grew out of the Students for Peace and Justice organization and works to bring American attention to African issues, such as AIDS and poverty. The word "harambee" means pulling together in Swahili, reflecting the group's main mission.

"Harambee isn't about leaders," said the group's co-president, Reginald Alberto, '09. "It's more about just people coming together and establishing a belief that they can make a change."

With Harambee, Nyambura draws attention to Africa, but the ignorance of Americans to poverty and the AIDS epidemic frustrates him.

[Americans] live as if nothing else mattered in the world. […] How many times do you think about AIDS during the day, really? But then, back home, you can't avoid it. You're going to move around and see. Wow, there's a child playing. That child has been orphaned by AIDS," he said.

These orphaned children are more than statistics to Nyambura. They're his friends.

After high school, he tutored street boys, many AIDS orphans, in an after-school program. Demand exploded, but Nyambura was discouraged.

"They had to go back to the street; they couldn't sleep there. They sniff the glue, and then the next day they are high. So what you taught yesterday, he is not going to remember," he explained.

In May 2003, Nyambura and his colleagues founded Dagoretti for Kids, an orphanage that keeps the "chokora" off the streets. The orphanage provides food, clothing, education, and shelter in a rented house located in the Dagoretti division of Nairobi, Kenya.

At 21, Nyambura acted as project director for the orphanage on a budget of less than $1000 a month, maintaining the facilities, paying for school, and feeding the dozens of boys who call the orphanage home.

Nyambura, administrators and children dug an 83-foot well over several months with machetes and their bare hands to supply the orphanage with running water. They continue to work towards getting electricity. But their main goal is rehabilitation.

"Living on the streets makes them not even aspire to something better, but these kids can become anything in the world. There comes a point where you realize that you have the opportunity to release your maximum potential. So that's what we are trying to do with these boys, make them realize the potential that they do have now," Nyambura said.

"You don't know how it is to see a boy you took from the street coming home every day from school and he's going to talk to you about what he studies. And it's not just one. Many of them, they are coming," he said.

Like a father, Nyambura pulls up the boys' pictures on the Internet, pointing them out one by one with a smile spread across his face. And to him, he is their father.

"Every time you get these letters [from school] that say you have to come to these parents' meeting, it kind of gives you comfort that you are a parent. You just want to do it, and do it, and do it. I wouldn't trade it for anything," he said.

"Except an American education," he added after a pause.

In his hands, that education will change Kenya. On a personal level, he pressures himself to succeed academically so St. Joe's might offer more scholarships, maybe to one of his boys. But his goals extend beyond his own orphanage.

"They don't just need an orphanage. That's not all they need. Some of them need other ways of earning a living," he said. "People have pride. They don't want to go to an orphanage."

With his economics degree, Nyambura plans overcome that obstacle by designing a village with employment opportunities using principles of micro-financing. He already has the site picked out, complete with plans for an adult literacy center and a health clinic.

He called his summer filming research into how to make a change on the individual level. Perhaps his best research was done in his teens as one of the "chokora".

"I would say that working with those children, staying with them, and living with them, I should be the best person to understand their problems," said Nyambura.

The passion to change the lives of his children drives Nyambura while he studies at St. Joe's. But his friends know it will soon pull him away from them. "He doesn't want to stay around here. He's not staying in America," acknowledges Alberto, his close friend.

He has children to get home to.