Vivienne Westwood and the Jam

Back in November, before I came to Kenya, I read this article in the Guardian. I remember it as it fitted so well with my placement and I remember saying to people that I JUST need to meet Vivienne Westwood and she would sort out SMAK for me. Basically the project links up big fashion names with low income groups (mainly women) in Kenya and commissions them to do part or all of the craft work involved in their product production, paying a fair wage and helping them to work out a sustainable business plan for when the project ends.
Well, it just so happened that last week I was in Ibrahim’s bead workshop looking at some purses he was decorating for a new order he’d been working on in the Maasai Mara. I really recognized the logo on the purses and when I went off and looked up the name of the man who Ibrahim was working for, discovered that he was indeed making Vivienne Westwood purses! He had been head hunted to train a group of Maasai women in speed work, as whilst their work was good, they were too slow in completing orders. I tried to explain to Ibrahim how much of a big deal Vivienne Westwood is in the UK, but he remained cool as a cucumber about it all.
On Thursday he was due to go and visit another group of women just outside Nairobi and invited me to go with him. We went first to the GoDown art centre in Nairobi where the project is based and met Jeremy Brown and Vincent Odour, who are both mentioned in the Guardian article. The tag line of the project is ‘Not charity, just work’ and it seems to live up to it. Vincent’s job is to work with communities, mobilising women to get involved in the project and organising training and capacity building sessions with them. Having grown up in a slum, he is well suited to the job and has a lot of enthusiasm for it. So good that he is leaving it soon to set up his own consultancy firm. Unfortunately he was unable to contact the women, so Ibrahim was told to go back to his workshop rather than hanging around waiting for them. This decision reflects the very business minded way the project works. No time is wasted, orders have deadlines and the quality has to be the best. So we headed back to Ziwani for the afternoon (after lunch and a sneaky visit to the monkeys in city park).

Cheeky monkey

The monkey visit was during a somewhat rare moment of sunshine in rainy season Nairobi. For the past week and a half the city has been subject to daily downpours. And when it rains, it REALLY pours. On Tuesday, Kimberley was caught in the rain after work and after an hour in a soggy bus queue without an umbrella was forced to give up and get a taxi, which took another hour and a half to get home. On Wednesday we both came home mid-afternoon to avoid the rain and subsequent traffic jam. On Thursday we both made it home but our landlord got caught and on Friday it was my turn. The rain started at four and consistently bucketed down until six. Angelina and I left SMAK, trudged to the matatu stage at Gikomba market and waited around twenty minutes in the sludgy mud as it got dark. Angelina decided we would never get home that way so we crammed into the front of a TERRIFYING matatu into town. The driver hurtled through the streets as it started raining again, people were scattering like ants in every direction and he boarded the pavement several times to skip past queues. I squealed and Angelina found my terror hilarious. We then waited a casual hour and a half in the rainy bus queue before an hour long journey home. After leaving work at six we got home just after ten. SUCH fun.
As I write, we have just reached our Global Giving project target! In fact we have gone past it and are still making more. Thank you SO much to our family and friends for being so generous. I have spent the past two Saturdays with Angelina doing basic training sessions with the day care girls just using the few resources we already have. Already the children are happier- engaged in more activities, spending time outside playing and a daily checklist is making sure that duties are carried out thoroughly. We are really looking forward to organising sessions with the mothers now and will begin looking for an Early Childhood Development teacher soon. Thank you thank you thank you for choosing to give to SMAK!

THANK YOU