Reuters NewMedia - Saturday, February 1, 2003
Mujo Masinde

Her face is averted from the camera's gaze. Little more than a toddler, she looks as if she is lost. The image, taken with the artlessness of an amateur, reveals little more, apart from the photographer's shadow looming clumsily in the foreground.

But read the caption below and you learn that the small child was raped a few minutes earlier.

The image is one of several alarming pictures telling of the tragedy and triumph in the lives of the young women of Nairobi's Kibera settlement, the biggest slum in east Africa.

Exhibited in a school classroom wall in Kibera, the photographs were taken by teen-age girls who used cameras and role-play to fight back against the evils they face every day -- rape, gang violence, domestic abuse and HIV /AIDS .

"I was just going to church when I just heard some people saying, "Beat him! Beat him! When I went there I saw a man being beaten like a thief," Mercelline Akinyi recalled of her picture of the small girl.

"I asked some of my friends and then they told me that this man had raped a girl -- a very young girl."

The two-month program, known in Kiswahili as Binti Pamoja (Daughters United), tries to develop the confidence and communication skills of young women who make up perhaps the most downtrodden inhabitants of the shantytown of 800,000.

In Kibera, a huge, foul-smelling swathe of tin-roofed shacks where barefoot children play beside trenches clogged with sewage, girls must cope with the daily reality of hunger, rape, disease and the lack of formal education.

Under the program, organizers gave 12 girls aged 14 to 18 disposable cameras to take pictures of anyone they found interesting. They then displayed and discussed the results.

"WE ARE SILENT"

"The problem we have as African women is that we are silent. "We never mention anything," said Pauline Makwaka, a women's activist who attended the exhibition.

"But this program will help young girls to come out and be open about their lives."

The images, shown in a rented classroom where the girls also perform role play, were often shocking portraits of ordinary people living lives of extraordinary courage or squalor.

One picture showed an apparently harmless young man engaged in a domestic chore. His face partly obscured by a cap, he is busy washing his clothes in plastic basins on a patch of grass.

Locals say he beat his wife to death.

"He told me to take his picture as a sort of remembrance, so that when he goes to jail at least he'll know someone has a picture of him," said Zeba Akoth, the photographer, who explained that police were hunting for him at the time.

Organizers Emily Verellen and Karen Austrian said the photographs provided an objective focus for examining problems the girls themselves experience but are too painful or embarrassing to discuss as personal issues.

Verellen and Austrian, both from the United States, say Binti Pamoja creates a safe space for young women to discuss sexual health, sex discrimination, domestic abuse and rape, using art and photography as a means for self expression.

Not everyone thinks it works.

"A lot of people wonder ... what are you trying to do?" said Verellen.

"You're going to be here for two months and the problem is just so huge that it's almost a joke what you're doing! We get that so much from Kenyans especially and from Americans."

EDUCATION IN DISGUISE

But that's not a view shared by Faith, 17, as she discussed a photograph of an old woman sitting in a poorly lit room, her face hidden by shadows, who admitted sleeping around with men.

"This lady boasts saying if she gets pregnant, she knows how to get abortions. When she gets pregnant she just has an abortion! It doesn't bother her," she said.

"Isn't she old?" asked another girl gazing at the picture.

"She looks real old," Faith replied. "But only because of the illegal brew she drinks."

It sounds like gossip but Verellen and Austrian say such anecdotes are how girls learn about sexual health and hygiene in a slum where home invariably means a hut of mud, scrap metal and cardboard and where flush toilets are unknown.

Home to many law-abiding Kenyans, the shanty is also a den of criminals.

And apart from football and drinking, Kibera has little other recreation. The nearest thing to cinemas are stalls where kung fu thrillers are shown on TV videos.

Giggles erupted as Judith performed a skit about a sex worker but everyone present recognized a slice of real Kibera life.

For Judith, such sketches are the closest she will ever come to going to school. She cannot afford the fees and even if she could, sex education is not in the Kenyan curriculum.

Binti Pamoja has helped her be more open about taboos like sex. "Binti Pamoja has helped my thinking," said Judith.

"There were some things I was shy about and couldn't bring myself to say, especially to other people that I can now even say to my peers."

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