Adventure Alternative

Adventures/Africamp

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The Africamp Street Kid Rehabilitation Programme

How does Africamp fit in with the concept of rehabilitating street kids in Kenya?

The background to this whole programme begins with an idea to take street children off the streets and try to give them a life, an identity and some hope in their future. They are given clothes, a school uniform, a place in which to meet safely, regular food and an opportunity for education. Mostly we give them company and friendship and a sort of surrogate family which is a big security for them.

This was the vision of Gavin Bate since 1991. Now it is a highly successful, well managed and fulfilling programme which incorporates many aspects of corporate strategy promoting pro-poor tourism, and charity being supported by commerce. This is now seen as a main tenet to aid in Africa by the Commission for Africa report in 2005.

About Street Kids…

The children of course have become a huge problem and embarrassment to the government. They terrorise tourists in gangs, they thieve, sniff glue and cause untold damage. They are an eyesore to a nation which depends largely on tourism for it's revenue and the problem has often become chaotic in the big cities, where special squads of riot police have resorted to beatings and arcane methods of ‘discipline’. One of the biggest fears for any kid on the streets is the threat of the police who routinely throw them into jails and then demand bribes to get them out again.

But these children are victims of a society beset with problems of overpopulation, poverty, disease, poor economy, corrupt governance and the absence of a welfare state system. The child fatality rate is very high and the ones who survive are, by a simple process of natural selection, remarkably hardy and smart. It has increasingly been the job of NGO's ( non-Governmental Organisations ) to tackle a situation that the World Health Organisation once described as ' the single biggest social problem on earth'. In Nairobi alone there are an estimated 35,000 street children (up to aged 15), and about 7 million world-wide.

What you see on Africamp

You cannot conceive of the lives these children lead, but you will soon find out during Africamp. It will seem almost impossible to understand how a child can exist in such circumstances and still remain sane. You are in for a big education. Kids who have suffered crippling diseases like tetanus, spent years with a pot of shoe glue stuck in their mouth, being repeatedly beaten in public, sleeping rough on a rubbish tip for years, eating just once a week sometimes and often never having tasted meat in their lives. To them, you will appear godlike, a person of unlimited wealth, then reaching out to touch you briefly and then run away shouting to their friends that they have touched a mazungu (white person) ! Initially you won't know what to do, but don't worry, just watch and see what happens.

Beginnings of a vision

Gavin Bate, MD of Adventure Alternative, started the programme in 1991. He has been travelling and exploring all his life, and has spent a lot of time sleeping rough in developing countries. During many years spent in Africa. he fell in love with Kenya. A stint driving overland trucks resulted in staying in slums with his Kenyan colleagues. Later he got involved with driving the convoys of aid supplies into refugee camps, particularly in northern Kenya and along the border regions with Somalia, Eritrea and once to Rwanda. The experience completely completely captivated him.  Indeed it's hard not to be touched by it. 

Using his mountaineering expeditions over the years to raise money and awareness he initially helped to develop plots of land and do small grass roots projects like repairing taps, rooves and facilities in shanty towns. He also started supporting street kids and spent a long time in the ghettoes finding out about their lives and learning to speak their language. The climbing became linked to his charity work and this became linked to the company. A sort of triangle wherein commerce supports charity and climbing provided a platform to promote both. It became an exercise in both commercial and social entrepeneurialism and Gavin worked for years and years during the 90’s to build the foundations – ever so slowly – for what he felt would be a great and robust enterprise later on in life. This vision is encapsulated in the Africamp Expedition.

Climbing Mount Everest and other more important mountains…

Gavin has now climbed on Mount Everest three times. Each time so far he has been turned back just metres from the summit, but each time the mountain has probably offered more challenges than would normally be imagined for a high altitude climber summitting the highest peak in the world. Two of those climbs have been without supplementary oxygen, and on a desperately difficult bid to ascend the North Face in 2002 Gavin had to deal with a potentially fatal injury to his colleague and best friend just 100 metres from the top. A 3`day descent without food or sleep or water still ranks as one of Gavin’s most impressive memories.  Then in 2005 he climbed the mountain alone and without oxygen, opting to turn back about 50 metres from the top because of queues and a sick Sherpa who was shadowing him. In so doing he made the furthest non-stop ascent of the mountain without oxygen by a Westerner.

Yet on all these expeditions the bigger challenge has been to raise thousands of pounds for Moving Mountains, which is the name of the charity that he formalised in 2001 after years working in the slums by himself.

“People climb Everest every year, and it is of course a great achievement. But I want to achieve more. I want to climb it without oxygen which is much harder, and I want to use my climbs to raise a lot of money for Moving Mountains”, says Gavin. Iif my ascents of Everest can assist in my charitable projects then I will have considered them worthwhile achievements”.

What happens when the kids meet you..

Gavin started taking small groups of 'mazungus' to Kenya to help with these projects, people who had a real interest and concern for street children and who wanted to do something to help. Small efforts can make a difference and the simple contact with foreigners was often a catalyst for releasing all sorts of potential in the kids.

Some of the kids turned their backs on the streets and began trying to live a life of sorts. They began to talk of their future - imagine that in a society which as a rule does not think further than where the day's food is going to come from. They began to go to school.

In some cases and after much effort, we were able to reunite the kids with what family they had left, long since lost in the maze of shanty towns, and offer help to the mothers in the form of clean, safe shelters for bringing up babies. Counselling the mothers was just as important as talking to the children - in reality trying to change the ways of a generation was like trying to stem a tidal wave with a paddle. But perseverance paid off and gradually the results began to show.

“Over the years I have seen thousands and thousands of families, thousands of street kids reunited with families and it’s hardly surprising that this is bedrock of our rehabilitation programme”, says Gavin, “inevitably you question a world in which the existence of such astonishing poverty is so prevalent, but the shining truth that shines through is the equally as astonishing power of a family unit. In Africa it is everything.”

As the number of children began to grow we began to run bigger rehabilitation camps which we called Sisi Kwa Sisi, Swahili for 'Being Together'. Bringing all the kids together from all over Kenya and from differing tribes was a fantastic experience and these camps became the focal point for the year, receiving increasing publicity in Kenya and visits by Government ministers.

An amazing fact began to show itself. These kids, sharp as a pin, began to excel in school. They were no Einsteins but they gave the 'normal' kids a real run for their money. Some of them do go back to the streets, tempted by the 'excitement' of life there and it is important to understand that no programme like this can be 100% successful. Consider the size of the problem and you will understand.

So where do you come in? First of all it's important to understand the excitement that these children will have just in meeting you. It will be a little like having the Queen pop round for tea at your house.

Over the last number of years we have been helping to develop various sites and schools by putting in kitchen shelters, hostels, toilets and water pipelines. We also renovate slum schools. This is where you come in, running the various projects that ultimately will assist these children and their families.

Some of you will be running a rehabilitation camp for about 100 of these children, with campfires, cooking outdoors and making things like tables out of wood. It will be basic and quite different to anything you have experienced before. It will be a community rehabilitation camp - that is, a camp for street children whereby everyone will be helping to do a variety of projects around the site to help improve facilities. The emphasis is on everyone working together for the common good.

Projects + kids camps + contact + a will to help = Aid in Africa !

We also run more project-orientated trips where you stay in local hostels and work in a slum school like Muthurwa where we have spent years educating children. The project is often quite daunting, renovating classrooms, repairing rooves, building toilets. You name it, we can do it. You don't have to be a carpenter or experienced, you just need to have the will to help out. Every minute will be worthwhile and you'll be also doing a bit of teaching, spending a day in the slums with the kids visiting their homes, taking the kids on outings in Nairobi and even taking them on weekend camps into the Rift Valley. It's tremendous fun and deeply fulfilling.

Then there's the running of a camp for over a hundred people. Going into the slums to buy food from Market, haggling over the price of a sack of 'viazi' ( potatoes ) with African traders, using 'jicko' cookers, preparing food in the open and so on. It is light years away from going down to the local Spar, believe me.

Then there's being with the kids. You'll be working with them doing all those projects and essentially living together. You'll be in constant contact with them and it will be your job to teach them those basics of living which we all take for granted - basic hygiene for instance. We'll be buying things like soap so they can wash. We'll be buying food so they can all eat meat every day - can you imagine the luxury of that ?

Things will fall into a routine after a day or two and you'll soon get used to the very outdoor, relaxed African way of life. There'll be games and competitions and incredible music over memorable campfires which you will never forget. You'll see that cultural differences can be overcome through the simple factor of human contact in a way that we generally don't experience in Western society.

At the camp you will be in small groups to work closely with up to ten or fifteen children at a time, you will gradually get to know their names, characters, life history and circumstances. You'll know which ones are the troublemakers and which ones aren't. At the end of the day kids are kids, the world over. After a day or two the initial barriers are broken down and suddenly, like a tidal wave, the children pour out all their natural exuberance and love to you. They will be all over you ! They will vie for your attention, look for your praise, hold onto you, touch you and accept you as a mother or father figure. How can these kids, who have so little, give so much you will be asking yourself constantly.

It is perhaps daunting to imagine how big an impact you can make on another person's life, and make no mistake about it, you will; therein lies the satisfaction. However minuscule the effort may appear relative to the global size of the problem, it is important to understand that every child is one life, and helping one life may be just about the best thing you will feel you have ever done.

This in nothing to do with money or commercialism or profit margins; this is called Aid in Africa, and if you ever wondered what those words meant then here is your chance to find out.