One of the CHE projects the trainers do with their committee members in the different villages is a "village clean up". A village clean up can be different depending on the village and what it's needs are. For one village it could simply be cleaning up trash from the ground, whereas in another it could be cleaning out the open sewers so that the water flows through it. For Mathare 4A where I participated in a clean up the task was the latter.
Myself with a few of the CHE trainers and some of the CMF interns helped the CHE committee members of Mathare 4A make their village a cleaner place. With the use of a few rakes, shovels and wheel barrows the open sewer drains along the roads of Mathare 4A where completely emptied of all trash and sewage to make their village a cleaner place. What was one of the best part of this whole experience for me to see was how much the community directly participated in helping with the clean up. So much so that there was barely any work for us mazungus (white people) to do. The community committee members took real ownership of this project and helping make their community a cleaner place. It was great to see one of the goals of CHE to empower people of the community, happening right before our eyes.
Before we started the drain was completely full of trash and sewage and this was the trash as it was being cleaned out.
To clean up all the trash we only had a few shovels and rakes to get everything out of the drain.
People and children from the community gathered to see what we were doing, a great witness for MOHI and the CHE program.
All of the trash and sewage gathered out of the drains was dumped in a large pile for the city to pick up.
At the end of day, we had cleaned the drains up to be completely empty of all trash and sewage.
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