Serve Like a Superhero: Season 3, Episode 2
“Every comic book hero and superhero team, they need to be prepared to face their villains… even though every superhero has a super villain with the right preparation, they can stand against any foe that threatens their city.“
Jerry McCarty, STC superhero expert (see picture at bottom of post: Jerry at ComicCon!)
Serving like a superhero means standing up to the villains that threaten our cities. But unlike superheroes in the comic books, the villains we face normally do not have faces. They are insidious issues like poverty and endemic violence. And instead of fighting them through reciprocal acts of violence, we stand up to these villains with small acts of kindness.
In today’s episode of Serving Stories, we hear how three leaders from Serve the City Kenya—Leah, Lucy, and Daniel—are standing up to the villains that menace their cities.
Standing up to the Villains of Poverty and Gender-Based Violence in Eldoret, Kenya
Leah Wangui Ngugi (in black jacket) is the STC City Leader in Eldoret, Kenya. She is pictured here with her husband and some other members of her Core Team, who are helping her stand up to the villains of poverty and violence, and whom she calls “a very encouraging team.”
Here is Leah (standing, in yellow dress) with a group of STC Eldoret volunteers. Eldoret is a small agricultural city in the west of Kenya. About 50% of the population of Eldoret lives in slums. Most of these people migrated here after the post-election violence of 2007/8, when they lost their homes and often also lost family members through violence.
In the pictures below, STC Eldoret volunteers are doing a slum clean-up in Eldoret, which also gave them a chance to interact with these traumatized people and begin to stand up to the villains that plague the informal settlement. Leah said, “We had a good chance to speak to sex commercial workers and some young men who are believed to be gangsters. They have very painful stories and others are living there as a hiding place.”
Leah and her husband spend a lot of time working with survivors of gender-based violence, another villain that menaces the citizens of Eldoret (along with 736 million others around the world). The pictures below show a couple of the support groups Leah and her husband have started: at left, a celebration with a group called “STC Fortress”; and at right, a group called “Mwangaza,” which means “Light” in Swahili. Most of the group members are women, but some men also find themselves victims of gender-based violence as well.
In addition to supporting one another emotionally, people in the groups contribute the equivalent of $3 per week as a basis for microloans, in order to help each other become financially independent. This will help them fight not only the villain of poverty, but also of dependency!
WANT TO HELP OUT IN ELDORET? Leah is looking for resources to be able to invest in these survivors to help them become more independent. For $160, she can lease a five-acre piece of land where they can grow their own food. She is also looking for sewing machines for ladies to learn tailoring skills or the means to buy them. TO DONATE: GO TO https://www.servethecity.net/donate/ Be sure to mark “STC Eldoret” as destination.
Standing up to the Villains of Violence and Ignorance in Nairobi, Kenya
This is Lucy Wangari, Serve the City Kenya National Leader, based in Nairobi. Corlea Human, one of the STC Africa coordinators, described her in the episode as “soft spoken, motivated, determined… a serial social entrepreneur.” She also standing up to some fearsome villains through kindness!
Lucy (in yellow-green t-shirt, at left) has long been involved in outreach to prisoners. Here, she leads a group of volunteers who are bringing health packs to prisoners in a women’s prison in Nairobi. Besides distributing desperately-needed health items, they will also engage the imprisoned women in conversation, working to lead them toward a new life free from the influence of the villain of violence. The teams also work with the correctional officers.
In reaching out to prisoners, Lucy is hoping for them to find rehabilitation and a new life. Recently, two of the prisoners her team worked with were released ahead of schedule because of the changes the officials could see in them!
Serve the City Kenya leaders also recently took a trip to support STC Zambia. Pictured here are: Daniel Owuor (STC Kenya, in this episode), Chewe Paul Mumba (STC Zambia), Edward Aligula (STC Kenya), Luca Wangari (STC Kenya, in this episode), and Mercy Mulumba (STC Kenya).
Daniel Owuor, a primary school teacher by profession, has a heart to stand up to the villains of poverty and ignorance threatening children in the slums of Nairobi. Here, Daniel (in yellow STC T-shirt), with his wife next to him, are leading a group of volunteers on a visit to a home for children living with a disability. Daniel’s vision is that these children, too, can learn “to see the value in themselves.”
In the Mukuru slum, there is only one primary school for more than a million children. Daniel, responding to the lack of educational possibilities for these kids, started his own school in the middle of the slum—a school which this year has received government accreditation.
This year, the school moved from the middle of the Mukuru slum to its outskirts—a change that will help involve more volunteers in helping stand against the villain of ignorance that keeps children like these down.
In addition to the school, Daniel also started a feeding progam for the most disadvantaged children he could find in the slums (pictured above, right). Most of these children have no parents and are completely destitute. However, the first two children he involved in the feeding program and the school many years ago are now getting their university degrees. So this encourages Daniel to keep on going.
If you want to hear another episode about how destitute children are being helped by Serve the City, this time in Port-Au-Prince Haiti, listen to Courage: A Fight for Haiti’s Future!
WANT TO HELP OUT IN NAIROBI? Lucy and Daniel both are looking towards programs of rehabilitation and empowerment for prisoners and disadvantaged children alike. Lucy would like to be able to cover the costs of job training courses for ex-prisoners (for example, driving courses for men). And Daniel would like to be able to have resources to send children from his primary school on to further schooling, and to help train children with disabilities towards self-dependence. TO DONATE: GO TO https://www.servethecity.net/donate/. Be sure to mark the designated project!
And here is the promised picture of Jerry McCarty, our superhero specialist, at ComicCon! He is pictured here with the creators of “X-Men: The Animated Series”!
