The Mwelu Foundation

Chang’aa (also known as kumi kumi) is the cheapest alcoholic drink that you can buy in the slum. Typically, men will meet with their friends to drink chang’aa in local pubs. Sometimes they will spend their whole day’s wages without thinking about the need to buy food for their families.

After taking three or four cups of chang’aa people often end up losing their way home and sleeping rough, even getting robbed in the process. If you ask anyone who has had three or four cups of changa’aa to tell you their full name, the chances are they will have forgotten it. People have gone permanently blind from drinking bad batches of chang’aa. The affect of the drink and the dark of the night was such that the people did not realise what was happening to them. Scores of people also died in one such incident.

(March 23rd, 2007)

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Hello...

The Mwelu Foundation is a youth project based in the Mathare Valley slum in Nairobi, Kenya. We use photography and film production to document our lives and communicate our problems - and our hopes - to the wider world. We are taking positive steps to improve our livelihoods by building essential life skills. Through our initiatives we also hope that we can begin to displace the myth that slums like Mathare are dead-end places with no potential or home-grown talent.
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