These students are volunteers working on behalf of Carolina for Kibera Inc., a service program developed by former UNC student Rye Barcott during his senior year and now based in the University's Center for International Studies.
A privately funded program, CFK relies on grants from such organizations as the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to help pay its operation costs. But on a more human level, CFK depends on the altruistic hearts and minds of UNC students looking to make a difference outside their own world.
Britt Lake, a senior journalism and international studies major, is currently working in Kibera. Lake learned about CFK through her work with Students for Students International, a campus organization that boasts as its primary project a scholarship for Zimbabwean students' secondary school education.
"Because (Students for Students International) and CFK have similar goals and deal with a similar community, I had heard a lot about CFK before I ever really considered going to Kibera," Lake said. "I was already planning a trip to South Africa and Zimbabwe, so a few weeks later while I was trying to finalize my itinerary I e-mailed Rye to find out if there was a space for me in Kibera."
The goals CFK has established include preventing ethnic violence, developing leadership among the native Kenyans and encouraging people to keep working to improve their community. And in order to make CFK's mark remain and contribute to future efforts, CFK requires Kibera residents' participation in activities such as cleaning up the streets, which are littered with debris and human waste.
"The organization is unique because it is in fact run by youth from each ethnic community, male and female, from Kibera," Barcott said. "This is to say that we, the American outsiders, do not run the day-to-day operations of CFK. The residents have ownership in the projects."
Students working with CFK have helped establish the Rye Clinic, which took its name from the program's founder and president; the Carolina Academy, a self-sufficient Montessori nursery school that educates children ages 2 to 6 for roughly $5 per month; and the Carolina for Kibera Kenya Sport Association, which gives area youths an unprecedented chance to play organized soccer games.
CFK is now working to secure a $500,000 endowment, intended to provide the foundation with a permanent sports association. This association is looking to create the first girls' soccer league in Kibera, something that taboo has prevented thus far. Also on the list of accomplishments, CFK is launching a peer educator program designed to help prevent the spread of HIV.
Barcott said of Kibera's 600,000 residents, half are under age 15 and a quarter of those will die from AIDS-related complications by 2007.
"Add to that the greatest tragedy of all -- that there is in fact enormous potential in such a place," he said. "There are youth as smart, as able, and certainly as strong as you and I. Yet there is so little opportunity for that talent to develop and rise up from hand-to-mouth, day-to-day existence."
Keeping with the program's goal to educate, CFK also has plans to attempt to create a student-volunteer exchange program with both the Robertson and Morehead scholars. They also plan to found a Carolina Primary School and provide scholarships for Kibera's youth.
Interest in CFK has risen since the program's inception in 2000. The number of volunteers looking to travel to Kibera has resulted in the program being forced to turn some help away. This influx speaks measures about the program's meaning to its participants.
Nick Lewis, a journalism and public relations major working in Kibera, said CFK has given him the kind of knowledge that only experience can grant.
"I've learned that the poverty that exists in places like Kibera is far too complex to tie up in a bundle and generalize from the U.S.," he said. "You can't simply take a picture of it, put it on your fridge and say, 'This is poverty, glad I don't live in that.'"
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