Slum tours offer travelers an authentic, offbeat look at foreign cultures—and locals a new way to make a living.

Authentic? Sure! Offbeat? How can 1/6 of the earth’s population’s lifestyle be considered “offbeat”? To her credit, the author does point out this fact. She doesn’t sound like the kind of visitor to a foreign country that makes many of us cringe, but the tour that she describes definitely gives me that feeling. Imagine the marketing that these slum tour operators must use: Come see the REAL Rio! You’ve seen the Taj Mahal, now see how millions of impoverished Indians live! Hideous capitalist mindsets run amok? I doubt it. These are regular people trying to make a living, and their product is hot.

The photo that accompanies this post is of my “impact assessment team” (me and Mark Mann) from The 1010 Project moving through the Korogocho slum of Nairobi, Kenya. Korogocho was the toughest spot I had seen in Kenya – open sewers, schoolchildren eating and learning in chicken coops, and sheet-metal homes. A few days later, my team went to Kibera. That’s the big one. Smaller in size only to Soweto in South Africa, Kibera is the slum featured in the (awesome) film “Constant Gardener”. In many ways, Kibera was a lot like Korogocho: packed to the gills with people, poor, and dangerous (like any city). But when I left Kibera, I found myself absolutely drained emotionally. That’s not an easy thing to do.

I cannot imagine poorism being a rewarding trip for anybody. Dive-bombing into an impoverished community and moving on after snapping a few interesting pictures can be spiritually dangerous. Having a sustained relationship with the slums and favelas of the world would ameliorate this, I feel, and provide the “locals a new way to make a living” that is founded on up-to-date understandings of humanitarian assistance, compassion, and friendship.

Mark and I kicking it in Kibera with some friends

There is no end to blog posts from experts declaring the need to “separate noise from signal” and “engage your community” while getting out there in social web promotion. As nonprofits, we understand this. No joke. We get it.

I spent 13 months with The 1010 Project in Denver, coordinating fundraising and our social web life. In July of 2009, I left The 1010 Project for a job with the Interfaith Youth Core and Tony Blair Faith Foundation. I now do a bit of consulting for The 1010 Project along with the former Director of Communication Mark Mann (now heading up Denvelopers), who handled all the coding and web design and SEO stuff. Since leaving, and with the benefit of distance (physical and otherwise), I have realized what we were really aiming for and accomplishing with our forays into the social web. Three milestones (we’ll use that word for now) have enabled me to take a look back and understand how we made things happen.

1. The 1010 Project came in 1st (disclaimer: it was an alphabetical list! :)) on Lon Cohen‘s list of “26 Charities on Twitter“, which attracted a lot of attention (and followers) on Mashable in April. We were in very, very good company on that list.

2. Follow Fridays have been good to the organization this year. We are regularly grouped into #FF tweets with other luminaries like charity:water, Save the Children, and the National Wildlife Federation.

3. Yasamin Beitollahi, a marketing strategist and Huffington Post blogger, included The 1010 Project in her “Tis the Season for Charitable Giving: 7 Extraordinary Nonprofits on Twitter“. Some of the other luminaries? LIVESTRONG, Habitat for Humanity, and Susan G. Komen For the Cure.

Compared to these other nonprofits, The 1010 Project lags behind in almost every conceivable dimension. Since our founding in 2003, we’ve spent (in total) less than many of these organizations spend in one month. We have (as of December 2009) just shy of 2000 followers on Twitter. How have we managed to play with the big dogs?

We’ve been genuine. We’ve been honest. The quote that begins this post is not so much something that we learned from other bloggers as it is something that came naturally to us, as a community-benefit organization. We simply translated what we would do face-to-face to what we would do digitally. We had conversations (a staple of successful “How to Tweet” posts), we told friends about other like-minded orgs, and we never for a minute harangued about ROI (return on investment) or anything like that.

As a humanitarian organization, we did what we knew was right. We connected with people, albeit through tweets. And those tweets have landed us friends/followers, digital evangelists, and some money. We played with the big dogs because we knew that digital tools are equalizers, and that having a human behind a URL can make a world of difference. By viewing the web as an extension of real life, we made those relationships work.

Seriously, it’s gonna be a looooooooong post.

Like 2000 words long.

In June of 2008, I walked up a stairway in the Denver Community Church and into the office of The 1010 Project. I sat with the organization’s Executive Director Adam Delp (newly minted that March) and chit-chatted about what the org. was up to, what its work in Kenya entailed, and how I might best “plug in” to that work. I was pursuing a grantwriting internship. Having already written a (albeit small) grant while at Aurora University, I figured I had an edge. Adam asked me when I could start.

On my one-year anniversary with The 1010 Project, I climbed Mt. Longonot, an extinct volcano in the Great Rift Valley of Kenya. Adam wasn’t with me (he was biking through Hell’s Gate National Park), but I was in the company of other people from The 1010 Project as well as folks from one of our partner churches. As I stood on the rim and looked out across the valley, I thought of the strange constellation of factors that had brought me to Kenya and to my future work as a Faiths Act Fellow with the Interfaith Youth Core.

When I came to The 1010 Project, our office was…unique. An executive transition in March had left things in a slightly-confused mode, but Adam and Mark Mann, the Director of Communications, were doing a great job of rebuilding and strengthening the organization. By the time I came on board, the post-election violence in Kenya had subsided, and we were designing new accountability instruments. I headed a team tasked with producing grant proposals and letters of inquiry. Up to that point, we had never received foundation funding; I was determined to change that. And so it went.

I found myself staying long, long hours at the office, writing, editing, collaborating and finding any other way that I could help the organization’s work. We embarked on an aggressive social media marketing campaign. We rebranded The 1010 Project during winter and produced training documents and continuity papers. By the time February of this year rolled around, I was managing a few interns of my own (I’ve never been comfortable calling myself an intern; I prefer “unpaid staff”). We were enjoying unparalleled success digitally. One of the grant proposals turned into $18775 in the bank. We were thriving.

And in June I headed to Kenya with The 1010 Project to meet the people for whom I had been working for for so long. It was clear to me on the ground that the work we were doing in Denver was having a lasting and positive effect on communities in Kenya. It was an amazing trip. I returned to Denver and began editing and organizing content from the trip and doing what I could to prepare the next group of committed interns to continue my work. My acceptance into the Faiths Act Fellowship was, I am sure, heavily dependent upon my work with The 1010 Project, and I needed to give back to the organization that had “made” me a future nonprofit junkie.

My last day at the office was yesterday, Friday, July 24. I leave in three days for my new job. Part of me wants to look back over the past year at all that I accomplished (usually as part of a team) that has made The 1010 Project shine. But in casting my eye backwards, I don’t see anything but the people who made my time there shine.

Adam Delp - He’s a Midwestern boy like myself. Early on (during my interview) we had an interesting discussion about the differences between a faith-based humanitarian organization (WorldVision and the like) and a faith-motivated organization (The 1010 Project).  As I came to know Adam personally and professionally, I found that his passion for helping the less fortunate was truly an outgrowth of his religious convictions. Once, after a particularly lengthy strategy meeting, he constructed a “web of reasoning,” an advocacy tool for the different ways in which to make the case for poverty alleviation, e.g. economic, political, human rights, etc. When he came to “Religion,” he explained the Christian basis for helping the poor, but blanked on how the argument could be presented to other religions. In my best “Interfaith Organizer” mode, he and I discussed how faith has often been a driver for positive social change, and how each tradition has its own ideas about why the destitute must be cared for. It was an inspiring discussion. Adam was the best kind of boss – one that trusted me to take initiative without direction and to make things happen, but who still checked in to make sure that I was alright. He didn’t think it was silly to inquire as to his employees’ “persons”. He taught me a lot about administration and international development. Good boss, greater friend.

Mark Mann – Mark runs the communications and marketing side of things, and has been with The 1010 Project for almost as long as Adam. I remember the first time Mark asked me to help write something for the website. He knew I came from a writing and research background – I was a grantwriter – and he thought I might be of use. Thus began my work with content creation and editing. We were a good team: Mark would create a newsletter in the blink of an eye and then let me fine-tune it. At the same time, he was teaching me some small part of his encyclopedic knowledge of PHP, CSS, HTML, and all other web-tools. Mark’s one of those guys that can build a beautiful website in 15 minutes – from scratch. I’m one of those guys who can fill a whole website with stories in 15 minutes. We complemented each other well. I knew that if I needed some crazy banner or some other design-piece, Mark would have it in my inbox before I even finished describing what I wanted. He’s that good. And he didn’t just help me in the office. This blog is a testament to his patience with me. Whenever I’m missing a <head> tag or can’t find a widget, he’s there with the answer. And Mark, too, became something far more than a boss. He’s a great friend and ally. We have inside jokes, some of them about Adam.

Katie Sewell – Katie came on board as our Advocacy and Outreach Coordinator a little while after I joined The 1010 Project. Katie recently completed her Master of Social Work degree at the University of Denver. At the same time, she received her Master of Divinity. Katie is a preacher. I mean that in every possible way. We’ve had a cheerfully antagonistic relationship from the get-go. She thinks I’m a madman, I think she’s too curious. But for all our banter, she’s never been too busy to have “moments” with me outside the regular flow of work to figure out what’s happening in my personal life. And although she has refused, by choice or by chance, to understand Twitter, I know that she understands far more of our work than she lets on. This became clear to me in Kenya. I had never thought Katie was much for the international development side of the work – her focus had always been on networking and advocacy. But on the ground, meeting with out partners, Katie grew wings. She was efficient, thoughtful, and thorough in gathering impact assessments. She understands the power of stories, and never missed a chance to delve a little deeper into some of our friends’ lives. Her questions were always well-appreciated, and the data that she gathered will be immensely helpful for our advocacy work. She lives to empower others. Katie’s a tough kid, and even though I doubt that she’ll read this, I hope she understands how much I’ve valued her time with us.

Ryan Linstrom – Ryan is our video guy. I recall his title as being something like “Design Coordinator”. Although he hasn’t been around lately (he’s currently studying in Jerusalem), he certainly produced some beautiful things for us. Ryan was a student at the Korbel School like me, and his wife works for a local charity. He dresses like a hipster, which we made fun of to no end (note: I secretly wish I could dress like a hipster). For the longest time, I only thought that Ryan produced still images – he made really interesting flyers and had a way with texture-work that I’ve rarely seen repeated. One day, I came into the office and Adam asked me if I wanted to see the new video Ryan had made. I did not expect him to have created something that soon! The video is 1:43 long and features some beautiful music and a bunch of great pictures and video of our Kenyan partners. The message of the video is that it only takes on person [YOU] to break the cycle of poverty. I remember crying at the end of the video and trying to shake a strong body buzz. He had created something powerful that has stuck with me for many, many months. I still get misty when I watch it. Ryan’s also big on stories, and whether he’s telling them in print or in moving pictures, they are amazing. Oh, did I mention he’s also an amazing photographer?

Emily Ruppel – So one day an intern showed up in the office. Her name was Emily, and she had only recently returned to the United States from the Peace Corps…in Kenya. What an asset! She lived for over a year in the very place where we did our poverty-eradication work! Emily seemed to have near perfect knowledge of East Africa. She, too, was a student at the Korbel School. She’s a hard worker, to say the least. When she came in, she decided to reform and renovate our entire data-collection and impact assessment system, as well as streamline our Kenya-to-Denver communication systems. BAM! Just like that. While working on the grant that we ended up winning, she proved invaluable, providing me with lots of data and thoughts from our partners’ proposals. Without her, it wouldn’t have happened. And she became a celebrity during our visit to Kenya, often taking the lead with monetary negotiations, teaching Kiswahili, and helping us to figure out the local culture. Her guidance was invaluable. She stayed in Kenya this summer to work on a massive health project. Someday, when she’s the Director of USAID, I hope she’ll remember the guy at The 1010 Project who had a million questions about foreign aid instruments, Kenyan cuisine, and life.

Jackie - She started out as our Special Events Coordinator. She’s enormously intelligent and gets all the silly jokes that I make about international politics. Oh, she as well is a student at Korbel. Jackie is in Kenya this summer interning for an NGO that works with community-based groups, organizing a massive women’s conference and helping out at a local orphanage. Working alongside her has been an enriching and hilarious experience. Also, she’s my girlfriend. :)

So many more people for whom I cannot continue writing paragraphs! I apologize. Keith, who has done more strategizing than any other human I’ve met. Matt, who co-lead the grantwriting team until his departure to study abroad. Jenny, who balances our books. Fred, who manages our work in-country, and whose house is always open to those in need. Jessie, Betsy, Micah, Jennifer, Erica, the guys at Elias Fund, James, other Mark, Yvonne, Rachel, Megan and everyone else who put up with my outbursts and still sought my advice at the end of the day – thank you.

Oh, here I am, waxing on at just shy of 2000 words about the people who have changed my world for the better. I am reminded of the story behind The 1010 Project’s name. It comes from the Bible, in the Book of John, where Jesus states that people should have life, and have it to the fullest. The work of the organization is guided by the belief that we can help our friends in Kenya, community by community, family by family, and person by person, to live life to the fullest.

My friends and coworkers at The 1010 Project have done that for me – they have helped me to live my life to the fullest extent. You won’t find a more professional or committed team. I cannot thank them enough.

I was presented with the argument that “fixing” the problems in the developing world is best left to the “experts” in the West. It is assumed, or “proved” through analysis that the West knows best. While I was presented with evidence both for and against this theory in school, I found my real answer in the work that I was doing with The 1010 Project. The founder of the organization, Andrew Syed, was fond of saying (paraphrased) the following:

People in America have this picture of people in Africa standing there with their hands open, waiting for someone to come and help them, to rescue them. That picture couldn’t be farther from the truth. Africans, as well as the rest of the developing world’s people, are already hard at work in their communities affecting change from the bottom-up.

He’s right. We often say at the office that we don’t provide handouts or a hand-up, but that we extend a helping hand. That means “listening to, learning from, and humbly serving alongside the true experts in the development field – the poor.” On our last visit to Kenya, during one of our various meetings with community-based organizations, I realized (suddenly) that I wasn’t teaching them anything. Our Kenyan partners were explaining everything to us!

Whether it was previously-unknown microfinance instruments, or how to cook building bricks out of mud and rock, or how to provide healthcare and antiretroviral drugs to those with HIV/AIDS, our team was truly learning alongside experts. In fact, they laughed at us when we didn’t understand concepts that to a resident of Kenya might seem laughably simple. And we laughed right along with them, not just because they were right, but because we were friends.

Towards the end of our stay in Kenya, I was reading an op-ed in Business Daily Africa called “Time to attack myth of Western superiority.” It was written by Eveline Herfkens, the founder of the UN Millennium Campaign and former Dutch Minister for Development Co-operation. She said that in recent years, it was inspiring to see “… Africans stand up against the insulting paternalism of some parts of the international aid community.”

It was a great article, and it reaffirmed my belief in one of her exhortations:

It is high time to attack the underlying myth of Western superiority: we lecture —you listen; we give —you receive; we know—you learn; we take care of things— because you can’t.

If my short time in Kenya taught me anything, it’s that the myth of Western superiority is on the way out. Humanitarian organizations in the West and beyond have learned (most of them), that partnering with social entrepreneurs in the developing world and developing friendships with them can be a powerful way to affect change. I couldn’t agree more.

2300 liters of awesome

Water is life. I’ve known this for some time. I’ve also been nursing a water addiction for about a decade. I love the stuff like a fish loves…water. I need it, I crave it at almost all times, and I drink many, many liters each day. I knew that traveling in Kenya would be difficult for my water intake. We’d be at the same altitude as Denver, so I would have to keep my levels high, but the groundwater was considered off-limits due to unfamiliar flora and bacteria. To avoid becoming a macho-man and still getting sick, I decided to bring along some iodine tablets. While other team members were scrounging for half-full bottles from the previous day’s adventure, I would calmly fill my Kleen Kanteen from the tap and drop in my tabs. I did share them, by the way.

On my first day out and about in Donholm, a suburb of Nairobi, I was astounded to see a plethora of “water carts,” often nothing more than some iron slats on an old car axle, being pulled by men on the street. The carts held about a dozen (depending on size) yellow plastic jerrycans which each hold about 20 liters. Now for some math:

1 yellow plastic jerrycan full of 20 liters of water @ 2.2 pounds (1 kg)/liter = 44 pounds
12 (give or take) jerrycans @ 44 pounds/jerrycan = 528 pounds
Estimated weight of tires, axle, and accompanying wood/metal = 150 pounds (minimum)

During our walk that first day, we stepped past one such cart attempting to roll over a very large bump in the road. I turned back and recruited two other strapping young men from our team to help pull the cart. It took a number of 1, 2, 3, HEAVES! to get the thing up and over. The cart-puller nodded his thanks and ran on down the road to deliver his goods. That cart was heavy – at least 700 pounds – but those guys run them along the streets. With a municipal water system that lacks in about a few dimensions, delivery is the only option.

My guts are full of these little monsters.

So I’ve been feeling a little fluxy in the stomach since returning from Kenya. I finally got the gumption to go see a doctor about it yesterday. They gave me dicyclomine for my stomach-ache and took blood and other stuff. The lab just called me and said that I tested positive for giardia, the little parasites that cause the aptly-named giardiasis.

Here’s some symptoms:

Gastrointestinal

A small number of infected individuals experience an abrupt onset of abdominal cramps, explosive, watery diarrhea, vomiting, foul flatus, and fever which may last for 3–4 days before proceeding into a more sub-acute phase. The majority of infected persons develop gradual symptoms that become recurrent or resistant.

In both the acute and insidious onsets of symptoms, stools become greasy and malodorous but do not contain blood or pus because giardiasis does not involve dysenteric symptoms. Watery diarrhea may cycle with soft stools and constipation. Upper GI symptoms including nausea, early satiety, bloating, substernal burning, egg-smelling halitosis, and acid indigestion may be exacerbated by eating and are generally present in the absence of soft stools.

Constitutional

The most common constitutional symptoms are anorexia, malaise, and fatigue. Weight loss affects more than 50% of patients. Adults with long lasting malabsorption syndrome and children with failure to thrive may experience chronic illness.

Additional syndromes may include lactose intolerance and allergic manifestations such as erythema multiforme, bronchospasm, biliary tract disease, and urticaria.

Physical

Abdominal examination may expose nonspecific tenderness even there is no sign of peritoneal irritation. Rectal examination should expose heme-negative stools and in severe cases, there may be evidence of dehydration.

I’ll start on an antibiotic regimen today and I should be cleared up in no time. At least it wasn’t something really bad. To be honest, I’m not really surprised. I ate a lot of food in Kenya, and not all of it was prepared under perfect conditions. Still, it’s comforting to know that it’s not life-threatening that that I’ll soon be rid of it.

The people here are very nice and I wish that I could bottle up Dutch accent and sell it. Old buildings and new buildings – typically European. I came out onto the city at about 6:30 am. For two hours I saw about ZERO people. The city was a dead zone.

I wanted a nice coffee drink, which I eventually got, but I had to wait a number of hours to find a shop that was open! They like to start late, I think.

Expect videos to back up this post later. I’ve been using the dickens out of my Flipcam, so Youtube will be my next endeavour. Until then, friends.

In the meantime, we’re heading back to Nairobi tonight. Next week will be very busy, as we meet with partners, make great plans, and work on implementing our recent grant.

I’m in great health, sleeping wonderfully, and I miss everyone and most things. I’ll be in touch.

I’m sure I’ll tweet this when we hit the road again, but if I had two words to describe the Kenyan countryside, they would be: “carelessly verdant.” Seriously, everything is either a strange mass of strange trees or a field of plants. Lots of farmers around here. We drove out to Western Kenya last week, almost to Lake Victoria, and slept under bed nets in an orphanage where one of our partners works.

In case you don’t know, I’m here with The 1010 Project, a Denver-based humanitarian organization that partners with social entrepreneurs in the developing world to break the cycle of poverty. Aside from two organizations that are based in the rural west, we have a number scattered across the slums of Nairobi. I’ll be heading to Korogocho and Kibera and Kayole and Matopeni in the coming days.

It’s amazing here, it really is, and I’m super-glad to be with The 1010 Project. I’m our Fundraising Coordinator, and part of our trip involves me implementing a grant that I wrote a few months back. Our partners are VERY happy to work with us on some specific income-generating projects.

Some highlights: Helped a 4 year old Luhya girl carry a 20-liter jerrycan of water through a cornfield to her home. She smiled. I addressed a crowd of what looked to be 40,000 street children in Matopeni, singing songs and dancing and telling stories. I thanked a baboon for laying the groundwork for the internet and Twitter. Got bit by a mosquito, which means a LOT more here than it does in America (check out previous posts, which I can’t link to now, about my work with the Interfaith Youth Core and Tony Blair Faith Foundation).

I’m likely to spend the first week of July writing a bunch of impassioned posts about these and other things and putting them up, but for now, I just wanted to check in and thank you all for following along with my work. You folks are a big part of the work I do – I see it in the congratulatory tweets as much as I see it in the smiling faces of orphans and entrepreneurs that we work with in Kenya. See you all soon.