Life Onboard LAST UPDATE  February 6, 2010
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January 18, 2010 Hayakawa Chiaki – The heart of Africa in the heart of Kibera
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Peace Boat was a family affair for Hayakawa Chiaki, onboard with her son, Yuta (R), and grandson, Amari, as well as her daughter Maya (not pictured).
“I have 500 children of my own!”

Most people would do a double-take at a statement like that, but Hayakawa Chiaki isn’t exaggerating. In Kenya, where Ms Hayakawa has lived for 21 years, community and family are one and the same.

In the Kibera slum – just 20 minutes from the heart of Nairobi - thousands of children live on the streets without either of those supports. Many have lost their parents to illness – such as AIDS and malaria – or violence, Ms Hayakawa says, and some have run away from home to escape abuse or forced labour. They scavenge through mounds of trash for food and find shelter in the slum’s dirt-filled alleys. Some of these children, she says, are so distressed from what they’ve experienced they can’t bring themselves to speak, or they use paint thinner to forget about the horrible things they’ve endured.
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Kibera slum is the second-largest urban slum in Africa. (Photo courtesy of Hayakawa Chiaki)
Under a shiny tin roof in a maze of drab wood and mud shacks, Ms Hayakawa helps open the door to hundreds of these lost children every day at the Mashimoni Good Samaritan School for the Orphans (MAGOSO).

She started the school in 1999 with Lillian Wagala, a woman she calls “a wonderful person” and her best friend of 20 years. Lillian, says Ms Hayakawa, grew up as an orphan and raised her younger siblings herself. After her brothers and sisters were able to be on their own, Lillian opened her home to children from the street: That was the start of Magoso. Ten years later the center has expanded from the floor of Lillian’s house to having a school, a library and a kitchen to feed all 500 students that now go there.
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Girls at Magoso school in Mashimoni village, Kibera. (Photo courtesy of Hayakawa Chiaki)
In her three weeks onboard Peace Boat, Ms Hayakawa taught participants about the hardships of life in the in Kibera, which consists of 13 villages – Mashimoni being one of them. About 1.2 million people live in Kibera, many of whom migrated from the countryside in hopes of finding work in the capital city, 7km away. They have next to nothing, she says: no security, no insurance.

You would never know, she says, by looking at the skyscrapers and fancy hotels in the center of Nairobi, that such poverty exists in Kenya. The government has pushed the problem out of sight.

What’s special about Ms Hayakawa’s lectures and workshops is the positive atmosphere she creates, while speaking about such hardship, and the joy she shares with her Magoso family. “People living there (Kibera) have a powerful energy. You can see the power in the people … they're radiating a shine in their eyes.”

The Kenyan people, she adds, care about one another. Even though they didn’t have much money themselves, it was the people of Kibera that built the school, even raising the funds from one another; Lillian, who has her own family to raise, collects food donations every week; and a number of the school’s volunteers are former students.
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Not a day went by without hearing Ms Hayakawa singing the beautiful music of Kenya.
Ms Hayakawa uses her experience in tourism and television production to gather support for Magoso – both financial and volunteer support – and also as a tool to promote understanding of sustainable development in Africa and beyond. A 2004 collaboration with the FujiTV programme Ai Nori captured the attention of viewers in Japan, who donated enough money to build another school, in Miritini village near Mombasa.

“Most of the time, the Japanese people have a natural guilt in them. They feel guilty when they see the poor starving children (because they are from a wealthy country). I don’t think that’s the solution.” She’d rather people understand and experience the wealthy culture of Kenya, and to see something more than poverty.

Sending aid through governments, she says, has done more to spread corruption in Kenya and make rich countries richer than it has to improve the quality of life in places like Kibera. She wants people to see each other as equal and to work together, as a part of a global community: It’s about relationships and friendships.

“These children taught me what it means to live. They are my mentors. I am not helping these people, they are helping me”

With translation assistance by Fukuda Hikari, Hiramatsu Yuta and Takayama Mariko