IR Student Visits Kenya, Sees Tragic Results of Drought

(Photographs courtesy of Jennifer Armit.)

Kenya is weighing heavily on Jennifer Armit’s mind these days.

Jennifer Armit and a Kenyan student

The junior in international relations, a volunteer committee leader for Friends of the World Food Program's WFP Committee of St. Louis, recently spent nine days witnessing WFP operations in this drought-stricken African nation. The only student on the trip, she toured various sites with six other American WFP volunteers; Margot Hoermer, Vice President of Outreach for Friends of WFP; and the director of the satellite WFP office in Kenya.

Friends of WFP is a U.S.-based, nonprofit organization that helps build support for the United Nations World Food Program and other hunger relief operations. Armit is in the process of starting a Friends of WFP Committee on the St. Louis campus.

Kenyan school girls in uniform.

During the trip, Armit said she numbed herself to the overwhelming suffering she witnessed—a necessity so she could keep going. “It didn’t hit me until I got back,” she said.

Now that she’s home, the many photos Armit took in Kenya remind her of the human misery she is determined to help alleviate. On the bright side, they also help her remember the friendliness and graciousness of the Kenyan people as well as the sweetness of their children.

After an orientation in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, the group flew to the coastal city of Mombasa, where they saw WFP’s massive food distribution center. After that, they traveled to Kilifi and observed a community farm and “water pan” project. (Armit explains the water pan concept, which provides water for crops and encourages agricultural sustainability, in a video clip on a WFP web page about the Kenya trip. See “Community Garden.”)

Children line up for lunch.

Armit said observing the farming and reservoir projects helped her better understand WFP’s goal of helping drought-stricken countries help themselves. “WFP recognizes the fact that if the goal of ending global hunger is to be successful, the population facing food security issues must be able to sustain themselves,” she said.

The group then visited a rural school of 1,200 students near Kilifi. “The only reason children get to go to school there is because it’s the only meal they’ll get that day,” Armit said. She said the children in the rural school were well-disciplined and attended school regularly, especially in comparison with kids from the urban schools they later visited.

One such school was in Mombasa. Armit has many memories of that school, including a song of welcome the 1,500 students sang for the visitors and a tour of the school’s kitchen.

A woman prepares a meal using WFP food rations.

“Touring the kitchen was one of the harder things to do,” Armit said. “It was almost barren, with a large silver cauldron for mixing the supplemental food.”

The Mombasa school was receiving short-term food assistance from WFP, Armit explained, and with drought conditions lifting, was scheduled to have its supplements stopped. Armit said administrators were preparing for that time by cutting back on the food they prepared so supplies would last longer.

Clinics that treat HIV/AIDS were also on the tour. Armit said the WFP link to these clinics is that AIDS victims are offered “prescriptions for food” for themselves and their families. AIDS medications must be taken with food, she explained, and whole families are given rations to make sure AIDS victims don’t give their food away to other hungry family members.

One of the armed guards who accompanied the WFP group into Kibera

On the return to Nairobi, the group visited Kibera, probably Africa’s largest slum. It was a sight that Armit will not soon forget. Comprising one square mile and home to 1-3 million people (no one really knows how many), Kibera is a maze of squalid shacks. Only 30 percent of its households are supported by an employed person.

The WFP visitors were accompanied by armed guards on this leg of the trip because of deadly riots that had recently occurred. And yes, Armit admits she was frightened.

She recalled how the slum was built into a valley, with the middle-class homes of the adjoining hills serving as a daily reminder to Kibera residents of their own poverty. And yet, she also felt their hope. For example, she said she was touched that residents showed their belief in the future by planting gardens in grain bags filled with dirt (see photo below).

Grain bags filled with dirt offer a chance to grow food for slum dwellers.

Other memories of Kenya will remain with Armit: visiting an AIDS victim in her home; being mobbed by happy kids when she distributed crayons and flashcards; and observing their fascination when she showed them photos of themselves—the first time they had seen themselves in their lives.

Armit is currently trying to spread the word about the tragedies caused by four years of drought in Kenya. “You can’t come back from a trip like this and not do anything,” she said.

She is sharing her photos via PowerPoint presentations to fellow students and also presented them at a cocktail-hour fundraiser at a local restaurant. She is urging everyone to volunteer and to write letters.

A Kenyan woman poses for IR junior Jennifer Armit.

“I think a lot of people want to help,” Armit said. “They’re generally aware of world hunger, but they haven’t seen it. What I mainly do is raise awareness.”

Armit hopes to finish her international relations studies next year at Webster’s Geneva campus and to work for the United Nations, either for the World Food Program or the High Commissioner for Refugees.

At age 30, Armit is a nontraditional student. “I’ve been around,” she laughed. Having formerly studied environmental science, she is gravitating toward a career in helping impoverished nations achieve sustainability.

A Kenyan child. Many of the children photographed by Armit had never seen their images before.

And she shrugs at the suggestion that what she is doing is extraordinary. “I just have a passion to help people who are less fortunate than me,” she said.

If you’d like to know more about aiding Kenya’s victims of hunger, contact Armit at jenniferarmit37@webster.edu.