THINK BEFORE YOU TOSS: MAZINGIRA SAFI NI JIRANI MWEMA

 The world is a very small place. It is supposed to bring us close, closer to people and closer to things. It is so small that we ought to be wary of what we say, what we do, and how we interact with even the least thought of things; lest one day we meet when we least expected it, at a place we never thought of, and in a form we could hardly imagine. An encounter that might not be pretty.

Recently, I was sited in class, and in one of those moments where dons just like to digress off topic, my professor asked an obvious question, considering his audience was purely postgraduate students. A question that least makes you to doubt yourself, because you watch TV, read the papers and books, and you attend forums that help you to connect many dots in life; but a question that crosses the mind of very few and even among the few, the question is rarely answered with actions but only left to linger in the cognitive domain.

He asked, “When you buy a candy and decide to toss away the wrapper carelessly, where do you think it goes? Do you ever imagine that the two of you might meet one day but this second encounter might not act in your favor?”

He was obviously hinting at something that is not new, and even as he tried to explain it further, he still left it open and made us to rationalize it on our own, typical professorship. But I tried to be objective and to put myself in the shoes of that candy wrapper or litter for that matter. I decided to write an epitome that embodies the larger reality about litter. I simply decided to bring litter into life, give it a human face, and present it as below.

A lot has been said about me, but the cycle never seems to end.
Stories after stories, nothing ever seems to change.
You leave me in places where I am not supposed to be left.
You drop me on the streets where council workers have just swept.
You toss me out of your car windows, by the road side to stench.
Even after seeing ‘no litter’ sign posts, your ignorance still remains at its best.
I may be disgusting and useless, what do you expect? I am waste.
What good can come out of me? I make a mess.
But just make sure you put in the right place.

I understand candies appeal to your tastes
When you are tired and hungry and all you want is to rejuvenate.
I understand Nairobi does not have enough bins
And you are always too anxious to get rid 
The burden of carry me around
I understand that picnics are fun, when you hold them in public Parks 
You get to share memories that last, for a while, 
But you forget to care for the trash, you leave behind.
I understand most Nairobi streets are dirty
But it’s only fair if you simply do the right thing

You slap Mother Nature right on her face 
when you litter or leave me on the ground.
It’s only a matter of time before she gets
 really mad and unleashes the wrath of an irate woman.
A scene my eyes will honestly hate

But even now, I loathe seeing you and your brood fall ill 
I loathe contaminating aquifers and river streams
I loathe making the air heavy for you to breath
I just loathe when I see you walk on dirty streets
Or see you sleep next to a pile of me

So, if you refuse to understand me
I will be your worst nightmare. Trust me.
If you ignore those litter bins,
Or if you think you are too far from a bin, 
and decide to compromise,
I will be your worst nightmare. Trust me.
Worst all, if you decide to cut down trees
thinking that I have nothing to do with it,
I will join forces to be your ugliest nightmare. Trust me
And that’s where we shall one day meet

But I want to save you a lot of trouble
Put me in the right place and your brood, please disciple
I also think you need to learn how to recycle
It’s a ‘no brainer’, and you are not splitting an atom
You are simply separating waste, something easy to fathom

So much for being in the shoes of a candy wrapper, but if litter was to think like this and everyone understands it, there would be a lot of justice on the streets of Nairobi. Nairobians would operate on a different tier. A tier of kusema na kutenda, for Mazingira Safi ni Jirani Mwema.

Launching the New Mazingira Safi Initiative Website

After months of design, development, optimization, content creation and quality checks, Mazingira Safi Initiative is proud to present our brand new website to the world – www.msi.or.ke

For the past few months, our IT team has been working on putting the new look together, and we hope you like it. The new website features easy to use navigation tabs, a free membership application form, prominent feedback and contact forms, and lots of new content to keep you up to date with the organization. You will also find links to our profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and Blog! Follow us to stay up to date on all of the latest news.

Mazingira Safi Initiative, as a nonprofit organization, relies on the power of volunteers and support of well-wishers to ensure the environment around us remains clean, and the website gives you an opportunity to be engaged and be part of us. We are dedicated to making it as easy as possible for you to connect with us and help us inspire people within communities to stop littering.

We will be constantly adding new content and pages to the website, but what you see now is the basic concept that we are very proud of. And as much as we love our final product we have already begun working on the next iteration of our website to improve visitor experience. 

While you visit the site, www.msi.or.ke, please feel free to take a look around and let us know what you think! We're constantly looking for ways to improve and we want to hear from you.

MAZINGIRA SAFI INITIATIVE: ONE YEAR…ONE MONTH… LATER

The last one year has been an amazing journey, and I'm so grateful to be a part of it. It's a rare thing to be able to touch people's lives this way, and I try to remind myself to make the most of every opportunity I get.  

As most of you know, MSI is a nonprofit, volunteer-driven organization that seeks to inspire communities to own the responsibility of keeping the environment clean through action and community participation in our monthly clean-ups, and education programs.

People often wonder the story behind the start of MSI and they ask why I ever thought of starting such an organization. I remember, in July 6, 2013 at conference, I was having a conversation with an American gentleman I had just met. His name is Kyle. He was interested to know my life story and my passion. I remember telling him that my biggest dream is to see a clean, litter free environment in Nairobi with a proper waste management system.

After all that blabbering, he asked me one question, “Why don’t you do something about it?”

I replied saying I was afraid. He looked at me and what he told me next changed everything. 

He said to me,“You have everything you need to do what God has told you to do.”

I had a passion for the environment. I wanted to be a problem solver and to be an influencer. I was tired of seeing a dirty Nairobi, but on that day, I learnt that my passion had to be greater than my fear.

Later, I began sharing the idea with some of my friends who have, since then, walked with me in this journey. Today, the team has really grown. I got six other passionate and self-driven people on board, rallying alongside me as we pursue this vision. To be great, you must surround yourself with greater people. The organization membership has grown to over 200 people and we have been able to have an average of 30 volunteers in every of our nine previous clean ups. 

The team works very hard to ensure that our activities remain a success. The volunteers are so important to MSI because we don’t just want to make Nairobi, and Kenya, and the world, clean. We want Nairobi, Kenya and the world to be made clean by people who live in it. This is because it is their environment and we want them to own it and love it enough to lavish it with beauty in form of green grass and less litter and good waste management.

Like any other thing, we have our fair share of challenges but we continue to overcome them. In our journey, the NCC has really supported us and most importantly, we are on GOD’s side, the Creator of the environment we are fighting to protect. We look forward to more volunteers, more partnerships and a cleaner environment.

So, the story behind MSI came to be as a result of a dream given by God, and passion for the best environment there can be.

It is driven by the same passion, and passionate people who want to be influencers and problem solvers. It is inspired by you and I and other volunteers here who make a difference by owning this environment and committing to making it clean.

It is not MSI’s work to clean up, it is yours and mine. So we clean today, not litter tomorrow and tell everyone we know to do the same and to join MSI for the next clean up, every day from today.

We will be content not when the world is clean but when the people living in the world make it their duty to keep it clean.

HAPPY ONE YEAR, ONE MONTH ANNIVERSARY MSI AND MSAFITES!

Purity Wanjohi.

Founder

BUILDING THE "MSAFITE" MOVEMENT

The notion of volunteerism is often seen as a tool for peace and development. This is mainly due to its benefit to the individual volunteers and the contribution it makes to the peaceful coexistence of people within communities and the development of societies. Volunteering opportunities, especially at community level, tend to bring people together to work in solidarity towards addressing issues and challenges affecting communities. They are a way of giving back responsibly and adding value to community projects. But volunteering is also a major driving force for environmental sustainability and protection of natural resources. 

Since August 2013, Mazingira Safi Initiative has made significant strides towards building a community based waste management system in Nairobi and inspiring communities to take up the responsibility of cleaning their environment. The initiative is just one powerful example that exists in different parts of Kenya and the world at large of people uniting and mobilizing action through volunteerism to address the challenges of litter, improper waste disposal, and individual attitude against environmental cleanliness.  Just like the greenbelt movement, which, through the power and support of volunteers managed to empower communities, especially women in communities, to improve their livelihoods by conserving the environment, the initiative is using the power of volunteers to gradually building a strong movement of “clean freaks”, also known as “msafites”. These are individuals from all walks of life who are radical about the cleanliness of the environment.

A movement is comprised of radically minded individuals who are brought together by their desperation to be the change they want to see. History has it that movements can bring down outdated systems, overthrow poorly run governments, and caused terror among those in opposition to positive change. If the combined effort of the ever growing 1000+ "MSafites" is well facilitated, then this will not only support the attainment of environmentally sustainable outcomes but also promote a long lasting process that changes people’s attitudes and perceptions towards the environment and encourage resilience towards realization of change.  Volunteering is a critical driving force that will continue to build the “Msafite movement”. 

Volunteers during one of the MSI's cleanups

All Kenyans should be part of this new wave of clean freaks and give first priority to the environment and the well-being of people before anything else.  Without sustainability, problems such as poverty can never end because pollution, uncleanliness, and environmental disasters deeply affect the poor. Supporting and encouraging each other to be environmental ambassadors in our most immediate environment, puts us in the right path towards achieving sustainability. What Nairobi and the whole of Kenya needs, is msafites and like minded individuals to mobilize resources to ensure that the streets, neighborhoods, towns, and markets remain clean.

It takes our collective effort to ensure streets remain this clean.

Article written by Kelly Wale

BEYOND THE WORLD ENVIRONMENTAL DAY, 2014

The 31^st World Environmental Day will be marked on June 5^th this week. This is an important day to increase publicity on the need for improving the state of our environment. I see it as a day where the public demonstrates their grass-root actions that have had a positive impact on our environment. Celebrating this day further leads to what I would call transformational thinking, something that we at Mazingira Safi Initiative strive to achieve. The theme for this year’s celebrations is “Small Island Development States”. I guess for most of us Kenyans we may not be aware what this theme is all about.

Let me give you a brief rundown. Human activities over the past half a century have led to some devastating effect on the planet. The low lying islands nations are some of the victims left to absorb the negative effect of climate change, which is also their foremost development challenge. Arguably, some of them are likely to be submerged when sea levels continue rising. You can imagine a situation where an entire country vanishes by being submerged in water because all the arctic ice has melted and the sea levels have risen to unprecedented heights. While this still remains imaginary, the coastal lines of these islands are faced with a situation where their biodiversity is destroyed by a combined effect of climate change, hence the need to turn the spotlight on these low lying islands during this year’s world environmental day.

Image source: UNEP

 But as the world awaits to celebrate this day, we as MSI intend to continue showing that it is possible to reduce the impact of human activities on the environment by inspiring grass-root actions where we are.  We will continue to make our contribution count in raising our voices and not the sea levels. 

However, one big challenge we face is that of changing people’s mindsets and developing a culture of personal responsibility. This is a challenge that cannot be addressed overnight. It takes resilience and moving a step further to inspire people, especially the young generation, before we can begin to realize transformation thinking. It can be hard to measure such an attribute but it is easy to notice it because it is evident in culture and behaviors. For instance, I know Kenyans have a tendency of improper littering in their own country. But, meet the same Kenyans in Dubai or in London they would not do the same thing. (I have used the word “Kenyans’ loosely because I know a few places in Kenya where people do not litter improperly). This shows the extent of the challenge because the privilege to travel to such cities is mainly with the educated Kenyans. Essentially, we have to adopt a culture of personal responsibility towards the environment and it starts with those who are informed.  

However, looking beyond the World Environmental Day, MSI will continue to unite communities to love and take care of their environment. Unity is important in mitigating causes of climate change. No matter where we live, we all have an individual responsibility to protect the environment. The longer we take waiting for someone else to do it, the more the damage is caused. So, I think, there is no better time to start than now. 

"The planet Earth is our shared island, let us join forces to protect it." -Ban Ki Moon

Article written by Kelly Wale