“We Are Part of Them”
In 2015, Brian Kigundu was the leader of an armed youth street gang in Kibera, a densely populated urban neighborhood of Nairobi with a population in the hundreds of thousands—the largest of its kind in Africa. Most of the residents in Kibera earned less than US$2 per day. There were few schools because most people could not afford education for their children. Basic services such as electricity, running water, toilets, and medical care were often lacking in Kibera.
Among the neighborhood’s many tiny shanties, streets, and railroad tracks, tensions were rising in the wake of political disturbances and fires. At night, Brian and his friends went out looking for trouble, and the police regularly shot at them.
Then Brian met Samson, a Latter-day Saint, who persuaded Brian to give up his gun and change his life before it was too late. Samson introduced Brian to the missionaries, and after two years of meeting with them, Brian decided to be baptized.
Samson became an elder and spokesman for the Kibera Vision Youth Group, an organization dedicated to helping youth gain the skills and experience they needed to succeed through small entrepreneurial ventures. Brian became the treasurer of the Kibera Vision Youth Group.
Together, Brian and Samson have worked to empower young girls and boys. Beginning with a car wash business in 2007, this youth group’s entrepreneurial activities expanded to making sandals out of cast-off tires, welding, fixing motorcycles, recycling plastic and iron, driving boda bodas (motorcycle taxis), and conducting on matatus (minibuses). They even established a local youth football team.
Samson and Brian taught the Word of Wisdom to girls and boys in the Kibera Vision Youth Group. Some of them had been harmed by addictive substances in the past, such as a resident of the neighborhood, the mother of five children, who lost her eyesight from sniffing glue as a teenager.
By working with youth and helping them launch collective ventures to earn money, Samson and Brian helped them learn to support each other.
Participants in the Kibera Vision Youth Group, 2021 (image courtesy of Brian Kigundu).
Samson’s and Brian’s full-time work in Kibera was recognized by the local county chief and assistants to the county commissioner. Because of the pair’s good examples, Latter-day Saint missionaries were welcomed by the local government representatives. Samson served in the Riruta Ward as mission leader, and Brian served as Sunday School president.
“Our aim is to reform these young people, and they relate well because we are part of them, and they see the change in our lives,” said Samson.