Did you know that green spaces are a luxury? Nairobi's poorer neighborhoods are stripped of trees and vegetation. To counter this, Stoneface Bombaa, a Mathare local and member of the Kairos Futura art collective is working to both bring greenery to his home and let children there interact with nature.
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00:00My name is Brian Otieno, but I'm famously known as Stoneface Bomba.
00:07I'm an artist, human rights defender, and I'm a Madhari residency.
00:12Madhari is one of Nairobi's oldest informal settlements,
00:16but it is a far cry from the green city in the sun, as Nairobi likes to call itself.
00:21For Stoneface, though, Madhari is home in a place he calls a concrete jungle.
00:25You can see around Madhari, there's no single tree.
00:28In fact, it's early in the morning, but the sun is burning.
00:31They've designed this Madhari like a place where you should just survive.
00:36But on the other side of Nairobi, people are living.
00:40They're not just living, they're living in a dignified life.
00:44To counter this, Stoneface and other community members tried planting trees in Madhari,
00:49but creating change here comes with its challenges.
00:52A few months back, floods devastated the area, killing residents and tearing neighborhoods down.
00:58At the time, Stoneface and his fellow artists had started designing an urban jungle room
01:04to teach kids about nature and the environment,
01:07but that too was destroyed, this time by government bulldozers.
01:11For now, his urban jungle has found its place at the studio of the Cairo Futura Art Collective,
01:17which Stoneface is a part of.
01:19We started planting this tree one week, second week, you know.
01:23All of a sudden, cops from nowhere, they came to that area, like,
01:28why are you guys planting tree?
01:30You know, what were you guys doing?
01:32They would say, we are planting tree.
01:34Who funded you?
01:35Like, it's our initiative to see communities green, so no one is funding us.
01:41Away from suspicious eyes, Stoneface's plant garden is part of an exhibition by Cairo Futura.
01:47They want to show the disparities within the city, but also play with the idea of utopia
01:53and want to highlight small havens that communities have created around town.
01:59This is our utopia map of micro-utopias that we have identified around Nairobi.
02:06The idea is to encourage people to go visit these different locations
02:11and to interact with the community organizations that we work with there.
02:16While Stoneface's jungle room is on hold,
02:19the Cairo Futura team takes Mavari's future environmentalists on regular trips
02:23to one of Nairobi's inner city parks.
02:26Here, they spend time in nature, do art or learn about science,
02:30an opportunity that many kids from their area don't often have.
02:34Today, they are generating electricity from soil and water, a so-called earth battery.
02:41I have learned so much that I can even teach other kids at school.
02:46We learn some of these things at school.
02:49I see them, but I don't know how they work, but then I learn it here.
02:54I enjoy it because it mostly connects me with the nature
02:58and interacting like the way I'm hearing the birds.
03:03For Stoneface and the Cairo Futura team,
03:06seeing the kids become familiar with their new surroundings is one of the best parts.
03:11While there is no quick fix to Nairobi's ecological divide,
03:14Stoneface and his fellow artists hope to bridge the gap for these kids,
03:19who one day could be future changemakers in their community.