The One Stop Shop
If anyone randomly walked through Ruben Centre's gates on July 22, 2023, they would double-check their calendar to confirm whether it was the weekend due to the myriad activities and the great number of people involved.
Ruben FM, in partnership with African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC), was organizing a community engagement forum with a focus on Nyumba Kumi (a Kenyan communal structure that groups the community into ten houses) leadership. Various community leaders spoke in the presence of community members as they tackled tough questions about what is and what is not working in the community. Some of the challenges raised by community members concerning water and sanitation are: Lack of a centralized waste management point in Mukuru, overpricing of water by vendors, lack of clean drinking water in Mukuru and waterborne diseases due to poor sanitation.
Over 100 students from the orchestra were present, fervently practicing their talents. Leading the enthusiasm was a small group trying to harmonize their piano, guitar, and trumpet into a grand quartet. A few meters away, the grade 7 students were donned in makeshift aprons and chef hats for an assessment under the new Competence-Based Curriculum (CBC). About ten teachers supervised these year 7 students as they struggled with knives and charcoal stoves, creating undoubtedly the largest kitchen in the Southern Hemisphere, where over 500 students played chefs. The assessment was about the students' ability to steam food. This massive effort of curriculum implementation actually worked despite the haphazard nature of bringing 500 thirteen-year-olds together to cook for the first time in the school playground with poor planning and implementation of the new curriculum, which was on display for all to see.
Our partner organization The Association of Volunteers in International Service (AVSI) had a crowd of 150 community members receiving donations to start small and micro enterprises as a means to make their beneficiaries self sustainable. In the background, a loud pounding could be heard behind the hall. There, a group of three youths and four staff members had begun constructing and renovating a youth gathering space known as Mukuru Salama Youth Hub. Meanwhile, Ruben Health Centre has been piloting the opening of their facility on Saturdays for outpatient clients and the trend has been the medics see about a third of their normal clients on weekdays. Taking advantage of this opportunity, a Kenyan production company used the facility to shoot a documentary for TB awareness.
The crew was the last to leave the Centre at 8:00 PM on a Saturday. Amongst all these normal activities still continued. The maternity had two babies delivered, and Ruben FM kept the Mukuru community entertained. Our much-used analogy of the “One Stop Shop” was brought to life on this day.
