"The Best Dream Ever"

This morning began with a session I facilitated with the girls around Marketing and Communications. We started the session by discussing some core principles around Marketing and ended the session with journal entries. The girls could write about anything they wanted and then after we read them aloud and discussed their writings as a group. Many of the girls gave me their journal entries to keep and I wanted to share one that I felt was particularly poignant:

"Last night I slept very soundly and I dreamt of how my future would be. I dreamt that I had finished my O levels and life was very easy because I had a good job and I started an organization which changed the lives of many girls. I hope someday my dream will come true."

Each day I continue to be inspired by these young women - they want so badly to change their lives and continously dream of achieving both a proper education and a good career. Many of their journal entries revolved around their dreams and hopes for a better future.

As our day went on I saw yet another way in which these women are working to change not only their own lives, but the lives of those around them. In the afternoon we all went outside and cleaned up one of the slum areas. There is a lot of garbage in the slums and the girls take shovels outside and work for hours to collect garbage and make the area more tidy. The unfortunate thing is that there is not an efficient waste disposal system in Nairobi. So while the girls collect all of the garbage, they have to burn the piles of waste in order to get rid of it. This is a common way of getting rid of waste in Kenya, and as Canadians, we were fascinated by this practice. It seems ironic that while the Safe Spaces girls are getting rid of the garbage, the air around them is being polluted by the toxins from the buring plastics in the garbage. But I have no doubt that as the Safe Spaces girls continue their work, they will someday remedy this problem and a more efficient and less harmful waste system will be put in place.