Dar Charity Foundation Director Polina Levina and Tabor School Head Alfred Okumu with the school’s students and teachers. (© 2024 [BLUEPRINT PHOTOCRAPHY]. All rights reserved.)
By Exec Edge Editorial Staff
When Nikita Mishin was approached with the idea of funding a startup school in one of the poorest places on earth — a neighborhood of Nairobi, Kenya, called Kibera — the need was instantly apparent.
Kibera is a dreadful place with a wicked past. It was established in the 1920s as a way to keep black faces out of central Nairobi during British rule, so as not to upset the white colonialists. One hundred years later, it remains barely electrified, and there is little running water. There is no sewage system and there never has been trash collection, so homes are built from found materials – garbage – on mounds of garbage. It is one of the densest places in the world, with an estimated 300,000 people per square kilometer.
There is no food security. This was discovered by chance in the 1980s when AIDS and tuberculosis workers came to the slum and tried to administer their medicine, which needed to be taken with meals, three times a day. They found that Kiberan residents ate only one meal a day. The treatments were abandoned.
A Tabor School student at work in a classroom. (© 2024 [BLUEPRINT PHOTOCRAPHY]. All rights reserved.)
In an environment like this, education is a luxury. That had to change. Mishin had founded Dar Charity Foundation in Moscow in 2005 and opened the New School there in 2017, educating bright children, regardless of their means. Mishin’s passion has long been education, but economic necessity forced him to prioritize business after college. Now, he is focused full-time on supporting projects that bring education to underprivileged children. A school in Kibera made sense.
The project aligned with Mishin’s educational philosophy but, ever the pragmatist, he insisted the school must be certified by the Kenyan government. This would give the school credibility and accountability and give its graduates a certificate and a standing they would not have otherwise. Tabor School in Kibera opened in 2021.
This story was related by Dar Director Polina Levina after her first visit to Tabor School in June. Levina, along with her two teenaged children and Dar colleagues, spent several days at Tabor School. There, they met with head of school Alfred Okumu, a former Anglican pastor who grew up in Kibera; teachers Evans Ouma, Hellen Opudo, Milka Nyaboke, Delvine Omwoyo and Cynthia Obedi; as well as Vadim Markin, a pastor and founder of orphanages and schools who brought the idea to Mishin.
Tabor School students learn a game that was made for them by students at Moscow’s New School. Students at the two schools often interact via video. (© 2024 [BLUEPRINT PHOTOCRAPHY]. All rights reserved.)
Most importantly, they met Tabor’s 103 students, who range from in age from four to nine years old.
At first, the visit felt a bit formal, Levina said, as her group toured the school and met teachers and students.
But then, she pulled out a large board game that the elementary students of the New School in Moscow had made for their counterparts at Tabor. It was spread out on the dirt school yard, and students and teachers flocked around it, learning the rules and playing.
“After that, it was like normal,” recalled Levina. When the New School starts in the fall, she will show students pictures and videos of the Tabor School kids playing the game.
Meeting students in a radically different culture and economic condition than those she interacts with daily was a bracing and often surprising experience, Levina said. Not just for her, but her two children. She tried to prepare them – and herself – for the poverty and conditions they would encounter in Kibera, but no preparation could be adequate.
“They were shocked,” she said.
The Kibera slum in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. (© 2024 [BLUEPRINT PHOTOCRAPHY]. All rights reserved.)
But the teens quickly adapted, interacting with the Tabor kids. Her daughter handed out pencils made of recycled material from the New School. Her son handed out stickers, which surprised the Tabor students — they had never seen stickers before.
But instantly, Levina recalled, in a moment that proves children are the same everywhere, the Tabor students peeled off the stickers and affixed them to their foreheads.
Tabor not only teaches the students; it feeds them two meals per day, which produces another teachable moment: The children are shown how to eat at a table for the first time. At home, families typically eat on the ground. Students also receive free monthly medical checkups.
“Everybody [in Kibera] wants to send their children to the school,” said Levina, “because they teach and feed them.”
Levina was struck by the fact that most people in the Kibera slum are born, live and die there, often without ever leaving. She noted that she and her children went on a safari, something that would be incomprehensible to the Kiberan children, even though a national park is only 20 minutes away.
Dar Charity Foundation Director Polina Levina’s son, Yasha, hands out stickers to the students at Tabor School in Kibera. (© 2024 [BLUEPRINT PHOTOCRAPHY]. All rights reserved.)
An education from Tabor School gives children from Kibera the opportunity to leave the slum, find work and better their lives. She is hoping the success of Tabor can be something of a case study to show other philanthropists like Mishin, and more children in Kibera and elsewhere can get the same opportunity to learn and grow.
Levina displays a mask she got in Kibera. It is made from pieces of found metal; neglected things hammered and nailed together to make something new, and beautiful. It is a fitting metaphor for what is happening at Tabor School in Kibera.
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