While many students were startled by the violent altercation on Fountain Avenue last semester, public violence is nothing new for Kennedy Odede ’12. Hailing from the Kenyan slum of Kibera, Odede comes from a place where there are no police, a place where violence is the law.

“In Kibera, if you are caught stealing, they will put a tire on you, pour kerosene on the tire and then burn you alive,” Odede said. “I’ve seen that happen many times. I’m used to it.”

Kibera—or “Kibera Slums,” as Odede puts it—is the second largest slum in Africa, with roughly one million residents contained in an area slightly smaller than Manhattan’s Central Park. In this well-studied but poorly supported area, he says, disease-carrying sewage runs through the streets, HIV is rampant and 80 percent of the population is unemployed.

At the age of 14, Odede, the eldest of eight children, began living on his own because his parents could not afford to feed him. Fortunately, he was able to access the support of local Christian missionaries, who helped fund his tuition at a boarding school with other poor Kiberians, where he consistently ranked at the top of his class.

After finishing high school, however, Odede’s good grades only led to one clear economic opportunity: working from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. as an unskilled laborer, carrying goods on his head—often stones—back and forth between a train and a factory. Such work, the only kind available to the 20 percent of employed Kiberians, is extremely unreliable, and Odede says that he had to find a new job every day. If there were no jobs that day, he recalls, there would not be any food either.

For five years, Odede rose early in the morning and walked extensive distances so he could arrive at the tracks in time to secure the day’s work, which was often grueling.

“I had to wake up at 3 in the morning because I had to look for water and walk to my job because I couldn’t afford the bus,” he said. “Every day you don’t know what will happen, you don’t know if you will be chased away. They would not feed us, we worked from six to six, and we would get $1.2 a day. Hand to mouth, as they say.”

Odede’s money problems, however, were only compounded by the burden of feeding his seven younger siblings, a responsibility which largely fell on his shoulders.

“Even though I was working, the money was not enough,” he said. “I supported all my siblings while I was working. I would have one meal per day and sometimes I would go without food.”

At some point, however, amidst the trials of coming of age in Kibera Slums, Odede was struck by an intoxicating notion—the idea that there were other ways to live life, that the people of his city could shirk the sense of inferiority that naturally comes with living under such degrading circumstances. He realized, most importantly, that he was living in an environment stricken of any hope for a happier future.

“In the slum, even if you are a bright kid in high school, there is no way out,” he said. “You will be doing unskilled jobs from day to day for the rest of your life. That is what most of my friends are doing, and that is what my brothers want to do. There is no hope of a better life.”

In large part, Odede became enamored with the words of Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey, who argued that those of African ancestry should reclaim Africa from its European colonizers, a goal that could be worked toward, Garvey said, through an attitude of self-reliance.

“I was inferior because of poverty,” Odede said. “Garvey used to talk about how all people are equal and that changed my life.”

With Garvey’s words in mind, Odede set out to create what he considered a “University of Life”—a cultural, educational and economic center where the people of Kibera, not outsiders, could collaboratively better themselves and their destitute neighbors. The center was to be called SHOFCO, or “Sharing Hope for Community.”

When Odede founded SHOFCO in 2005, it was an ambitious but unproven organization housed in a tin hut. Kibera still languished in disease and poverty, and Odede was still laboring for his dollar a day at the train tracks. The prospects for success, whatever that even meant, seemed distant.