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Teenage Mothers Association of Kenya (TEMAK)
T
he sign for TEMAK indicates that it is "the last house towards the Obunga
slums." While the word "slum" has a slightly different meaning in Kenya,
the levels of poverty and illness in a Kenyan slum is much higher than that of a normal
Kenyan neighborhood. Many of the unwed mothers who come to TEMAK to learn job skills live
in these slums.
TEMAK is an organization that offers job training in tailoring, hairdressing, secretarial
skills, tie dying, batiking, and recently computers to unwed mothers, girls, and
others in the Obunga slum community. It has also become critical that the organization
provide the community with an educational forum for HIV/AIDS awareness as well as the
dangers of female genital mutilation.
To enable the young women to learn a trade, their children often attend a primary school
conducted in a sheds in the back of the compound. Twenty or thirty young women learn the
trade of tailoring by sewing clothing of paper bags. The room is full of the whirring
sound created by the manual sewing machines. Saturdays are reserved for tie dying and
batiking material that is sold as tablecloths, curtains, or bedspreads, or tailored into
clothing. The dyes and materials used are a high quality and produce material in deep
hues.
In the last year, TEMAK has become a craft center for many of the artisans
and craftspeople in Kisumu, who are known for making products out of
recycled wire, tin, metal, and the weed, water hyacinth. The
artisans, for example, will make the wire decoration or paint images
on the discarded tin while the young women will affix the designs to
greeting cards, making it a complete product. The TEMAK center
provides artisans with a place to work and acts as a consolidation point
for selling items to international markets, greatly increasing the
sustainable income available in the region.
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