Griffins Ndhine; a model of true service to society.  

By Gabriel Dinda

In Writers Guild Kenya, we encourage our writers to provide practical solutions to society, alongside writing about them. We work to grow an active writer, one who is a true human being, taking note of the problems around them and using their abilities to solve them. One of the people who has been a model in this is Griffins Ndhine. Griffins is a performing poet with exceptional energy. His poems are not only inspirational but also very educational. Other than highlighting different issues through poetry, Griffins has probably grown more other artists than all of us combined. He has placed himself to the true service of others. You may have experienced the powerful performance of Maji Mazuri kids. Every Monday and Wednesday, Griffins dedicates his time to the growth of the vulnerable children being taken care of in Maji Mazuri, Mathare. He trains them and spends time with them.  He mentors them on art and connects with other people to mentor them in different areas.
And that is how we came in. We thought we could make a contribution and a number of our writers have taken part in different activities to achieve this.

On 15^th February 2020, he organized for a tour of Strathmore University to the candidates’ class of Maji Mazuri in collaboration with Strathmore University’s Community Outreach Project(COP). Strathmore is greatly inspirational because it shares the view of service to community. The twenty-four students and four teachers were taken through different facilities that the University has and taken through the processes to achieve excellence in what they do. At the end of it, the students were greatly inspired. Arthur Juma, one of the students and beneficiaries of Strathmore’s community outreach projects shared his story with the students, encouraging them that background does not matter in one’s achievement in life but determination. He is a testimony to this statement.

Griffins, could describe the feelings of the students in just one sentence, ‘the seed planted today will grow to be a forest.” We celebrate Griffins Ndhine and encourage all writers to look at our societies not only as a source of content for what we write but as a ‘crying baby asking for our assistance’. May we do the little we can and do it consistently.