JOAN OTIENO AND WASANII WAREMBO FIGHT POLLUTION WITH PLASTIC FASHION

                   FIGHTING PLASTIC POLLUTION WITH PLASTIC FASHION

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

Who said only poor people live in the slums?

Joan Otieno, 36, stays in Ngomongo village, deep in the bowels of Korogocho slum where she has been working with young Kenyan women to create recycled fashions that have taken her all over the world.

Busy setting up a photo-shoot for an upcoming fashion show in Paris when she spoke to BD this week, Joan has been working with an international team of photographers, hair stylists, production designers, and a fashion journalist to create a captivating photo preview ofan African ‘trash fashion’ show.

“The French team also brought one professional model with them for the shoot, but the rest of the models are girls from Wasanii Warembo,” says Joan, referring to the NGO that she started back in 2018 when she was still based at Kariobangi North.

“We had to move in 2019 and that’s when we set up our studio and gallery in Ngomongo,” says Joan whose following amounts to over 25 girls and young women whose ages range from 6 up to 25.

By then, Joan had already trained her core team of young models, all of whom came from informal settlements in Nairobi’s Eastlands, and all of whom were learning survival skills, especially in recycling plastics into attractive fashions, from Joan.

The shows started slowly. The first one was at the Michael Joseph Centre where Joan tested the waters by wearing an original design. She had created a trash gown made from debris collected and cleaned from the Dandora dumpsite. It was a smash success.

That was right around the same time that she had begun attracting the attention of young girl school dropouts who were eager to learn new skills. Joan was also keen to see young women not fall into errant ways like prostitution or drug addiction.

Initially, it was just a handful of young women who joined Joan on her weekly trips to the Dandora dump where she’d collect plastics for use in recycling everything from jewelry, bags, shoes, and hats, to rugs, paintings, fashion, and even place mats.

By the time Joan and her Warembo Wasanii women were invited to hold fashion shows everywhere from UNEP and USIU to Alliance Francaise, the girls were wearing matching ensembles, (namely dresses, shoes, handbags, jewelry, and hats), all made out of the same refurbished plastic packets.

The marvel of their displays was not just that Joan had taught the girls to design and cut out new clothes like professional seamstresses.

It was also that they had been able to go deep into garbage dumps with Joan to collect specific plastic packaging. This enabled them to design fashions that were either all pink and white, made out of ‘Always’ sanitary pad covers, or red and white, made out of ‘Trust’ condoms, or blue, green or pink, made from Omo plastic packets.

Joan even taught them all how to hand-stitch all those packages together into plastic ‘fabrics’ which they then transformed into environmental statements that have had global appeal ever since.

For instance, Joan has been invited to share her recycling skills in Adelaide, Australia and Stockholm, Sweden where she has shown the versatility of working artistically with plastic trash.

Locally, she’s been invited up to Tafaria Castle several times to create whole windows and walls out of broken bottles and other bits of garbage. And just prior to the COVID lockdown she spent time in Lamu, working with orphans at the Anidan children’s centre.

“We had a fashion show at the Peponi Hotel in which the children modeled dresses that they’d created during the two weeks I was with them at Anidan,” Joan says.

So while she may not be rich monetarily, Joan’s become a trailblazer in solving the planet’s monumental problem of plastic pollution one plastic gown at a time.