Making the steemitke Tshirts for our meet-up today. What an experie...

Small Businesses run in Nairobi river road can do anything. This is the down town in our city. Here we have all kind of shops and all kind of people. Around these areas you have to be macho or act macho. Speak swahili mostly, these guys rip off people speaking english ( I still cannot explain that.).

Planning with the community

As the seemit community in kenya, we have been a little shy to appear on photos we post because we are not branded. We want to be proud and show all that is Kenyan. So in our last meeting we dwelt on the branding agenda for a while and decided to make Tshirt samples. This tasks was assigned to me and @jeanwandimi. Our friend @sirkim is in the event organisation and does a lot of branding. He knew all the good places to get materials without parting with a lot of money. This was a welcome suggestion. He directed me to Aloice, A young artist. Aloice has a tiny shop in Nairobi Downtown. where he did all hos branding work. I gave him a call, told him what we needed, discussed the price and planned on the day and time. While on this call I had the impression that he would pick tshirts and stick them to a fabric printer and out came tshirts with the logo and out names.

Our trip down town

River road has always been identified for under hand deals, thieves, forgery name it. Most of the evils can be replicated here. We were however confident as we had been directed to someone @sirkim had already dealt with before. On this material day we met with @jeanwandimi and called Aloice for directions. None of us is well informed of that area so we got lost. Aloice sent someone to pick us up, who also took us to a wholesale Tshirt shop. This shop closed business on this day at 11. The owner said he would not be taking anymore customers. I figured we were the small fish. Further research later revealed that. The number of Tshirts we were to buy would not have made a difference as the shop deals with trucks loads of tshirts per day in deliveries. So yes, I want to be that rich.

At the shop

Talking to Aloice on the phone I had the impression that this was going to be a drop and print job that would take us only 30 minutes. Turns out it was a long process as @jeanwandimi docucemt's it in her post here

We also had to wait, as they were already working on some orders. This gave us some time to get to know the artist a little better. We found them working on some school uniforms. Their work was amazing. He was very polite to us on the phone and we knew we would use him after the samples. So knowing more about his work would give us more confidence next time, to call him up, order, make a deposit and wait for a delivery.

Apart from the strong paint smell that were super confident might get us high if not sick. I had a really educative day. I enjoyed spending time and watching the artists work. At some point we watched with our mouths open in disbelieve. An example is when he exposed the stensil to the light for less that one minute and the designs were transferred. @jeanwandimi even exclaimed " na watu wanasema hakuna kazi" ( people say there are no jobs) to this Aloice answered that it is all in the interest. He also offered to train us. Saying that even girls do that work.

The video

I will upload a video on dtube. My first ever detailing the process. I am still learning to edit so it is not near perfect. I muted the voice as most is in swahili. Enjoy. I will link it here. For now I am still figuring that out.

Edited
See the video here

Meet-up Today

@jeanwandimi provided details of this in her post here. if you are somewhere in Kenya do not miss. It is a good time to brainstorm and share ideas. Network, take some pictures and have fun.