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If you want to help by contributing money to this project, please click the button below, or contact us directly at:contribute@livingandbleeding.com

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If you would like to participate in other ways, including donating specific equipment or your time, please check out needed equipment list here.
Please note that EveryThink LLC is donating merchant services and transactions for this documentary. Donations are not tax deductible because this is a for-profit endeavor to benefit the Mathare Roots Youth Group. Go to disclaimers if you want to know more.



Help the Living, Slow the Bleeding

We want to give Mathare a voice. We want to make the world know about the important work that Mathare Roots Youth Group is doing. We want to make a documentary that will educate, enlighten, bring smiles, and generate money for Mathare Roots.
We want all this, and we want your help to make it happen.

The financial resources needed to make a typical documentary are staggering. Considering that we are traveling to Africa and filming in the harsh environment of the Mathare slum, our budget of $15,000 is absurdly small. We can make an exceptional documentary inexpensively because we are donating our time, the resources of a startup studio, and much of our own equipment. Most importantly though, we have friends in the U.S., the U.K., and Africa, that are helping us to succeed.
You know one of us

Or you know someone who does. We are only asking our friends and their friends for assistance on this project because we want it to be meaningful for everyone involved. Any contribution of any amount or item is greatly appreciated! To make it really meaningful for our friends that step up to contribute $100 or more, we'll give you credit on the DVD, a signed picture of the Mathare Roots members, a copy of the full-length DVD, acknowledgment on this site, and our deepest gratitude. If you would like specialized credit on the final DVD, please contact us at: productions@livingandbleeding.com

At under $15,000 to get to Africa and shoot two weeks of footage, this is an inexpensive film, but not a low quality one. Check out Matt's movie awards and numerous film festivals to review his experience.

We've just added a brief summary of this project and a few pictures from Mathare Adam took during his visit in 2006. To view it on you computer, get the web version. If you want to print it out on good old paper to show someone else, get the print version.

Adam visited Mathare by chance-
if you can call it that, because a muzungu doesn’t just happen to end up in Mathare. Adam was in Nairobi for the 2006 Kyoto Protocol, and was introduced by a friend to a leader of the Mathare Roots Youth Group. Adam was able to be toured through Mathare, and the rest is becoming history.


Pictures from Adam’s first visit are below, but be warned- life in Mathare can be crushing.

Charles guiding me through Mathare. Note the open sewers, pigs (food), and small mud and tin shacks where 5 - 10 people typically live in each one. And don’t forget that most of the population here are kids and teenagers.




I was assured that these kids were not dead, just high and passed out from sniffing glue.




Four children defecating on one of the many garbage piles in Mathare. This is perhaps a bit more sanitary than the open sewers that others use in the cramped portions of the main valley, but this is also where future food (pigs, goats) forage. Rain will wash this material into the Mathare River below that is used as a water source.




This is a shot across the Mathare River of homes burned in the November 2006 riots that left 26 dead. Shacks are being built to replace the burned shacks.