Matthew Meyer, Ecosandals.com

Matthew Meyer is a third-year law student at the University of Michigan. In 1995 he cofounded the Wikyo Akala Project, which today sells used-tire sandals around the world at Ecosandals.com.

Korogocho, the town that is home to the Wikyo Akala Project, means "hopeless" in the local Kikuyu dialect. Korogocho families, with as many as 10 members, live in single-room huts made of mud or rusted sheets of iron. There is no sanitation system and no piped water. Refuse of all types litters the homes and their surroundings, and the stench of urine often wafts across the neighborhood. Disease runs rampant, as do gun-wielding thieves. The educational system, even at the elementary school level, is too expensive for most people to attend. In so many ways, all community structures have simply broken down. Virtually every week another child dies of a curable disease, and every few days a gun battle claims another victim -- including one last Tuesday, just a few feet from our workshop. And so I repeat my mantra of yesterday, which became my mantra the first time I set foot in Korogocho: People should not be forced to live this way.

Some people in Nairobi are able to earn a decent living through panhandling. Literally thousands of children, many from Korogocho, learn from the earliest age that the surest path to survival is with hands outstretched. Young mothers and their children travel a few miles to downtown Nairobi and stay there for several days, hoping the occasional sympathetic passer-by will provide a few pennies to help put food on the table.

Our 27 sandal-makers, men and women who never had the opportunity to complete high school, have found another path to survival. The sandal-making project has helped people understand that creativity -- in this case, a novel approach to the problem of overflowing trash -- can be another ticket out of desperation. Our workers earn a living wage while helping to clear the neighborhood of refuse. The idea is catching on: One sandal-maker, Joel Chege, used some of the money he earned last year to start a small business recycling and reselling old plastic bags. Another, Mary Nyambura, a young mother of two, left the streets just last Thursday to join our project. "Don't give to me," Michael Karuri, another sandal-maker, likes to say. "Buy from me."

Last week, Mercy Mureithi, a small business development advisor with Open For Business of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada, led a series of workshops for the sandal-makers. The primary goal was to enhance the entrepreneurial skill of the sandal-makers to help them consider their business prospects in a global context. One activity Mureithi led encouraged sandal-makers to think creatively. She gave them an old box. Working in small groups, the sandal-makers were to list potential uses of the box -- different ways to reuse and market it. Many of the sandal-makers have not completed more than a year or two of formal schooling. Yet the exhaustive lists they created showed they had grasped one lesson as clearly as any development expert: that the creative use of existing resources can be the fastest route out of poverty.

I arrived home from Nairobi Sunday night and am operating out of Ann Arbor this week. The tasks here are often menial, such as addressing customer concerns or performing regular maintenance on the website. But such involvement is ultimately about providing a gateway for the Korogocho people to the international marketplace, giving a global voice to a people who otherwise have none. Just one year ago, after six years of work, the Korogocho project was an eight-person operation struggling to pay its bills. In February of last year, Ecosandals.com went live. Within weeks, the project tripled in size. The sandal-makers were profiled in newspapers from Paris to Peoria and appeared on Canadian and Kenyan television, as well as on CNN.

We have not yet spent one penny on marketing, and we send all profits back to Korogocho. We only ask Chege, Nyambura, Karuri, and their team of 27 to think creatively and efficiently to produce high quality footwear from readily available resources. It is then our job here in Ann Arbor to give them voice, to help them access the global marketplace, and to enable the rest of the world to hear the voices of the Korogocho environmentalists as loudly as it does those at the United Nations Environmental Programme. Along the way, we are slowly building community pride and creative energy, a sparkle of hope in a place called Korogocho.