Rebuilding the Riverbend community kitchen after the fire

Six hundred meals a day, then nothing

The Riverbend kitchen has fed this neighbourhood for nine years. Six hundred meals on a weekday: school children in the morning, a lunch service that anyone can eat at for twenty shillings or nothing, and a catering operation in the evening that trains ninety cooks a year and pays for the whole thing.

On the eleventh of June a corroded gas line failed behind the main range. Nobody was hurt, which is the only piece of luck in this story. The fire took the range, both fridges, the extraction system and the ceiling above them. The building is structurally sound and completely unusable.

What rebuilding looks like

We are not rebuilding what was there. The old kitchen grew by accretion over nine years and the gas run behind the range was a known problem that we kept deferring. The rebuild puts the gas outside in a bunded store with a proper shut-off, moves the extraction to a single certified system, and lays out the room so two services can run at once instead of queueing behind each other.

• The shell, plumbing and drainage survived and have been inspected as sound.
• The catering arm, which funds the free lunches, has been closed since June with no income.
• Three schools have lost their morning meal delivery and are currently covering it themselves.
• Insurance paid out 340,000 shillings against a rebuild cost roughly nine times that.

What we need to reopen

Every figure below is a quote from a Nairobi supplier, obtained in the six weeks since the fire.

• $9,800 — Commercial range, oven and two fridges Like for like on capacity, with a gas train that meets the current standard rather than the 2016 one.
• $5,600 — Extraction, ducting and fire suppression A single certified canopy with a suppression system, which the old kitchen never had.
• $4,200 — Rewiring, ceiling and surface repairs The ceiling above the range line and about forty square metres of wall and floor.
• $3,100 — Gas store, shut-off and inspection Cylinders move outside into a bunded store. This is the change that stops this happening again.
• $2,400 — Prep tables, utensils and small equipment Everything within four metres of the range was destroyed or contaminated.
• $1,300 — Certification, permits and platform fees Public health re-registration, a gas safety certificate and the campaign costs.

Three schools are covering the morning meal themselves at the moment. One head teacher told us she is doing it out of the exam budget. We would like to give her that budget back.

Who runs the kitchen

The kitchen is run by a committee of eleven, nine of whom live within a kilometre of it, and staffed by six paid cooks plus trainees. Riverbend Community Foundation holds the lease and the accounts, and Wanjiru Kamau has been involved since the kitchen was a single burner under a tarpaulin in 2016. The catering arm is registered separately and its accounts are published to the committee every quarter.

Risks and challenges

The biggest risk is time rather than money: every week closed is a week the catering arm earns nothing and the trainees lose, and two of our six cooks have already had to take other work. We may not get them back. Construction estimates in Nairobi have a way of drifting once walls are opened, so we have quoted from three suppliers on every major line and hold the surface repairs as the flexible item — if costs rise, the walls get painted rather than tiled. Public health re-registration is outside our control and takes between three and eight weeks after the work is done. We will reopen the free lunch service first, before the catering arm, because that is the order the committee voted for.