Kibera

We visited the Kibera slum in Nairobi on Tuesday, September 22.  If I was looking for a shock-point, this was it. The rest of our trip, while at times disturbing about the level of poverty in Kenya, was not that much different than the other trips we have taken to Central America.  Visits to the CFCA (Christian Foundation for Children and Aging – www.cfcausa.org) subprojects, meetings with the staff, meetings with the mothers’ groups and the sponsored children and aging was all good, but they had a familiarity to them that lent itself to certain expectations that coincided with what we’d already seen in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.  But Kibera  – I was definitely NOT prepared for that.

We started this part of our journey as we started all the others; by climbing onto a bus.  As we pulled away from the JJ McCarthy Center, our home for the last couple of days in Nairobi, and onto the bustling streets of the city, the chatter of 20+ people filled our ears.  Winding our way through the ever-present traffic jams, we headed past the Nairobi National Park entrance, with all the accoutrements of a nation wanting to show its best side.

After picking up some CFCA staff members at their office, we drove past some new developments – houses, retail stores, apartments – and stopped at a makeshift lookout point.

Below us, and as far as we could see to the left and right, was a sea of rusty corrugated steel/tin sheets that formed the roofs of the houses in what was the Kibera slum.

There was a certain orderliness to the scene with all the homes in line and at right angles to each other. In fact, Fr. George (one of our group) made mention of the orderly fashion in comparing it to a slum he had visited a week earlier near the Emmaus Center, the other place we stayed in Nairobi before our trip to Kisumu.  He mentioned how, from where we were looking, Kibera didn’t look that bad at all.

Little did we know.

Stephen, our CFCA / MAT coordinator, told us that a million people call Kibera home. That was unimagineable, as the area the slum covered, from our vantage point, didn’t appear capable of holding a million people. (Later I learned that Kibera does, indeed hold a million people and possibly 1.25 million. In addition, it comprises 1% of the land area of Nairobi while holding 25% of the population.) Also, from our perch lookout, we couldn’t see any people moving around. The conditions looked bad, and with the slope of the land such that we could see the path that refuse took when it rained and knowing that there were no real sanitary facilities in the slum, we had a pretty good hunch that things were, in fact, bad.

 

Back to the bus, we headed into traffic once again heading to the slum.  We turned a corner and it was as though the gates of hell had been opened and filled with a teeming mass of humanity. This was the middle of the morning and it was shoulder to shoulder. A market is at the entrance to Kibera, and we were in the middle of it. Ramshackle shops, like so much of the commerce in Kenya, held the goods that people needed for their existence. Stands selling coal, attended by Kenyan women, were the first shops we saw.  The women were covered in coal dust, as were the children playing nearby.

 

But that was just the start. As we ventured off the street, which was packed with people and the ever-present small vans/buses, the number of shops increased as did the number of people. 

 

This was no ordinary shopping trip. We were told that, for our own safety, we should not buy anything, nor should we take pictures of the residents without their permission. So why should we go there if we couldn’t shop or take pictures?

 

A shallow as that question is, it became apparent why we were there. The human condition of Kibera slum defies my ability to properly describe what we experienced. 

 

Several things were working in concert here.

1. The extraordinary numbers of people packed into a small area;
2. The lack of sanitary facilities;
3. The lack of fresh, clean water;
4. The dirt walkway, every inch of it covered with an accumulation of years and years worth of trash, the soles of shoes, rotting food, dog waste and human excrement;
5. The open ditches that run through the middle of the walkway which is, for all intents and purposes, an open sewer;
6. The smell;
7. The heat.

 

When I was in college, I worked during those summers on the back end of a garbage truck. I have had the experiences of smelling what people throw away after it has been sitting in the sun baking inside a garbage can for a week.  But I have never, ever experienced the overwhelming stench of Kibera. We came upon piles of refuse that contained the waste of Kibera, a place that only throws away what has no use for anyone, that had been fermenting under the heat of the equatorial sun for God-only-knows how long.

 

The people of Kibera create the sense of perpetual movement, People just walking up and down, moving from one place to another. Men pushing wheelbarrows full of goods they need to move to their shops. Bananas, vegetables, scrap metal – whatever. Young children, running and playing as children do, many without shoes and with no regard to the putrid nature of the ground they were walking on. People everywhere.

 

There is no quiet, no privacy in Kibera.

There were no toilets to be seen on our visit, aside from one public facility off through the shops.  There is one toilet for every 1000 people in Kibera. The public toilets are too far from the homes and the streets are too dangerous at night to go to the toilet, so people go wherever they can, or want to, and then walk away. Or they make use of the “Flying toilets,” where they defecate in a plastic bag and then fling it away from their home. Sometimes they land on cars in the nearby streets, with predictable results.  But much of the waste is carried down the ditches that I described earlier. Marius, a CFCA project coordinator, stepped in a pile of brown, liquidy goo that covered the bottom of her sandal, oozing onto the insole and over and around her toes.  She stopped and said “I pray that it is mud.”  Knowing better than that, she cleaned off what she could with a tissue, while I poured the better part of a water bottle on her foot to help clean it.

 

If you visit Kibera, fresh water must be brought in with you, as it is very difficult to find in the slum.  I was told that there are places where stand pipes exist so the residents can fill buckets with water for their use, but we certainly didn’t see any.  The bottles that we carried were the only drinking water I saw.

 

Running down the middle of the entire length of the commercial area of Kibera is a dirt walkway. At one point it is replaced with a set of railroad tracks. Not that the tracks are any less used by the residents, only that they are used in place of the dirt walkway in their constant movement.  Vendors spread their wares on the ground only inches from the tracks.  These tracks are not abandoned, but rather used twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, to carry commuters home.  The space between the rails is the walkway and takes on those characteristics – trash, filth, human movement.

 

The substance of the walkway is black in color.  I hesitate to call it dirt, as it is made up of so much more. The soles of countless shoes sandals, the rotting vegetation and the oozing brown goo are all major components of its substance.  It was hot the day we were there, but not as dusty as one might expect with a million sets of feet stirring up the dirt.  It seemed to have a heavy consistency that prevented it from becoming airborne. Nonetheless, it managed to adhere to our shoes and the bottoms of our pants.  We washed our shoes in a bucket of soapy water when we returned to the retreat center, turning the water black.

 

The vile nature of the dirt did not prevent countless residents from walking barefoot, or nearly so.  I cannot imagine the diseases that are spread by parasites picked up from the filth that is absorbed into the cuts and scrapes and open wounds on the bottoms of the feet of the residents. I have to imagine the unimaginable, at least for us in the west, the maladies that are commonplace for the residents of Kibera.  Typhoid, cholera and malaria are all frequent visitors – and killers – of the people. 

 

There is the ditch that runs the length of the slum.  In places just a foot wide and a few inches deep, it carries untold substances aided by a slow, nearly stagnant stream of water, aided by gravity to the bottom of the hill the slum sits upon, collecting more and more as it goes. It ends up in a place where there once was a dam and a lake. That has long since been filled in by the collected refuse and has turned into a place where tall grasses grow, and where the residents have taken to using the area as a toilet. 

 

The water in the ditch has a white/grey color to it, and it is stagnant in many places.  Flies buss around as it winds its way past the produce sellers and the butcher shops. The butcher shops are open-air places, or some have a window in their store front, where skinned goat quarters can be seen hanging.  Flies hover around and on the meat, doing what flies do: spreading disease, laying eggs on the exposed flesh, made all the more distasteful by the heat of the day.  I don’t know what happens to the meat that is not sold in a day, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that it is not thrown out or given away. Tomorrow’s market may well see today’s leftovers.

 

Then there’s the smell. It is pervasive. It’s disgusting, nauseating and constant. In some places it’s worse than others, but in all places it’s bad.  As I mentioned earlier, I used to work on a garbage truck. I thought I had smelled some bad things, such as fish rotting in an enclosed steel can, or meat left over from a restaurant at the bottom of a dumpster.  I have had grass juice spill all over me as I emptied clippings into the truck, and I have had maggots fall inside my gloves as I turned the cans over.  Those events were stomach-turning to be sure, but the stench that comes from a million people living elbow-to-elbow, all day every day under a tropical sun, with no sanitary facilities and no garbage collection, is a stench that defies description. Had we stayed for much longer than the few hours we were there, I have no doubt that many of our group would have become ill.

 

The heat is all the time. Nairobi sits just below the equator. Its elevation is about 5,500 feet and it has cool nights and mornings. Once the sun comes up, however, and the heat is unrelenting.  With the sun at its closest point to the earth, it is intense.  It feels like being under the broiler of an electric oven.  The effects it has on people are many, and one is sweat.  There are no showers in Kibera, and body odor is the norm.  In addition, it cooks the dirt walkway, the ditch, the shops, the goat quarters and everything else in Kibera.  It also turns the dwellings, which are mud-covered walls, mud floors and corrugated steel roofs, into roasting ovens.  We visited a couple of homes only to have our stays shortened by the heat inside them.  We couldn’t take it, but the mothers and their children inside seemed to bear it.  I longed for the cool Wyoming autumn, but the residents of Kibera don’t have that option.

 

Which brings us to the final, most devastating fact.  After two hours of the sights and smells of Kibera, we climbed on a bus and drove off to showers, shade, cool breezes under shade trees and plentiful food cooked by others.  The residents of Kibera stayed there, in the heat, with the smell, the ditch, the illness and disease, the roasting houses, and all the other challenges of their day-to-day existence.  And they woke up the next day to the same, as they will the next, and the next, and the next. 

 

The sadness and terrible conditions in Kibera are blights on the landscape of humanity, shameful evidence of the willful acceptance we have of man’s inhumanity to man.  How we can live with the fact that human beings are allowed to exist in that fashion in Kibera – and Mumbai, and Karachi, and Rio de Janeiro, and on and on and on and on.

 

Kibera is not on a map, yet a quarter of Nairobi’s residents live there. Perhaps it is not listed is because it takes up only about 1% of the area of Nairobi, or because the world just wants to overlook the very existence of the people of Kibera. 

 

I’d like to end this on a hopeful note, but the truth is hope and Kibera don’t belong in the same sentence.  There are some efforts by the Nairobi city council, as well as the Kenyan government and the UN to move people out of Kibera, but it is a massive undertaking with what would appear to be minimal chances for success. 

Pray for the people of Kibera.

We are back

The internet is a fleeting thing. The places we stayed and the people we visited had little need for internet connections. Too busy worrying about food, shelter, etc.  Thus, no updates while we were gone. I will be adding more posts about our trip in the next few days / weeks. Much to say.

Matt

we made it to Nairobi. After a plane delay in Denver had us look at rerouting through Istanbul, we got back on track via the original plan: Toronto, Zurich, Nairobi. Met up with our friends Chris and Jane at the Intercontinental Hotel. Off to bed, as 21 hours on a plane has taken its toll. Will update in the next day or so.

Matt

We leave

Tonight’s the night. The lyrics from Rod Stewart’s song seem appropriate:

Tonight’s the night. Gonna be alright….

We leave in just a few hours, so tonight is the night because we are completing our packing. I told Sherry that I didn’t want to be packing at 10:00 Thursday night, so we’re not. We are packing at 9:30 Thursday night.

Tomorrow we start the long process to get to Nairobi. Denver – Toronto – Zurich – Nairobi. A 9 hour time difference from Cheyenne.

Once we get there we will meet up with our friends Chris and Jane Sharkey, formerly of Cheyenne, then Fredonia, Wisconsin, now building a house in Rhinelander, Wisconsin.  They keep running, staying one step ahead of the law.

Once we are in Nairobi, we will connect with the good folks from CFCA on Sunday. A couple days in Nairobi, then transfer to Kisumu.  Transfer by bus, that is.  Not a Greyhound, either.

We’ll try to post as often as we can.  Thanks for listening.

Peace, Matt

Banana

I had a banana with my breakfast today. 

Not a terribly remarkable event, but today it struck me a little more than usual.  The label told me that it was a Del Monte banana, grown and shipped form Guatemala. Sort of innocuous, sort of anonymous.  After all, how many of really think about where our bananas come from?

Not that there’s a call from anyone or any group to boycott Guatemalan – or Honduran, Costa Rican or anywhere else bananas – but just that we tend to not really think about where our food comes from, or who grows it.

We know people in Guatemala. More than just casual realtionships, many of these folks are our friends, with whom we are in contact on a regular basis. Any time I see “Guatemala” on a label, I always take a deeper look at what I am buying, thinking about the person who produced that particular item.

One item I have come to grow and love is Guatemalan coffee. In particular, the coffee from the mission at San Lucas Toliman.  It may well be the best coffee I have ever had, and it is better than fair trade.  From their website:

“For over ten years the Mission has been selling the best coffee in Guatemala and exporting it throughout the United States. Working with a cooperative of small growers, the Mission ensures that these workers receive better than fair trade prices for their harvest, over triple the national average. The street price for 100 pounds of coffee is Q 60.00. This gives very little income to families. We buy coffee at Q 200.00 per 100 pounds. We ensure the finest beans and closely monitor the quality of the coffee. We are also involved in every level of coffee production: from picking the coffee fruit to drying it, from sorting and roasting the beans to grinding them. Our coffee is packaged in colorful cloth bags created by the residents of San Lucas. The entire coffee program, from the cultivation of the beans to the sewing of the bags, is entirely geared to supporting the local economy, providing just wages for the people of San Lucas, and producing the finest coffee Guatemala has to offer.”

www.sanlucasmission.com

The coffee is available online, and receives my highest recommendation.  You send them an email and they send coffee and an invoice to you. Send them a check and the transaction is complete. 

I haven’t been able to locate the same kind of programs for bananas, but I would imagine that given the much more fragile nature of that fruit versus the hardiness of coffee beans, it would be much more challenging to get them to me in the mail. 

On our first trip to Guatemala, I saw open-box trucks overflowing with bananas crawling their way up the steep roads, spewing coal-black smoke from their exhausts, heading for the markets in Guatemala City.  I still picture that every time I eat a banana.  Including today.  I hope you’ll think about the people in Guatemala the next time you put bananas on your Cheerios.

Peace

Matt

Kenya was at one time a British colony.   Typical of the old non-voluntary members of the British Empire, Kenya was not always a happy child to the Queen.  A glance at  a wikipedia article about Kenya http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenya tells us an awful lot in a quick manner.  It has only been a Republic since December, 1963. 

Nairobi, home of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and our first stop, sits at about 5,400 feet. The temperatures this time of year are in the 70s during the day, and dropping into the 50s at night.  It sounds a lot like Cheyenne’s climate during the summer, so we shouldn’t be out of our element too much.

Read the Wiki article to get the lowdown on the history, politics and geography. Its fascinating stuff, especially when you consider that homo erectus walked the ground in Kenya 1.6 million years ago.

There is a human tragedy waiting to happen in northern Kenya. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis are streaming across the border to escape the war in Somalia and settling in squalid refugee camps where there is little in terms of food and water. It hasn’t rained there in three years, and disaster is imminent unless the world pays some attention to it. The problem is that the world often ignores events in Africa. See: Rwanda and Darfur.http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/09/03/somalia.refugee.conditions/index.html

To get to Nairobi, we have to go from Denver to Toronto to Zurich to Switzerland. The way back takes us through Chicago instead of Toronto, but both legs require more than 20 hours in airplanes. 

We have been asked about vaccinations, and the answer is yes. We both received shots for yellow fever, tetanus, meningococcal disease,typhoid, polio and hepatitis.  Let’s just say that these things are not free.

 

That’s all for now.

More Africa

 

FYI – Kenya is under electrical rationing.  Power is available only parts of the day, and because of this we may not be able to update this blog on a regular basis. On all the other Mission Awareness Trips we have made there has been internet access, and we hope that will be the case this time as well. Please be patient with us as we attempt to keep you current on our travels.

Peace.

Matt

The anticipation of meeting our family in Kenya

Family is generally a term used for our biological relatives.   My family consists of my wonderful husband, Matt, our two beautiful daughters, Brianna and Chandra and all of our biological relatives.    Also, I am also blessed to have family  living in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Phillipines and Kenya.   Matt and I are committed to taking care of our family beyond a letter or two a  year.   We have developed deep and lasting relationships with our overseas family members.   We are anticipating the joy and excitement of meeting two more families from Kenya we have been corresponding with over the years.     They also will be embraced by our large international family unit.   This will be a bittersweet trip as our beloved John died in January of this year and we are deeply saddened that we will not be meeting him and his wonderful spirit we grew to love through our letters.   We will be able to meet his wife Mary and her family.   Also we will meet Evanson, a young 20 year old man who has been living in an orphanage for a majority of his life because his mother could not afford to take care of him and the rest of his siblings.   He is now in the eleventh grade and finds school to be challenging.   He has a contagious smile and faithfully writes to us every other month.   It amazes me  the depth of my feelings I have for people I have never met before yet feel a deep connectionwith because of the letters we have written to each other and the prayers we have said for each other.    I am blessed to have John and Mary and their families, as well as Evanson and his family part of my life but most important part of MY FAMILY.   Please keep all of us in your prayers as we journey to meet each other.   It will be a celebration beyond words.   Blessings,  Sherry

Why Kenya

We are headed to Kenya in a a little more than a week.  THis is a trip we have been planning for quite some time, and now we are about to go.  Originally, we were intending to make this trip in February, 2008. However, in the fall of 2007,  a disputed presidential  election was the excuse for one group of Kenyans to kill another ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22440430/).  The sub Saharan part of the African continent is an incredibly volatile place, it was not a real stretch of the imagination to believe that the killing could spill over into more provinces and Kenya could end up being the next Rwanda.  We decided to delay the trip and plan it for the future.

The reason for our trip is to visit the friends we sponsor through the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging (www.cfcausa.org).  Originally we sponsored John, an elderly man who made money by making mats. We recieved wonderful letters from him where he told us about where he lived, his family, and how he always prayed for us.  To be prayed for is a humbling experience. To think that someone cared enough about you to ask God, the creator of the universe, to bless and provide for you is an extraodinarily high honor.

Once we sent a t-shirt to John, emblazoned with “Wyoming” across the chest, with our state’s bucking horse and cowboy symbol just below.  A few months later we received a letter from John with a phot inside. There he was, standing proudly in front of his home, wearing that Wyoming t-shirt.  His letters conveyed his spirit, which was infectiously beautiful. He prayed for the day we would meet, and we were determined to make that happen.

John became ill last year, and he suffered from tuberculosis.  It was quite difficult for him as he had to travel some distance to receive treatment, and travel in that part of the world is always an ordeal. In addition, with little money he was not able to get all the medication he needed, so he would take what he could, when he could.  Knowing the difficulties he was having, we sent a little extra money so he could get a more reliable supply of medication to make his life easier.  Then in April this year, we received correspondence from the social worker in John’s project, a handwitten letter an ominous green sticker on the top that said “final letter.”

Our heart sank as we read the news that John had died.  Letters from John were written by his social worker, as John was unable to read or write.  She said: “Well it is very sad that I am disclosing to you the sudden death of John in January but just take heart and pray that God gives you courage to endure the loss. Just as I had been telling you about his illness, it went with him till the day he passed. We tried the necessary we could to treat John but all in vain. Hardly had the money you sent John for treatment reached then he died. The office will organise on how the money will be spent on the family to assist in anything or the other.”

We decided to continue sponsoring John’s wife Mary. We will get to meet her and spend time with her and her family.  We will mourn John together, smile at our memories of him, and pray that Mary and her family will have good health for a long time.

That’s why we’re going to Kenya.