A Walk Through Kibera

From prison to the slums... What a week.

Friday the group headed to Kibera, the 2^nd largest slum in the continent. I knew it'd be an interesting day, but I wasn't quite expecting everything that I heard and saw that day. If I thought I had seen (or smelled) poverty before, I was wrong. Never before had I walked through streets, sat in houses, of a community that lived on this little from day to day.

I think the best way to go about this is just to give you a bulleted list of some of the facts about Kibera:

• Though it's the 2^nd biggest slum, Kibera is the largest slum that's located within the nation's capitol city. Yes, Kibera is located in Nairobi, not far from the main hub of town. In fact, I have seen parts of it several times prior to our visit. Nairobi itself is a nice city; clean, prosperous, “happening” - a little like GR. Yet, not a far walk from the malls, shops, and restaurants are around 180,000 people in 6 x 8 houses, with sewage running in the rivers, trash lining the streets, and people trying to survive on less than a dollar a day
• As alluded to in the fact above, people do live on less than a dollar a day. Later, I reflected with a friend on this fact. You hear “people in Africa live on less than a dollar a day, so donate money!”all the time, but I'll be honest – I was pretty de-sensitized to this. Until I saw it myself. It is true. If these people can make any kind of profit from menial jobs such as selling small fish, re-selling used goods, or other odd jobs, it's about 75 shillings (1 USD= 85 KSH). But this money is needed to fill basic needs. To get water from one of the tanks located sporadically throughout the villages (no tap in the house, so this is the only way they get water) you have to pay. To get veggies or rice or flour – any food – you have to pay. To get electricity to the home, you have to pay. Even to use public toilets, you have to pay. Pretty soon, that 75 shillings is gone. That is if a person can even make that much to begin with.
• There isn't an official trash disposal system in Kibera. Hence, the streets are lined with trash. Sometimes some of the youth come through and take the trash to a disposal site, but that isn't often enough. The trash also includes human waste. Since you have to pay to use a toilet (or latrine), most people don't use these toilets. Instead, they dispose of their waste on the streets or in the creeks that run along the roads. One of the guides who brought us through the streets grew up in Kibera, and said she used to play in the stream we were standing by. That stream is now dirtied and unsanitary with all the feces and urine in the water. Yet, sadly, children still play in it.
  
  
• Because electricity also costs money, many people rig their own power lines into the home. This makes for a dangerous situation; this is electricity, we're talking about, and very high voltage. People can get electrocuted. Several times, one of our guides, Philip, told us to be sure to duck under the power lines that ran at eye level.
• Most of the houses are about 6x8 feet, with mud walls and a tin roof. Some fit a family of twelve. One woman was kind enough to let us come into her home. There were about eleven of us that went into the house, and we just barely fit simply sitting in there. I was on Aubrie's lap, and others were standing.
  
  
  
  
• Philip told us that he grew up knowing “where the pavement ends, so does the government.” Once the streets become just mud paths, the government officials rarely travel along those roads. However, Philip claims that the people govern themselves. He told us a story about a man who was lynched right in front of him because he had stolen from the hotel nearby just minutes before. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone watches what everyone else is doing.
• Speaking of government... According to Philip, many of the members of Parliament in Kenya, including those representing Kibera, make more than President Obama. So you'd think with all this money, something could be done to remedy some of the squalor, right? Well, the sad fact is that the money is not often put to good use, and so the situation in Kibera remains the same. Even though the government officials in America don't always use their money in the best ways, something good must be happening because we don't have a community of 180,000 people living in this much poverty.

By the end of the day, I had been asked three questions: 1) What did you learn?, 2) What challenged you?, and 3) How would you fix this? Number 3 is the hardest to answer. I learned a lot, as the list above shows. And all together it challenged me to pay more attention to the brokenness in the world, and pray for and support reputable organizations trying to bring a little healing. It also challenged me to always be thankful for what I have, to never take the abundant blessings bestowed on me for granted. But how would I fix this? I still don't know.

After our tour, we went back to the school our guides run, which is connected with First Love, the children's home where Tyler and Max are doing part of their internship. It was only secondary school students still there, and a few of us played games with them and then Koly and I served them lunch. As I interacted with them, I didn't view them as “students from Kibera” - they were simply students, like any other that I interact with. The fact that they live in an impoverished community didn't change the smiles on their faces, the creativity they showed, their eager inhaling of food just as teens in the U.S. inhale food; they were students who loved learning, loved being with their peers, and were eager to have fun with us visitors.

I don't have answers for much of what I saw that day. What can be done? I'm not sure yet. What I do know is God has Kibera in His hands – as Steven Curtis Chapman's song “Yours” says: “every child in Africa is Yours.”