Day 2: A More In-Depth Experience in Kibera
Before I related the stories of my second day, I want to make it clear that I telling the stories of these individuals not for sympathy, or for donations, but simply because I think things like this should be known. At the very least, it puts the lives that we live in the US in perspective, and we can be grateful for the privilege that we have. I’m also telling these stories to re-humanize these people that are stuck in systemic poverty. Putting a face and a name to such issues make it impossible to ignore the fact that the very poor are still normal people living their lives with hope, vigor, and dignity.
My second visit to Kibera was the next day with John Agoba, an employee of the Holy Cross compound for the past 18 years. Kibera is only a little more than a mile from the Holy Cross Consulata. John is a soft spoken and kind man, and the perfect guide for an in-depth look at Kibera. We used a combination of walking and Matatus (privately owned taxi/bus) to get to Kibera. The last mile or so to the slum we walked on foot. The experience walking gradually to the slum is sharply different from driving into the slum in a car. With each step I sensed the approach of Kibera. I recognized the smell from my previous visit, and it became stronger the closer we got to the slum. Gradually, it became harder to take a breath, and even deep breaths felt like they didn’t yield much oxygen. Yesterday I had visited St. Monica’s school, and Margaret’s home, but both had been in the relatively nice areas of Kibera. Today John was going to take me deeper, into the heart of Kibera. As a resident of the slum for twenty years, John was an established leader and respected figure in the community. I was safe with such a respected man, but that didn’t mean I felt comfortable returning to the slum.
Entering the slum from the same direction as before, we passed St. Monica’s school and Margaret’s house on our way deep into the slum. Kibera is never place where I would go on my own. First, the streets don’t form any kind of consistent pattern, and getting lost would be incredibly easy. Second, as a white westerner, it is easy to stand out and be a target of thieves. As we passed groups of Kibera residents, I received a mixture of welcoming waves and puzzled glances. I tried to make eye contact with the people, and show that I respected them and was not just there to gawk at their poverty. But mostly, my eyes were focused on the muddy dirt road and trying to keep my shoes out of piles of mud, garbage, and puddles that smelled of human waste. After about five minutes we had made it to the bottom of the valley, and used a walking bridge to cross of the polluted stream of waste below.
As John and I crossed to the other side of the stream, we started climbing away into relatively fresh air. In this area, Kibera could have been like any other lower class marketplace. Take away the sanitation and garbage problem, and it wouldn’t be that different than a Portland Saturday Market. Music blasted from booths selling CDs, vendors sold fruit and vegetables from roadside stands, and children ran and played while kicking around a soccer ball. John waved to friends he knew as he passed, and every now and then he stopped and exchanged pleasantries and greetings with a good friend.
This is when the reality of Kibera really struck me deep in the my chest. If you focused on the people, like John, instead of the environment, Kibera is just like any other community. I think one thing that we do when we hear about poverty around the world is distance that reality from ourselves. I know that I’ve done it. But seeing John, I knew that he was no different than me. The people living in slums around the world could easily be you or I. Their situation has nothing to do with individual talent, skills, or some predisposition to poverty. It is entirely based on government, politics, the area in which they were born, and the lack of opportunity in the area. To me, that is the saddest part about visiting Kibera. It’s not the terrible living conditions, it’s the fact that the people living there are no better or worse than those who live in affluent areas around the world. We may try to put the poor in a different category so that we can care less about their situation and go on with our own lives, but the truth is that they deserve the same amount of dignity and respect as anyone else.
Millicent’s Story
On the far side of the stream, John led me into a small blue medical office. Sitting at a desk in the office was a woman name Millicent, a friend of John’s who has been trained as a nurse. She was around 35 years old and wearing a long jean skirt and jacket over a dressy blouse. At first, I assumed that she was simply an employee of the medical office, so I started asking questions about her job and the medical office. As it turned out, Millicent had grown up in Kibera, and been sponsored to attend nursing school by a Priest in the slum. After graduating, she got a high paying nursing job and moved out of Kibera into a nicer area of Nairobi. Although she was happy with her job, she felt a calling to return to Kibera and assist the people of the slum. After talking to relatives who still lived in Kibera, Millicent decided to move back to Kibera and open a medical clinic. Using her own money, she bought a piece of land and built her first medical office. Knowing that the residents of Kibera often could not afford to pay medical fees, she offered free consultations to residents and charged only for services and prescription medicines.
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| One of Millicent's Medical Clinics in the Kibera Slum |
Over time, Millicent built and expanded her practice. Now, Millicent has three medical offices in Kibera, one a 24 hour maternity clinic, and employs eleven people, including a doctor and lab technician. She is a perfect example of the type of positive change that can occur when someone works from the ground up and starts community based programs. To illustrate the support that she has among the people, Millicent told me about how one of her buildings had been destroyed to make room for a road through Kibera. Instead of using her own money to rebuild the building in a new location, the construction materials were entirely donated by residents of Kibera. The people brought extra iron, cement, and wood that they were keeping for their own homes, and built Millicent a new medical facility. She didn’t spend a dime. I was inspired by Millicent’s story, but I learned that she is one of the rare few that becomes educated and returns to Kibera to assist the community. Most people leave the community for a better life once they have a successful job.
Across the Railroad Tracks
After finishing my conversation with Millicent, John led me further up the slope of the valley. After a few minutes, we crossed a set of railroad tracks that were used sometimes to ferry goods between Kenya and Uganda. All of a sudden, we were in a middle class community. Gated homes lined each side of the street, with menacing spikes on the top of the wall to show potential thieves that their home was serious about security. Like I mentioned previously, I am always amazed at the levels of income and privilege can co coexist in such a way. We also stopped quickly at a church that had been toured by the likes of Melinda Gates and then-Senator Obama. Again, I wondered how such powerful people could see the realities of Kibera and yet no dramatic changes had occurred. We continued further into the middle class neighborhood and toured some relatively upscale markets. I bought a pair of dress pants from a local tailor friend of John, and we headed back down the slope toward Kibera. Once again, the tracks marked the entrance into the slum. At this specific entrance, a huge dump of trash was piled, leaving only a small walkway to cross the tracks and re-enter the slum.
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| Two story houses provide an odd backdrop for this marketplace. |
John’s Story
After descending once more into the slum, John led me along the road to his own home. Ducking drying clothes and corrugated metal roofs, we traveled down a series of alleys before reaching his humble home. Much like Margaret’s, the interior of John’s home was clean and tidy. We sat together on his worn couches and I starting asking him questions about his life in Kibera.
John has seven sons and daughters. His oldest, 18, recently had to drop out of high school because they could not afford the final two years of school fees. John explained how tight money was for his family. His wife and three of his children moved up-country, meaning out of Nairobi and into smaller villages in an area where living expenses are lower. John’s salary is 10,000 schillings a month (about $120), which is not bad for a resident of Kibera. 3,100 of that goes to living expenses (electricity, water, and rent), and the rest is spent on school fees for his children and food for the family. Recently, with rising food prices, the family can only afford two meals a day, breakfast and dinner.
Even worse, John’s living situation is now in jeopardy. The owner of his house, a medical worker in a more upscale area of Nairobi, is planning to sell the houses to another investor. As a result, John will likely have to move out of his current home and find another in the slum. The owner would not let John buy only his house outright, but he did offer John the two one room units in which he lives, and the two adjacent units for 200,000 (about $3600). John also said that on top of that 200,000, he would probably have to spend about 100,000 repairing the four one room units. Landlords in the slum do not spend money on repairs, so each unit is in need of some work. John currently has no avenue for obtaining the funding to purchase his home. Even though he would be able to make mortgage payments by renting out the other two units after purchase, the bank will not loan to people in Kibera because there is no official title for the houses. The government owns the land, but not the buildings. Therefore, because the land is not privately owned, the bank will not give a loan to the buildings built on the land.
Throughout this explanation, I was amazed at how peaceful John was in accepting the realities of his life and the challenges that he currently faces. He did not complain throughout talking about his life, and smiled about the tough choices of the situation. It’s inspiring to see that no matter how hard the environment in Kibera works to take away the dignity of the people, most refuse to yield to despair. As I sat and listened to John, my definition for personal strength and resiliency was redefined. John, like many other people in Kibera, endure their life of hardships with a quiet strength and grace that is inspiring to witness. As we exited John’s house and left Kibera, I had hope that soon these people would receive the opportunities to change their lives that they deserved.
In the End, What Can We Learn From This Experience?
Kibera is a place that eludes my best attempts at understanding why it exists. One of the major questions I am still struggling with after visiting such a place is how can we as a global community let these conditions persist? How can we not act to ensure that everyone has a certain quality of life? Kibera becomes even more ridiculous when I think about it compared to my life for the past nine months at the University of Portland. Nothing could be further from the peace and serene beauty of the University of Portland campus than the slum of Kibera. I imagine that there are other places around the world that are as bad or worse than Kibera, and I have a hard time resting easily with the life of privilege that we live in the United States when the world contains so much poverty and suffering. Maybe we don’t want to think about it, maybe our lives are hard enough without caring about people all the way across the world that we have never met, or maybe we just have never heard about such places. But has really affected me is the fact that I am no different than these people. Yes, I grew up in the USA and was blessed with relative wealth and opportunity, but none other difference separates me from a resident of Kibera.
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| This mall in Nairobi lies about 1.5 miles from Kibera. It provided a stark contrast to Kibera. I had a hard time walking through the mall and enjoying the comforts of development while knowing the realities of what existed within walking distance away. |
A tragedy of Kibera is the fact that it is almost completely ignored by the Nairobi government. 1 million people, and no police station, no government health clinics, no public waste management services, and no working sewage lines. NGOs and other Aid organizations have poured money into poor areas like Kibera over the years, but top-down assistance has done little to improve the conditions in the slum. What is really needed is more people like Margaret and Millicent, agents of change who work in the communities in which they live.
Well, What Can I Do?
This is the hardest part of learning about Kibera. The step that bridges the feelings that something needs to be done to actual action being taken. I’ll admit, I felt (and still feel) somewhat helpless when faced with a problem of this scale. Well-funded and experienced international groups have failed to make change, so what power do we have to do better? Well, I’ll get to that, but let’s first focus on the positives.
Through reading this blog you have already taken the first step: learning about the situation and eliminating some of the ignorance that we all have when it comes to issues of poverty. Being informed is the first step toward creating equality in the global community. If we remain ignorant that such situations exist, we will never take actions to make change possible. I encourage your now to learn even more (seeing that most of your Kibera knowledge likely has come from me, someone who has spent two days in Kibera, there is much more knowledge to obtain). The burden of this knowledge is that we can no longer easily make excuses as to why we are not taking action to improve the lives of people in desperate poverty around the world. When we admit the reality that these people are deserving of the same opportunities that we have been given, we are compelled to act to change the status quo. No, not everyone can personally travel to Kibera and see the situation, but everyone can make an impact through simply spreading the words about these types of crises, or by donating money to organizations that fund change agents like Millicent and Margaret.
A great website is
www.Kiva.org. Through Kiva, you can fund loans for individuals that help change lives. Even better, you can limit you search to loans in a specific area. For instance, you could search for individuals in
Kenya, and maybe even find an up and coming business person in Kibera to support. Also, The
Congregation of the Holy Cross is currently doing great work in the slum, and its international foundation does amazing work in poor communities around the world. There are also a number of other great organizations doing work that I do not know about, so please do your own research and let me know if you find inspiring and life changing organizations.
Lastly, try to answer the question of what can I do on your own, or by brainstorming with a few others. If there is one thing we don’t have enough of, it’s ideas of how to connect people to places such as Kibera and create lasting change in that area.
Thank you reading this far, and I hope I didn’t write too much or sound to preachy about my experiences. Writing a blog is as much as a space for my own reflection as it is a space for others to learn about what I have been experiencing. I leave for Kakamega today, and that is when I start the program that I actually came to Africa to be a part of. So I’m sure I will have more things to share with you when the time comes.
All the best,
Kurt
