Kibera: Hell on Earth

(photos will be posted soon - the internet connection is really slow)

Never in my wildest dreams did I have any idea that human beings could live as they do Kibera. Nor could I ever dream up conditions as foul and inhumane as this place, which is simply hell on Earth.

Kibera is the largest slum on the African continent, choking more than a million people, mostly women and children, into a space no wider than a mile and a half. There is no running water, electricity is hijacked from outside lines, and the stench made my stomach churn, as I steeled myself into compliance, so that I wouldn’t throw up again and again.

There are more flies than people in Kibera.

We weren’t sure that we’d be able to visit Kibera at first, as there was a deadly conflict the week before, between two tribes – one of whom served as landlords, the other renters. The tension erupted, resulted in a riot, shacks and stores set ablaze, eventually leaving several dead. WFP felt that we could manage, but insisted that we bring four armed guards with us into the slum, just in case.

There are no roads, no cars, no infrastructure to provide the slightest hint that the outside world cares about this place. Rows and rows of shelters are cobbled together using sticks and mud, with corrugated tin roofs, when available. The hierarchy of dirt paths, indicates the main way, eventually narrowing down to rabbit holes causing you to bend and duck under ragged metal rooftops, sliding your way around corners, leaving you covered with dirt and mud.

As we walked deeper and deeper in Kibera, we arrived at the top of a valley providing us with a view of millions of shacks, several with plumes of smoke rising above them throughout. It was a view of The Inferno, which at any moment, could erupt into violence beyond measure, or sink into the Earth and never be seen again. Either way, nobody would care.

Climbing down into the valley, I noticed that the dirt paths had turned to deep, rich mud, covering our shoes, splattering up onto our pants. Children ran about, barefoot, women lumbered ahead with firewood on their head, wearing flip flops, caked and covered in mud. After walking onward for awhile, I had a thought… but I was sure I didn’t want the answer until we were out of there. I turned to my WFP escort, and said just that, and she said – “The answer is yes.” I gagged, having to stop for a moment to compose myself. We were walking in decade’s worth of flying toilets.

Because there is no running water in Kibera, there are no toilets. There are a few which savvy businesspeople have made available for a fee, but the people who live here, who pay between $3 - $8 in monthly rent, don’t have enough money to buy food. So one must prioritize. A long time ago, the residents invented the flying toilets. One will pee on the ground when needed, but then they will poop into little plastic bags, and then fling them up onto the rooftops, so as to disappear. Eventually, the bags slide down, covering the ground with (so far) about 8 inches of human excrement, made slick with wet plastic bags. I had to force my mind from thinking about this, as I realized what was all over our shoes and pants, all over these children as they scampered about, imagining the disease that festers about in this place.

The greatest fear was falling, as the ground is rough and unstable and slippery. At one point, I grabbed onto a tin roof, so as to not to lose my balance, but instead, ended up cutting my hand. Fortunately, we had a doctor in our group, who pulled out her potions, and sanitized me. The other million would never be so lucky.

We visited three program sites while we were there.

First, Lea Toto clinic. Lea Toto is a free clinic serving HIV+ orphans, who are either living with relatives or guardian, but more often than not, by themselves, in child-headed households, scratching their way through life. It became more and more apparent to me that HIV is not a disease of sexual behavior, as it’s portrayed in the USA, but a disease of victimization. Women get the disease from their husbands (who refuse to get tested, and sleep with many wives and many women), women transfer the disease to their children in utero, women (with no means to feed their children) prostitute themselves (resulting in more transmission and more children), and children are raped by bored men who are looking for something to do. And (unlike all other developing countries I’ve visited), I didn’t see one public education poster, not one flyer, preaching testing or condom usage. Here, HIV is the outcome of the deepest kind of poverty, stigma and shame, violence and abuse, which runs as deep as the shit on the streets of Kibera.

We then slopped our way though the pathways, to visit the home of Ruth. Ruth is 31 years old, and lives in a 10’x10’ shack, with her 7 year old daughter Rhoda, and eight others; her mother, her sister, and all of their children. All of those who had been tested (including the children) were HIV+. Others had not been tested yet. We were horrified to see that we were tramping human shit all over her floor, but she just waved it off and brought us in. We sat down on crates, boxes and piles of paper, cramped into her little space, to speak with Ruth. She told us that she washes clothes when she isn’t sick, in order to pay her $8/month rent. She hasn’t been working though, because it’s cold (70 degrees) and working in water when it’s cold, makes her sick. We spoke with her about her husband (dead), he father (dead), her life (she moved to Kibera from the northern rural regions), and so much more.

By this point, I was teetering on losing my mind. I was overwhelmed with nausea and sadness, hopelessness and helplessness, seeing this, knowing that every single country on the African continent is suffering from exactly the same issues – it’s the same everywhere. I asked Ruth our final question, which was “What do you hope for your daughter?” – to which she responded with tears. And as she sat there crying, I started crying, and neither one of could stop. So we just sat there weeping. Eventually, everyone left except Ruth, me and the translator. I asked the translator to explain (in Swahili) that I was so sorry – I didn’t mean to make her cry, but that it was so evident to me that she loves her daughter so much, sending her to Lea Toto for treatment, sending her to school for food and education – that I wondered what she would like for her daughter. And Ruth simply said, “I want her to live.”

We then slipped and slopped our way to the Stara School – a beacon of light in this hellhole. Stara School was started in 2000 by Josephine Momo, a lifelong resident of Kibera. She gathered her women friends together in 1996, and decided to pool whatever little money they had, to start a school – a safe haven for children – which would be positive, and safe, and clean, providing nourishment for the mind and the body.

Each day, the teachers come and sweep the dirt floors of the walled compound, which provided a stark contrast from the outside world of Kibera. Josephine has poured her heart and soul into this school, learning how to teach, how to manage resources, how to make one shilling have the purchasing power of five… in 2006, she was nominated as the UN Person of the Year. She told me about getting on a plane and flying to Rome – something so simple to me (in fact, I did it in February), but so life-changing (and probably heart-breaking) to her.

Here at the Stara School, the children were children. They weren’t workers, resources, objects for sex, or commodities – they were 10 years old, and 6 years old, and 14 years old, singing us songs, playing their drums for us, adding and subtracting, learning to read and write, learning where Kenya was on the map and understanding, with disbelieving eyes, how far away we lived here – here on the map – in the United States. We sang and danced with them, watched them in their classrooms, stirred the pots of food and served them lunch, leaving me broken and wistful, until the school day ended, and the children lined up to walk home in the mud.