Nairobi Community Unity

Greetings from our last afternoon in Nairobi. We had a sombering but powerful experience as we traveled to the Mathare Valley slum, one of the largest in Africa with over an estimated 750,000 people residing here, and one statistic shared upwards of 98% are HIV positive. The good news is we came to see first-hand the great progress our Rotary partnership between our MN District and Nairobi's Langata club have made. We are in process of building 5 sanitation blocks within the slum. Each sanitation block will provide service for 10,000 people. We were greeted by our Rotarian partners and were able to tour 1 completed sanitation block and see the progress being made with the next 2 blocks. (Video of our drive into the slum, finaling at the sanitation block, is at the bottom.)

Yes, I'm sure you're looking at the pictures and have your own opinions on why the pictures with a toilet and the slum. However, keep in mind we have so much we take for granted on a daily basis for the basic survival needs, including access to clean water. I heard a recent quote that Americans flush more water down the toilet annually than Africans have access to clean water. When you enter the slum, you can't help but hold your nose from the strong stench of sewage and garbage strewn everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Even the garbage heaps up at the main road were mountainous and rotting with goats climbing on it for food. I asked our driver why there were such huge amounts of garbage, and he explained that the city council never bothered to pick-up garbage around here. This made me better understand why Tracy from Heshima the previous day expressed the need for jogging strollers for donations, as the mothers struggle carrying their kids 5 km on their backs, and wheelchairs are very insufficient for such challenging walking conditions in the slum. She already has our order to pick-up the jogging stroller we're no longer using when her family visits MN this summer.

We learned that for the sanitation blocks, there is a charge of 5 schillings (8 cents or so) per use for adults, and children are free, as there is encouragement of clean sanitation habits for kids to learn. The money is used to cover the costs of water use, toilet paper, and for the people working there overseeing the usage to ensure crimes are not committed. For those who can't afford the 5 schillings, some use chamber pots and dump it into a run-off (which we jumped across between bricks many a time during our visit) where it goes downhill into a sewage reservoir at the bottom.

We also learned that there is a large production of illegal "brew", or homemade whiskey of sorts made from the unclean water from the Nairobi River after the sewage plant. We could see people carrying firewood down towards the river, as that was the "fuel" for the distillery production. After the brew is made, they actually put it in the sewage from the run-off to cool it down. And the city cops are part of the equation too, regularly receiving bribes in order to not report the illegal activities. There are many neighborhoods in the slums, coined "Vietnam", "Kosovo", and as we walked from one neighborhood to the next, some men did not cross-over to the next area. We were led by the slum chief the entire time and never felt in danger or confrontation. The slum chief knew the second we were driving into the slum, as the slums have a very keen and fast way of spreading word through to the chief of who's doing what. Arguably, it could have occurred through texting on cell phones. We learned during our trip that mobile phones have revolutionized Kenya in an unexpected way. Internet access is slow and still not easily available in many area so the mobile phone has developed into a commerce device. People pay for many services with their cell phone which has made many areas much safer. Until just a few years ago many shop owners would literally bury their money in the ground under their shop at the end of a business day rather than carry it home and be robbed at knife or gun point.

During our walk through the slum, children were constantly running up to us to hold our hands, saying "how are you". They were very eager to get their pictures taken, as seen above, and although they lived in these unimaginable conditions, you still saw the common needs of children wanting to be loved, receive attention, play with other children, and even singing childhood songs in Swahili....the only words I recognized were "hakuna matata" and I could hear a degree of hope in their voices and my heart. Some things in life are amazingly universal, aren't they. I was happy to see how perhaps through access to these clean, safe bathrooms, it might bring people in the neighborhoods a small degree of hope and dignity that they deserve cleanliness in this basic human function and need.

So, before I say goodbye for the next few days as we explore new frontiers in the Masai Mara, I leave you with an incredible story we heard from Angela's brother regarding an amazing safari "close encounter" with a lion:

Four Kenyan Park Rangers were traveling through the Mara in a pick-up truck, with three men in the cab of the truck and the fourth in the pickup bed. An old or wounded lion was lurking in the brush along the road and pounced into the back of the truck as it passed by. The man in back was able to leap from the moving truck and the driver had the presence of mind to accelerate as fast as he could so the lion could not jump out and kill the defenseless ranger. The truck sped down the road as fast as possible for two miles with the lion in the back, and finally slowed down enough to let the lion leap out a safe distance from the man. The driver immediately turned around, found the man who jumped out of the truck, and drove back safely to the safari lodge.

Stories like this will make us even more grateful for our safari guide with a large rifle when we go for a walking safari on Saturday morning!

Peace be with you all, and maybe you'll have a new awareness of gratitude the next time you flush a toilet.... :-) Jane