Friday, 15 April

Adjusting to my new environment

My first full week at work has been very busy and a little stressful too as I have not been particularly well for most of it, partly because my body’s adjusting and adapting to a different climate, diet, environment etc.  Still, I get in at 8 each morning and leaving at 5, apart from this morning when I get in at 8.30 as I didn’t sleep very well last night.  Today, facilitate a group exercise to help produce objectives for an organisational monthly plan.  To my surprise, looking at my workplan for the week, I have actually got through a lot of work.  These include providing support to staff with their individual workplans, and beginning work on creating a grants management database for the organisation which will take a little longer to complete.   

This should make me feel positive, but considering the challenges I’ve faced in the few days I’ve been here, I’m beginning to find it all rather daunting and I wonder how much I can realistically achieve in the time I’m here?  As usual, I think practically, forgetting about my own emotional needs. I feel the need to revisit my own overall workplan for my work here and review /allocate tangible targets!

Only white people live in the UK

Each day, I learn a little bit more about people in the community.  This week, I accompany Lilly, one of the local staff on her ‘visitation’ (I’m still getting used to this terminology - I prefer to call them ‘visits’).  We visit some of the women that the organisation supports.  One of them goes by the name Mama ‘J’.  She lives in a mud house, as is the norm in Kibera. The size of the room is just enough to fit in two sofas, a coffee table and a bed in the corner.  She tells me (as Lilly translates) that she had 12 children, 2 of whom passed away.  Of the 10, four have left home, the other 6 live with her.  She finds it very amusing that I am from the UK – she thinks that only white people live in the UK.  I laugh.  I too find it very amusing.  

Choice or no choice?

Like a lot of women in Kibera, she runs her own business.  She sells ingredients for ‘githeri’ (beans and corn), a local dish, during the day, and sells beans in the evening.  According to Lilly, she is very hard-working, and therefore makes decent money to take care of her children.  She seems comfortable.  This is her life.  She says to me that when her children are old enough to take care of themselves she plans to go back to the village to live the rest of her life.  I ask her why she moved to Kibera if upcountry seems comfortable enough for her to return to.  She says that there are more opportunities to make money in Nairobi than there are upcountry.  It makes sense, but I can’t help wondering if this is still a choice, and her choice.  Some Kenyans have said to me that most people still struggle to provide their families with three square meals a day.  Still, I ask myself how much better people like Mama ‘J’ and her family are doing in Kibera than they would have done upcountry had they chosen to stay there.

Selflessness and living with HIV

And then there’s Liz who has lived with the HIV virus for 25 years.  Her story touches me.  She is a very well educated woman who worked in the media industry when she contracted the virus.  She says that she is one of the first people in Kenya to have contracted it, along with several other people – she ticks off the names of those who did not survive.  She was taken away from her work and the town she lived in, brought to Nairobi, locked away, and kept away from her family and friends, for fear of ‘contamination’.  She was then taken to the hospital where once again she was quarantined, as there was little research about the virus at the time.  Her family refused to see her.  The only people who spent time with her, washed her, clothed her, fed her, were one of her sons and her brother.  She lost everything, and ended up in the slum with her younger children.  One of her children has since contracted the virus from her partner who passed away.    She said the knowledge that her daughter would go through what she has gone through was devastating for her and made her condition worse in the last year.  She surprises me when she tells me that she could not help but agree with the controversial statement made by a Kenyan minister that when the virus first hit Kenya, perhaps it would have been better to lock up those infected and keep them behind bars.  I find it shocking that she would want to have been treated in this way.  I ask her why she says that.  In her opinion, had that sort of drastic measure been taken in Kenya, there would not have been the opportunity for people to spread the virus.  I do not argue with her, or remind her that testing and disclosure is still a key problem today, that HIV also exists beyond Kenya ... I may not agree with her, but I have a lot of respect for her for thinking about others other than herself.  

She tells me that she gets sustenance from the knowledge that people from the community and from organisations like ours are there to visit her, chat with her, find out how she’s doing and so on.  She’s a lovely woman, and she’s one of the few people I have met in Kibera  that I can communicate with in the same language.  She walks us out of her mudhouse with a smile on her face, ‘just to show Stella I can walk’, in her own words.  As I write this, Liz's story makes me feel both lucky and selfish at the same time.  

Unconditional selflessness

Later today, we visit a woman who has seven children of her own and takes care of seven other children – her nieces and nephews, all ‘orphans’.  ‘Orphans’ because their mother passed away from HIV/AIDS, while their dad is a ‘useless drunk’, according to their aunt and ‘caregiver’.  Mel buys us a bottle of soda each.  I feel bad – I do not expect her to, and I’d rather she hadn’t.  But according to Julie, she and her husband are two of the few people in Kibera who are doing sufficiently well enough to take care of 14 children on their own.  I am also told Mel's husband is rather unusual in the sense that he is happy to help take care of children that aren’t his.  Apparently most men in Kibera would shun the responsibility of taking care of children other than theirs, and in this case 14 altogether!  I’m really impressed with the generosity of Mel and her partner.  I see another side of the dynamics of Kibera – people who are working hard and just making enough are going the extra mile to support their own.  As we walk back to the office from Mel's it’s another trudge.  What could be a pleasant walk in the sun is rather painful – we come across heaps and heaps of sewage upon sewage, clogged drains etc.  I hold my nose as inconspicuously as possible.  Even though i’m in comfortable walking shoes I tread very carefully.   Some places are worse than others.  Even in the slums, there’s a range of bad, worse and worst.

Child negligence

Also this week, there have been lots of questions about the family of the young boy(s) who keep coming into our office.  This morning, one of them walks into the office.  He has big beautiful eyes just like his younger brother who came in last week.  Similarly, he is just as filthy and unwashed.  Eyrun hands him a banana from her bag – I can’t begin to describe the speed with which he grabs the banana and shoves it in his mouth.  The banana never leaves hi s mouth until he’s left holding only the peel in his mouth.  It’s both sad and cute to watch.  He’s clearly not just hungry, he’s starving!  While I work on organising our group exercise for that morning, Eyrun, Eli and Lilly follow the boy to determine where he lives as other people in the community have also shown concern.  They find the mudhouse he lives in and are absolutely appalled at the living conditions in there.  Houses in Kibera are small and usually made of one room only.  This is not only small but is also, in their own words, ‘filthy, dirty, smelly, with dirty pots everywhere, etc ‘.   The mother is nowhere to be found.  They enquire from the neighbours and they indicate that she has been gone a few minutes only.  This is part of the organisation's work, to make sure that children are taken care of, and are not neglected.  

She is sent to our office later and Julie speaks with her in private.  It’s all about determining why she’s not taking care of the children as she should and identifying appropriate support for her.    Later in the day, two of the paralegals meet with the mother again to continue working with her. They find out she is HIV positive, and that one of the children is also HIV positive.  They also think that she is high on ‘ban’, a weed-like drug in Kenya, which I am told is similar to marijuana and is cheaply available to people in the slums.  They reckon that must explain her  rather unusual behaviour.   Though they struggle, I am told that mothers in Kibera take pride in taking care of their own children in as much as they can.  She does look a little dazed and distant, but maybe she’s simply uncomfortable with all the attention she’s getting?  Lilly plans to do some more monitoring next week, to make sure the children are OK, well fed (as much as possible), bathed and cleaned.  

Later in the day, the older child, Abu, comes into our office to say ‘thank you’ to Lilly and colleagues for giving his younger siblings money for food.  It’s really touching.  He’s no more than 10.  He understands what’s going on and I guess he’s also saying ‘thank you’ for ‘finding’ his family.