Visiting Kibera slum: wow

Monday was an incredibly full day.  In addition to experiencing and learning more about the Kenyan legal system (more in a post to follow soon), I visited projects in the Kibera slum.  I didn’t write yesterday because of time and limited internet connectivity, but also because I needed to decompress and process.  Put it this way – at dinner in the evening with the Coulston’s (who lived for years at/near the Eastleigh slum, which is not quite as desperate as Kibera – but that’s not saying much) I asked how they could process seeing and being with such slum life during the day and then come back and function in their own place at night.  The question is pressing for me as I stay still in Nairobi, but in their house outside of town (though still very modest by American standards), and even more as one thinks about traveling back to middle class life in America while trying to be honest about dealing with such absolute poverty.  There are no easy answers here at all – but it’s better to see and know and be forced to deal with it than to pretend it doesn’t exist or isn’t that real.  (And this is true even though I have seen much poverty and read many books and blog posts such as this before; but sights, sounds, smells, and touch are different than reading, try as one might to enter reality that way.)

Kibera slum is home to somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people probably.  It’s hard to know because there’s no way to take an accurate census.  We drove on roads that can’t really be called roads, even in the Landcruiser-type 4×4 vehicle we were in.  We would have been better walking but I was glad we weren’t, honestly, though I felt a bit guilty about it.  The roads were dirt, with not only potholes but big rocks (though not like a gravel road).  The streets were teeming with “store fronts” and people milling around and walking, though not going anywhere.  The stores/houses were mostly flimsy steel structures, though there were some mud structures also; there was not enough money in this slum to construct any concrete structures – not even in the “schools” that I visited.  Along the sides of the road were ditches, filled with draining water, sewage, trash, and other refuse.  You had to step across this to get into any building – and some of the places had “bridges” across the ditch, made out of a grate that looked like a bad ramshackle metal welcome mat.  During the political uprising in Kenya last summer Kibera was home to the most violence.  (The same scenes played repeatedly on CNN.)  I saw remnants of churches and other structures on nearby roads that were being rebuilt, and the head teacher of the last school I visited told heart-rending stories of the violence, the desperation for food and other necessities, and how innocent people died – including 4 of his pupils that were victims of stray bullets that pierced the too-thin sheets of metal that function as houses and offer little protection from weather, bullets, and so many other things in life.

The first school I entered housed perhaps 200 children, on 2 levels.  I was frankly wary about climbing the wooden ladder to the 2^nd level since I honestly wondered if it would hold me, but I did so anyway and found 4 classrooms packed with wall to wall schoolchildren in them.  The lower level contained more classrooms and something cooking for lunch that smelled of things one would not eat at home, since I had trouble discerning the food smell from the other stench from the other trash and refuse.  I initially met the head teacher in the “office” (everything seems to need quote marks and seems overstatement here).  It was a bit of a surreal scene as he wore a yellowish/gold shirt with a identical color tie and we sat talking briefly as the flies landed on us both (though on him more than me) and it didn’t seem to phase him at all in such squalor.

The second school seemed a happier place to my eye, though no less poor.  The head teacher was a pastor who immediately was a person that you’d like, although again one would have wished his “office” didn’t also double as the food storage area – where little bits of USAID food was spilling on the floor from bags behind a decrepit desk.  He proudly showed us where they bunk some of the orphan children that need a place; the boys sleep 3 to a bunk in the bunk beds, but for children that otherwise would sleep in the corner of a filthy dirt street any bed can’t be second-guessed.  (Like all living quarters in the slum, the dorm housed a TV with rabbit ears to get a signal; the tops of the shantys are all adorned with antennae.)  I tried to ignore the chicken making noise and sticking its head out from just behind the boys’ “dorm” as I watched my step and tried not to slip on the rocks that were doing double-duty as steps.  The school itself was one large room (overstatement again), with the preschoolers on 1/3, the younger elementary in the middle, and the older elementary on the last 1/3.  I think the room housed 175-200 children total, but it was hard to tell.  As I got back into the vehicle all the neighborhood children swarmed around me and wanted to touch my white hands, each overly eager and shouting “How are you?” “How are you?” and not wanting to let go.

The third school was on the very edge of Kibera.  It is home to 500 students at present.  It plainly has more land and room, though that’s not saying much.  Each room was packed completely full of students on long benches with desk tables in front of them in straight rows.  This included the 3-5 year old classroom, which had (I counted!) 80 children with one teacher at the front and one at the back in a classroom that was smaller than my master bedroom in the US.  The children were in uniform here too (though quite shabby of course).   There was not really room for them to move, and “learning” appeared to be limited to copying instructions and facts from the chalkboards in the front of the room.  Here, as at the other schools, the students all immediately rose to attention when the head teacher entered and they greeted him in unison with rote greeting words.  He would ask questions and they would respond almost in chant.  Such rote memorization and learning is seen in Kenya as a sign of respect and good discipline, and the Kenyan educational system prizes such obedience to teachers.  I was quite conflicted as I cringed against this educational praxis that so stifles creativity and does so little to build leadership and problem-solving, yet saw that these schools were proud (and my local day-hosts were proud) that these Christian schools could exist and instill discipline in their students like this in the slum and thereby try to help their students be equals in society.  (I could write many more pages on this, but until the Kenyan educational system in general (not just the slums) learns to foster higher-level thinking and problem-solving in its children then the country will be relegated to subservient status rather than a true leadership status.)

I’m very grateful for the work of the schools I visited and what the leaders and teachers and students are trying to accomplish there.  But the scope and depth of the problem is absolutely staggering, and visiting it in person is devastating in its enormity.

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