After lunch, we set off to visit Zana Africa, a ministry that concentrates on empowering and enriching the lives of young women, specifically in Kibera slum.
South of the center of the city, Kibera stretches for miles and swallows up hundreds of thousands of people. I still couldn’t interpret my emotions from the morning, so I was anxious for the afternoon. What if I felt more helpless than before?
We took a matatu (taxi-like, but with many more people and far less rules) to Kibera and somehow, I ended up in the front seat with the driver and a silent passenger. He pulled me into the seat and then reached around me to cram me inside before shutting the door. As we lurched forward, I fought the impulse to dig my nails into the seat. I could do this, I thought to myself. I’m here to have new experiences.
At first Kibera didn’t look like I thought it would. Lively music played, children in tattered but brightly colored uniforms dotted the street, and chickens dodged bikes, motorcycles and a throng of walkers. On the main street in the sunlight, poverty didn’t look that bad. At Zana we were greeted with friendly faces and after a briefing, set off to a primary school near the edge of Kibera where we would help with a computer class and deliver sanitary pads.
To get there, we’d have to walk through the alleys of the slum itself, instead of just the approachable main street border.
In the midst of lively conversation with Laura and Jocelyn, I noticed the shops grow less frequent and the music fade. Then we turned to our left and hurried down an even narrower alley, with sheet metal houses with crude roofs that hung over the path.
At first negotiating the hole-riddled road and jumping over unexpected and dark streams seemed like just a challenge, it didn’t mean anything. But then the smell enveloped us. I involuntarily paused at the edge of a waste-filled ravine, then looked up to see a family staring at me from a crack in their home’s wall. The building was less than 2 feet from a river of sewage.
I shrugged it off and continued, meticulously following our leaders.
I think in this moment I didn’t feel horror because I thought,
“Oh, yes, this is terrible, but it’s ok, they’ll get to go home.”
But it was their home. And it probably would continue to be. There might even be a chance that it would become their children’s, and then their grandchildren’s. They might live in that place forever, never knowing any difference.
The horror began to set in.
It became harder to walk as we went down the slope towards the edge of the slum city. We crossed a plank bridge that I was convinced would collapse and then followed a river near the base of Kibera to St. Michael’s school. The teachers welcomed us inside and gave a few of us a brief tour. As I stepped into a pitch-black hallway, the smell of sweaty bodies made me gasp. To my left a tiny room held at least 25 boys, crammed onto benches behind a few desks and attempting to see the words they wrote through a tiny window near the ceiling. Across the hall even more boys and girls excitedly raised their hands and came out of their seats as they answered questions.
We went upstairs to a class of 30 or so young girls in level 8, which means they were around 14 to 16 years old. We split up into groups to help them with their computer lessons and I attempted to introduce myself to the four faces looking up at me. I spoke loudly and slowly, hoping they would understand. They looked at me quizzically, and then answered in perfect English. I felt foolish, but enjoyed the opportunity to overcome the language barrier.
I crouched on the small bench in front of them and shook the hand of the little girl next to me, wearing a torn blue sweater and faded purple dress.
She told me her name was Molly.
She laughed when I told her my name, but after I assured her that I was serious, she wordlessly scooted closer to me
In turned out that the computer lesson was on social networking, which as a communications major, I know a little something about. J
The computers were running slow (wifi isn’t great in Kibera), but the girls were far more patient than I thought they would be. While we waited we talked about hobbies and siblings. I asked them how old they were and what they wanted to become when they grew up. “A journalist,” Molly confidently told me. The other girls continued the conversation while I just sat and looked at her, at a loss for words.
I listened to the young women around me as they confidently expressed their hopes and dreams. A few wanted to be lawyers, others doctors and teachers. They didn’t say, “someday I hope I’ll be,” instead it was always “I will be.”
In a classroom without windows, in one of the forgotten places, one of the biggest slums in Africa, these girls had hope. They had confidence in themselves and their dreams. They would have to work harder for the lives they wanted than I ever would, and they were far more excited about the possibility than I ever have been.
When we handed them their packs of sanitary pads you would have though we were giving them candy. After, as I stood in the back, I thought about my needs and what made me excited, where I found joy and gratitude.
The girls told me that if I was going to be in Nairobi for two months, that I had to come back and see them. “We will see you again, they told me.” I said I would do my best, but that I couldn’t promise anything.
We made our way back through Kibera, through darker stretches that made my skin crawl. While the girls’ hope had enlivened me, the magnitude of their situation became even more real.
The fact that I had faces to attach to the problems in Kibera ensured that I couldn’t ignore my feelings. I couldn’t pretend like I could handle it, that it didn’t affect me. I couldn’t block it out.
While I was deep in thought, we continued on our walk back to Zana’s office. At a particularly close and difficult part of the road, I saw a woman washing her family’s clothes on the stones outside her home. She wrung water out of a worn shirt and stopped to look at me. A dead animal carcass and a pit of mud sat next to her.
For the first time, I felt like I understood a little. I was still an intruder, but I was an intruder into the homes and neighborhoods I was standing in, not just into heaps of wreckage and filth.
Like the woman washing clothes and the little girls studying to be doctors, teachers, and journalists, the people who live in Kibera are living life in the best way they knew how. They were still families who love each other, people who have dreams, and parents who care what their children wear and eat.
I still haven’t processed what I saw that day. And I might not ever come to terms with the emotions that I felt. But I finally saw the people in Kibera simply as people. People with dignity and personalities, not just subjects to be scrutinized and pitied.
In the grand scheme of this summer, I think that’s what I’m here to learn.
