So to pick up where I left off with my last blog – we started our home visits late last week. Max and Elliot accompanied Eric to Kibera on Thursday and were able to see the school and meet all the kids. Once school let out, Grace took them to 12 of the kids’ homes to meet and interview the parents. Both boys seemed to have been pretty overwhelmed by the entire experience… I’m sure visiting Kibera for the first time and then hearing some of those family stories was a lot to digest, though they said the kids and parents were incredibly welcoming and in generally good spirits, which has been my experience in Kibera thus far as well. Reading over their interview questions and answers, I was really shocked to see just how bad some of these families have it. The poverty in Kibera is evident, but just seeing it alone does not do justice to the types of challenges people are actually facing there. Like Ken said last week, life in the slums of Kibera is absolutely hellish for these kids. The majority of them come from families where neither parent is employed (that is if there even are two parents) or where families of 6 are sleeping in one bed in a one room shack. Most of the homes don’t have electricity, and none of them have private bathrooms. Some of the parents told us during the home visits that they can’t afford to feed their kids more than once or twice a day. If you consider that most of these kids are around ages 2 to 4, that kind of malnutrition is bound to be detrimental to their physical and mental development. Makes me realize that the feeding program Lisha Mtoto is running is equally as critical as the education we’re providing.
I want to avoid sharing all the kids’ stories on here, as we are in the process of writing up bios that will be available on our website for all potential sponsors, hopefully within the next month. I will say that you learn a lot from just observing in Kibera. For instance, two of our students are twins named Stanley and Stellamaris. During their home visit we learned that their mother has 7 children in total, and had previously lost 8 other children. She is unemployed and has no husband, yet she still manages to pay rent on her shack and provide her kids with meals once or twice a day. Without sounding horribly pessimistic, we can probably assume that she is a prostitute, as that is how most obviously unemployed and single women manage to stay afloat in Kibera. I say that without an ounce of judgement because I really can only imagine how hard her life is. Prostitution and drugs are an easy thing to fall into in Kibera, and HIV/AIDS is subsequently a huge problem as well. On a less depressing note, I’m glad to see that this mother has gotten Stanley and Stellamaris to our school and that we have the chance to potentially help the entire family. The twins are adorable and seemingly happy despite everything… they even insist on dressing alike everyday – I can’t wait to be able to share pictures with all of you!
We have about 12-15 more families to visit this week and then we’ll be done with the home visits, which is a big step! Now we just need to get this website up and running and hopefully we’ll see some interest in the child sponsorship program. I can tell you that with every passing day, we all become more attached to this cause. I want more than ever to see this organization succeed and these children get sponsored. There is still a lot to be done but we’re making progress and we all feel pretty good about where we are at. So good in fact, that we allowed ourselves to have a little fun Friday night… fun that involved a lot of Tusker’s (Kenyan beer)!
We haven’t really gone out or gotten too wild here at the apartment since we arrived, so I think Friday was a much needed night of fun and group bonding. Unfortunately in Kenya, buying beer is more difficult than it is in the U.S. – go figure. While a few grocery stores sell beer and liquor, it’s easiest to just go to a pub and buy bottles. What sucks however, is that you have to bring the bottles back when they’re empty or else you cannot purchase anything else. The result of this dumb system is that we had to go back to the pub down the road about 4 times on Friday night and exchange our empty bottles for full ones. I think the bartender was somewhat horrified that we kept returning hourly to restock. Might have something to do with the fact that we don’t have a refrigerator or anyway to keep beers cold, so the name of the game was simply drink fast. During all of this drinking we managed to organize some household drinking games and had a grand old time trying to teach Eric how to play. My personal favorite was watching Eric try to play “Never have I ever…” during a game of Kings. For whatever reason, his first two rounds consisted of “never have I ever bought my uncle a beer” and “never have I ever killed someone” – incredibly random answers if you’ve ever played the game before and hilarious even if you haven’t – he basically had us all in tears. He was also very eager to teach us his favorite drinking game, called Mafia, which required some elaborate storytelling – right up Eric’s alley. One story involved bad guys killing two boys and then everyone in the story simply going to sleep. The night ended with Eric asking the boys for advice on how to “cancel his girlfriend.” All in all, Friday was a hilarious and enjoyable night in Nairobi. One more word on alcohol in Kenya – apparently some people here make homemade liquor known as chang’aa. If you think moonshine is bad, the ingredients in chang’aa include marijuana twigs, battery alkaline, formalin, and dirt. Sounds delicious, right? We were all joking around about this stuff on Friday and then actually saw on the news yesterday that 10 people in rural Kenya had died from drinking the stuff recently. I think I’ll stick to Tusker for the time being…
Tomorrow will mark my 5th week here! I can’t believe how fast time has going, and the next few weeks will probably go even faster as we have so much planned! Next weekend is our safari to Masai Mara, which I am extremely excited for. We met with the safari company on Saturday and got to see pictures of where we will be staying. The camping scares me a little bit (I have unpleasant memories of Outward Bound) but I think I’ll survive. We will have Masai warriors standing guard around our camp at night so hopefully we don’t get eaten by lions. I promise to take tons of pictures and blog about our adventure when we get back next Monday! In the meantime, I hope everyone at home has a good work week! Miss and love you all.
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