Ian, Emma and Merryn

In this particular blog i’d like to share with you some of my experiences from Tuesday…

I got up very early, 7am people, 7AM!!!

Anyway, my reason for this was that i was going with one of the guys i’d met through KKV to visit some projects in the slums that he is involved with.  We only had half the day as i needed to be back at KKV in the afternoon.

We started off by heading to his home.  Kenyans would not class this as a slum, which is a statement that says more than enough.  He lives in a high rise block of apartments, up several flights of dark dank concrete stairs (no lifts of course).  His home is a tiny box room, with room for a bed and very little else.  No sink, toilet, cupboards or anything else we would take as standard.  A small single hob camping stove was the only technology.  The toilets were communal, and needless to say you don’t need to worry about leaving the seat down, its simply a hole in the gound behind a cubical door.

Next door you hear babies crying as they are washed in a bowl in the coridoor.  There is a window but it only faces a wall 2 feet away.  Its open, and the smells that come in are not pleasant.

However, as i said this is not a slum, and this is a working man who turns his attention to helping others, not once did he bemoan his own situation.  Instead we met with one of his colleagues and his friend Faith, who is Alex Obahatsu’s sister.  Faith took us into one of the slums to meet some ladies who she is working to help.  More about that in a moment.

However, it is worth stating that when i visited the House of Mercy orphanage a small time back i described the area it was in as a slum, i was wrong.  To you and me it was a slum, but in Kenya there is another level below that.  And this was it, in all its shocking glory (although i was told that this is one of the better slums.  Its 5 acres big i think, with 80,000 residents.  Its a shanti town, made up of corregated iron shacks, open sewers and rubbish everywhere.

So it was here that we met with two ladies called Jessica & Jenifer.  They are Aids widows & single mothers, meaning they have lost their husbands to Aids and also carry the disease themselves.  Faith & another lady are helping them though.  Along with two other ladies they make jewellry & embroidery (sp?) which they sell to make money to put their children into education in the hope they can escape poverty.  Thank you to Georgina (from Emmanuel Church) who was here in the spring for pointing me in their direction, when i return home i hope to  be able to bring some of their products with me, they really are very good.

After leaving the slum we went to see a lady who my friend from KKV is working with as part of his project to help widows and orphans of Aids.  This lady is a widow and single mother of three.  Her middle child, a daughter aged three, was taken to the local hospital with sickness in January and transferred to the national hospital in Nairobi for treatment.  Treatment however is not free in Kenya, but was administered anyway, out of the control of the mother.

The rule in the health service is that a patient cannot leave hospital until the bill is paid.  This lady could not afford the bill.  As a result her daughter has not been allowed to leave the hospital.  In addition, every day a patient is kept in, an additional 600 Kenyan Shillings is charged.  This lady can only work part-time as she looks after her family, and she earns on average 2000ks a week (i have a feeling she might have even said a month actually).  Currently the bill is around 100,000ks (approx 1000 pounds sterling), and grows daily.

How insane is tha?  She doesn’t even earn enough to effectively keep up with the ineterst.  Meanwile she can only visit her daughter from time to time.  In addition the family only live in another glorified shoebox.  And they’re not the only ones to suffer, a story in the paper that day told of how one man had been kept inside for 5 yrs!  And its normal practise for mothers who give birth to be seperated from their babies  if they can’t afford to pay – the babies are realesed but the mothers must stay.  And they really don’t have a choice, they are watched by guards, and if you try to escape you can be put into prison.

The hospital persist with this policy as it usually gets the money from somewhere in the end.  Of course it is not meant to work quite like this, there is meant to be aid available, but there is such curruption in Kenya that this aid never makes it to the people in most need.

Quite frankly some of the things i have witnessed have been at best wrong, at worst abhorrent.  And it is very surreal visiting these situations, as you feel as if a camara crew will appear at any moment, or that you are watching this on TV.  We are so used to seeing these situations, but only from a detached perspective.

I want to finish though on a brighter note.  When i got back to KKV one of the kids, aged 12, was telling me (in great detail!) about the chronic trouble she has been having with her back for the last 3 years and how various doctors have not been able to help.  She then asked me if i could pray for her back, so in the house with the rest of her ‘family’ we prayed.  At the end of praying for her she was a little dazed, but she just looked at me and said with a look of bemusement and joy, “it doesn’t hurt anymore.”  Awesome.

Love

Ian