Day Three: Kibera

Last night we ate dinner alongside the sisters whose hostel we are staying at here at the University. They are mostly Tanzanian and Ugandan and all ate dinner together while watching the Spanish language telenovela called Mara Playa in dubbed American English. They were following the story very closely and would gasp when something surprising was about to happen. I was so pleased just to watch them watch that. :)

After dinner I accidentally took a nap and was late to the hour we have set aside every night for a group reflection. I had very little to contribute to the discussion because it just felt a little bit too early in the trip to have processed anything significant to talk about.

Tonight will be different though. We visited the Kibera slum today which is the largest slum in East Africa with an estimated 170,000 residents (some statistics say 1 million, that's quite a difference). I will write more tomorrow maybe because I have to go to an early dinner now but it should suffice to say that I've never seen anything like it or Nyumbani before.

Edit: when we were in Kibera we were first brought to the top of the hill where the slum begins. It is lined with small shops and businesses like any neighborhood would be but is crowded more than any place I have been before. The closeness of the buildings and the people and the smell of the uncollected waste and filth permeate the nose to create an almost claustrophobic setting for a foreigner like myself.

As we met a priest who is part of the st aloysius high school (created for street youth who've been orphaned by HIV/AIDS), I stood in awe of my surroundings.

We walked downhill on a path littered with eaten cobs of corn, plastic bags, and broken sandles, lined with shacks made of tin and sharp edges. We entered a line of shacks that used to be the old st aloysius location but now seems to function as a grade school.
About 20 students crowded into each tiny classroom. We wound our way up the rickety uneven wooden steps to the second floor and could see out to the rest of the rust covered slum below us. The color and shape of the roofs earn the slum the nickname 'chocolate city'

We were introduced to a man named David. David graduated from St Aloyisius having started as a street kid and is now employed. In his spare time he started and runs an organization called Foundation of Hope ( http://foundationofhopekibera.com/ )
that uses the talents and skills of participating youth to engage their community in HIV/AIDS prevention and sexual health education.

The passion David displayed for his organization and the way he talked about St Aloysius was so inspiring. After sitting and discussing Foundation of Hope with him we took a walk through the slum to the new location of St Aloysius ( http://www.sagnairobi.org ) to get an idea of where it started and where it's going. We were greeted by a very professional principal and led around to the different classrooms. We met a few grades of the students and were asked to come for a performance which we unfortunately could not make.

It was so interesting to see the contrast of the old and new locations. The old was at the bottom of a hill and slanted and makeshift. The new was, well new, on top of a hill, had the structure you would expect of a high school, etc.

It was uplifting to see an educational institution start from next to nothing and grow into something so beautiful and purposeful in a place that is reputed world-wide for its level of poverty.

Erin