After some heavy hours spent in Kibera we made our way to Nybani Children's Home. Nyumbani means 'Home' in Kiswahili and Children's Home is a fancy way of saying orphanage. These children are HIV/AIDS orphans and many of them are positive themselves. Now sorry if I offend, but I have some opinions on this.
I had a kind of difficult time reconciling the idea that HIV/AIDS affected children were being institutionalized and by the Catholic Church no less and the fact that maybe in the socio-cultural context of Nairobi this was a good thing because it's better than allowing the children to live on the street where they may fall prey to just about anyone that would think to abuse and exploit them.
Their rooms were small and they all shared what little space they had. There was a playground and mosaics.
When we arrived the children were practicing a song and dance performance piece which I taped a bit of.
We then were led to a grave site on campus that broke everyone's hearts. There were small scattered crosses and gravestones with names of children and infants who had died of AIDS. They stopped around the year 2000 when they started receiving anti-retroviral medications. All of the medications they receive at their state-of-the-art clinic are provided free of charge by PEPFAR. The next time PEPFAR comes up in the budget debate to be cut I'd like to see the politicians who oppose it travel to Nairobi and tell the kids at Nyumbani that they are the people that are trying to cut the funding that quite literally keeps them alive.
It is one thing to know about a government initiative and the money that it costs, but it is quite another thing to see the children who are healthy because of it.
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