“Mwazunga”

I think that it was the year before, that Kari and three of her friends chose to sponsor Mwazunga while they were at Lifest. To meet Kari, he traveled on a bus from Mombasa, which is on the Indian Ocean, with his social worker who also acted as our interpreter. Mwazunga didn’t know any English. He was only four years old but this trip was an early present as his birthday was a week after we met him. Another early present must have been the clothes he was wearing. His blue shirt and khaki pants looked brand-new but were also a few sizes too big.

The Compassion center we met him at in Nairobi is a comfortable place. Inside the building is crowded with offices but outside there is a large yard with room to run and playground equipment.

Kari gave him the presents she had brought, starting with the soccer ball. He was shy at first, but after kicking the ball around a little bit, he started to relax around all of us strangers who just kept taking his picture. He swung on the swings and slid down the slide. Soon, his dimples came out and he started to laugh with us.

When he started getting tired, we stopped to rest in the shelters they had on the Compassion grounds. Kari pulled more gifts out of the backpack she had brought for him. She gave him a framed picture of herself and her friends who also sponsored him. She showed him the letters she had received from him and his pictures.

Before we knew it, Dave had gotten back from running errands and it was time to go out to eat. Lunch that day was incredibly delicious, but also almost surreal.

Not any old commercial

Tuesday was pretty darn eventful. By comparison, it seemed like we didn’t do a lot the next day. Whereas Tuesday we saw a lot of people, witnessed so many things that you could never have imagined going on in this century on this earth, Wednesday, for me, Val, Nate and Kari anyway, it was all about one boy.

A four-year-old boy named Mwazunga from Mombasa. It had taken him 12 hours by bus to arrive in Nairobi just to meet Kari. His shy smile was the sweetest thing I had ever seen; his dimples in his round brown cheeks were just so darn cute that there are just no words to describe them. He was precious.

This is one of the harder blogs I have written, believe it or not, because I really don’t want to sound like a commercial for the organization that brought Kari and Mwazunga together. So, I am just going to throw it out there, and if just one person reading this goes to the Compassion website to check out the kids who are waiting to be sponsored, I guess it is worth the risk of turning off the rest of you.

Back to Lifest for just a minute. At Lifest is where I first learned about Compassion, International. They are one of those groups who you send your monthly check to and they tell you it goes to support a child in need. They send you the information about your child and the two of you write letters back and forth. I know that there are a lot of charities doing this sort of thing, and I would hope that they are all legitimate, but how is anyone to know for sure?

One year at Lifest, Val and two of her friends, Jacqueline and Katie, talked me into taking the plunge and agreeing to sponsor one of these kids. Neela is 16 years old now and is from India. The first few pictures I received of her, she is a thin scared little girl. The last picture I got from Compassion showed a beautiful young woman. I cry when I look at her picture. 

Am I making such a difference in her life, with my monthly donation of $38 and my infrequent letters to her? I am not nearly that conceited. She knows that I pray for her and love her unconditionally, that I will always remember her no matter how many miles separate us and that we will probably never meet. But she’s turned into this lovely lady because she knows her Savior lives and has so much more in store for her, that the desperate poverty she lives in in India is not all that there is to life. She has hope, and if I had any part in that, well, I couldn’t have done it without an organization like Compassion.

So, if you go to http://www.compassion.com/ just to check it out, that would be excellent. Or certainly look into some of the other similar programs, such as World Vision or Save the Children. But I can tell you from first hand experience what Compassion is doing for Neela, Mwazunga and other children we met while in Africa.

“Home Based Care Workers”

Since I didn’t visit these people the day we were in the slums, I copied this account out of Val’s journal. I was going to reword it, but decided that Val can tell her own story.

Within the Mathare Slums is a group of people known as Home Based Care. It consists of a team of 15 people who visit their total 100 clients three times a week. These clients all have AIDS and the members of Home Based Care supply them with their ARV medications as well as assist with buying them food and paying their rent. All of the Home Based Care workers live in the slums.

First we picked up rice, flour and sugar from a market in the slum, to give to the people that we visited. The store was tiny and packed with so many different supplies.

The first client we visited was named Gyus. He had been diagnosed with AIDS one and a half years ago and is 26-years old now. He lives with his 20-year old brother named Charles and their father. Charles and Gyus both have tuberculosis in addition to AIDS. The brothers are both on medication, but their father is not because he is denial. They lost their mother two years ago.

The next two clients we stopped to visit had been taken to the hospital.

Next we visited Eunice, a bedridden mother of two who found out a year ago that she had AIDS. Her sons are one year old and six years old. She has not had them tested. Unlike many women in the slums, she does have a husband but he doesn’t have a job. Her dream is to have her own business. The week before, she could barely even wakeup, because she gives what little food she has to her children. The day we visited, she hadn’t eaten in two days.

I didn’t get the names of the next people we saw. The mother had reported her daughter to the Home Based Care team. The daughter had found out she was HIV positive when she was pregnant. In Kenya you must be tested when you are pregnant. Her husband left her after he found out. The woman was holding a candle because it was so dark in her home. She only completed the sixth grade and did not speak English.

We also visited a woman who had been an orphan. Then when her sister died, she took in her two children. She gets up very early every morning to voluntarily clean her church. She and the other woman in her apartment that day were going to be kicked out of their homes that day because they hadn’t paid their rent. Many of the others we saw that day also hadn’t paid their rent. Before we left the slums, Jen and Dave told us that they would be paying the rent for these people.

In one of the homes we visited was a sign saying, "God gives hope and loves us." Amazing in those kinds of conditions, that people can still have so much faith.

"Eljoy”

While Michelle, Cathy and I were visiting the WEEP women in Mathare Slum, the rest of our team went to a different area of the slum. Some day I promise to tell you all about the rest of the team members!

Their first stop was Eljoy School. Eljoy School is a small cement block building deep within Mathare. There are only three classrooms, each as bare as the next. Taped on the walls were hand-drawn pictures of shapes, cars, buildings, and fruit and other foods, along with the alphabet. Their desks were long wooden benches attached to thin tables. There were no books.

The kids didn’t seem to notice though. Each of the classes had songs, skits and poems that they shared with our team. They were so full of life and love, not having a clue of all that they were missing out on.

Someone taped them singing “Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, knees and toes”. Their angelic voices, with what sounds like a British accent, were so precious. Our team shared Biblical stories with them and joined them in some of their songs.

After leaving the school, the team visited the Eljoy Peanut Butter production. As everywhere in the slum, they were crowded into cramped rooms, this group of women shelling and sorting peanuts, and then running them through a grinder. Out comes tasty, healthy peanut butter. Unfortunately, as we later found out, because it is straight peanuts, it doesn’t spread on bread very easily.

But I thought I was in the Slums

It was our second day in Kenya, on my first trip there in 2006. We had visited the WEEP women living in Mathare Slum and had seen their project - sewing uniforms for the school children.

Then Mary, the social worker working with these women, said, “Let’s go into the slums. I want to show you one more home.” I looked at my partners and we all thought the same thing - aren’t we already in the slums! The next place we visited made the first ones look pretty chic, so I am sure that by some standards we were finally truly in the “slums”.

As we turned a corner, the concrete buildings suddenly faded away. Instead we were surrounded by sheets of plywood and pieces of corrugated tin, leaning together to form haphazard structures.

One young mother was brand-new to the WEEP program. Like the other women, she was trying desperately to raise her children on her own while she was battling AIDS. Her home, like the others, was perhaps ten foot by ten foot square. She had the customary Jiko stove near the door. There were two worn tattered chairs, with crocheted doilies on the arms and across the backs. A crate turned on its side served as a coffee table, another doily centered in the middle. The only other furnishing in the room was a bare mattress behind a thin sheet.

What made this home different was that the interior walls were lined in plastic. Because the outside walls were pieced together sheets of plywood with large holes scattered throughout.

The young mother was obviously proud of her home. She also was devoted to her children with the unyielding love only a mother can give. She had one concern though.

Many people who have AIDS also have tuberculosis. The two diseases often go hand in hand, especially in those living in poverty. This woman was in that class. She knew that at night when her coughing was the worst that she shouldn’t be sleeping with her children. However, if they weren’t sleeping with her up on the bed, they had to sleep on the floor, where, with the many holes in the walls, rats would run through the house and over the tops of her children as they slept.

She didn’t tell us this so we would sorry for her or that we would be shocked, or even that she wanted anything done about it. She just wanted to know if it was better for her to cough on her kids at night or let the rats run over them.

We all looked at Vickie to see her response. Again, she told the woman what a nice home she had, and how pleased she was of her efforts. Then she turned to Mary and said, “Can you find her a new place to live by tomorrow?”

Many Lambs”

As our group walked through the Mathare slum, led by Mary and Vickie, we were speechless by much of what we saw. It was a world we could never have imagined. There was garbage everywhere and filthy water running in streams along most of the trails between the buildings. The smell was indescribable, a mixture of rotting food, unwashed bodies, mud and some other odor I just can’t place.

Most of the structures were so close together that the sun light didn’t reach us. Suddenly though we walked into a large open courtyard. It was next to a school and the children were outside on recess. There was no playground equipment and nothing much else for the children to do, except run around, chasing each other and laughing.

Their laughter seemed out of place, but the sound rose above the poverty and decay. They were just kids who didn’t know any better. They didn’t know there was a whole different world out there, a place where the sun did shine and the grass was green, where clean water was plentiful and three meals a day was the norm.

And then they saw us.

If we thought little Sondra was obsessed with us, these school children in their matching brown uniforms were just plain fascinated by these pale foreigners. Their voices sang out a chorus of “muzungu, muzungu, muzungu”. They stretched their little hands into the air, their fingers raised in peace signs. They reached out to us, just wanting to touch us and be touched by a muzungu. Simply the laying on of our hands made them feel blessed. I said a silent prayer asking that God be with each of them. And I continue to pray for them daily.

“

“A Look at a few Homes”

To learn more about the brave women of WEEP, Mary wanted to take us to see some of their homes. We headed deeper into the slums.

The buildings were tall cement structures, four or five stories high. On all the balconies, clothes were hanging out, drying despite the cloud cover. The buildings were close together with narrow passages in between them.

The first of the homes that we saw was at the end of an alley and was a stark ten foot by ten foot space. The only things in the cement room were a Jiko (a compact stove which burns charcoal), a few clothes, a hanging sheet separating the sleeping area and a blanket on the bare cement floor. This woman and her daughter had been living with her brother, his wife and their four children in the same size apartment before Mary, through the WEEP project, had moved her into this room.

Another woman had just moved into a similar home where her only furnishings were a borrowed mattress and a chair loaned to her by her neighbor. Her husband had kicked her and her daughter out when he found out she had AIDS. She had been living on the streets when Mary met her.

Both of these women were given one of the quilts we had brought with us. And Vickie told Mary to take WEEP money and buy them each a mattress.

Along one of the many passages we walked I witnessed one of those scenes that get burned into our brains. None of the buildings had running water inside of them, but at various places throughout the slum there were city water spigots. At the end of an alley, just before we turned into one of the homes, was one of those faucets. Standing there in a rusted bucket was a young girl of maybe eight or ten years old. She was stark naked, thin as a rail and shivering. All alone, next to a muddy puddle of water, she was washing herself with a grey rag.

Of the many things we saw on this trip that is one of the pictures I carry in my head, reminding me that I live in a world so far away from hers.