“One Little Lamb”

We heard the various stories of the WEEP women. It was a repeat of the day before. Young mothers who had either been widowed or whose husbands had left them when they found out their wives were HIV positive. They all had children and no means to support them.

One of these children was Sondra. She attached herself to Michelle and me as soon as we met her. We continued throughout the day to tell her our names, but she insisted on calling us “muzungu” no matter what we told her. In Swahili, “muzungu” literally means one who travels, but most Kenyans will call any white person by that name. I suppose, at times, it can be taken as a bit of a derogatory term, but Sondra always said it with such a grin on her face, all we could do was grin back at her.

She followed us everywhere we went that day. During lunch, I held her in my lap. Later, I pulled out some paper from my back pack and drew pictures with her. I tried to get her to tell me what I was drawing, such as giraffe, which would be “twiga” in Swahili, or tree, which would be “miti”. No matter what the picture was, though, after I pointed to it and said its name, she would point at me and say “muzungu”. She was such a little goof ball.

“Fearing for my Life”

About that time, Vickie asked me to run to her jeep to get the pile of quilts we had brought with to distribute to the women. I don’t know where my team mates Michelle and Cathy were at the time, all I remembered were the stern instructions that Jen and Dave had repeatedly given us. “Don’t go anywhere by yourself at anytime for any reason.” We had also been told how the slums were filled with crime and any white person was seen as someone with great wealth, so be extra careful there.

I looked at Vickie and took the keys to the Jeep which she was offering me. Surely she knew what she was doing, she wouldn’t possibly tell me to do something that would endanger me.

I went out the front door of the church and looked up the gentle slope to where the Jeep was parked about a block away. The dirt-packed alley wasn’t filled with people, but there were a few milling about and others walking determinedly to their destination. It was the middle of the day, the sun was shining. Certainly I could make it there and back safely.

I took a deep breath, said a quick prayer and walked to the vehicle as quickly as I could. Being as it wasn’t the most modern car, I had to unlock the driver side door first to get at the latch to open the back hatch. As I came back around the side of the Jeep to the unlocked hatch, a man was suddenly in my path.

“What are you doing?” He said and then he froze just as I had. I stared at the quilts, my goal, and held my breath not daring to look at the tall black man next to me.

“Oh, you must be with Momma Vickie. I am sorry if I scared you. Can I help you?”

“No, thank you. I’m fine.” He still helped me unload the quilts and piled them in my arms. I locked the Jeep again and strode back to the church. It wasn’t until I was back inside that it dawned on me that the man had been watching Vickie’s car, keeping it safe. And Vickie had known that he would be there and that I would be safe as well.

“More WEEP women”

Tuesday morning the plan was for us to go to Mathare slum. Vickie was going to work with the women of a new WEEP project she was starting. Cathy, Michelle and I opted to go with her. The rest of the team jumped on the bus with Jen and Dave to visit one of the schools and a group who works with AIDS patients in Mathare.

When we were told we were going to a slum, I wondered where we were yesterday. That sure fit my definition of a slum, but little did I know. As we drove into Mathare slum, it was like entering a different world, like something you would only see on a movie set.

Vickie parked her jeep only a few blocks into the slum, because that was where the road ended. We walked only another block or so to the new WEEP project. Here, the women were making school uniforms for the children of Mathare.

It is another one of those things that an outsider cannot comprehend. The children in general wear rags or at best donated used clothes sent from the United States or Europe. When they go to school, however, they need to wear uniforms. When a family cannot afford food, how can they be expected to purchase school uniforms? Not only because of that do a lot of kids not go to school, but their parents also have to pay for their books. Yet Kenya is proud to offer a free education to its school-age children. I can’t quite figure that one out.

Vickie, too, could see that it was a huge problem. So, through HEART, she started a program in Mathare where widows with AIDS would sew school uniforms. They would earn an income from the sales and the families would have access to more affordable uniforms.

The building that was set up for their sewing room was medium size, but felt pretty cramped with six sewing machines and eight women. None of them have ever sewn before and because fabric is so expensive for them, they were practicing on paper bags. The walls of the room were lined with these small perfect clothes all made out of paper. The women were so proud of their accomplishments so far. That week they were supposed to be getting their first real fabric. The first uniforms they would sew would be for their own children. And for the first time ever their children would be able to go to school.

Mary is the woman of who locally runs this WEEP program. She is a pastor’s wife and a trained social worker. When she first moved into the slum with her husband, she felt so useless. There was so much work to do, so much despair but she didn’t know where to begin. Once she connected with Vickie, they were able to indentify young mothers in need of just such a project.

Mary’s church was just across the alley from the project’s sewing room and we ate lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and bananas there while Vickie shared the numbers with Mary. I wish I could remember the exact figures. If I recall correctly, Vickie estimated that within a month of the project being fully operational, the women would each be making the equivalent of $30 a month. Rent usually ran around $22.50 a month for most of the tiny cement rooms in the slums. I could see the wheels spinning in Mary’s head when she heard the numbers. Her eyes got big and a smile spread across her sweet face. “They can each afford their own place to live with their children,” she said.

What is your Definition of a Slum

I have to admit it. Growing up in the rural countryside of northern Wisconsin, I haven’t spent much time in a really big city. And when I have been in places such as Detroit or Chicago or Denver, it was mostly in nice neighborhoods. I have over the years driven through some rather questionable areas though. They look basically the same as any other neighborhood, but much more rundown, dreary and kind of scary.

In Africa, and probably a lot of other places in the third world, the word slum has a whole different meaning. It’s not a place that was once a part of the city and was just neglected. The slums in Nairobi are just big bad places where the poor and destitute were allowed to settle so that the city at large would not have to deal with them.

Kibera slum, south west of the center of Nairobi, is thought to be one of the largest slums in the world. If you do a search for it on Google Earth, you can see this huge area, about the size of New York City’s Central Park, filled with structures made of scraps of corrugated metal and pieces of plywood. Even from the grainy satellite shot, you can see, even sense, the desolation. Population estimates run as high as 1.5 million people, depending on the time of year.

Mathare slum, on the north east side of Nairobi, isn’t much better. The population averages around a half million and encompasses several areas, but the view is all pretty much the same. No trees, no roads, just a sea of pitiful buildings, if you can call them buildings. In between those buildings, crammed together as they are, are mounds of garbage, human waste, live chickens and goats, and dead ones. Inside those buildings, entire extended families live in rooms that aren’t more than ten foot square, with no indoor plumbing and only occasionally electricity.

And this is where we went our second day in Kenya on my first trip there in 2006.

“Morning Devo”

As I believe I already said, every morning one of us was assigned to read a devotion at breakfast. Tuesday, our second day in Kenya, it was Carson’s turn. He was the youngest team member, at 14-years-old, but the tallest, thin and gangly. He said he wasn’t good at leading devotions, so he wrote a poem instead. The rest of us all looked at each, thinking, “give me a Bible passage any time over writing a poem”.

Carson did a great job. Here is his poem, used with permission.

Sometimes I wonder, God…

Where have you gone?

Are you here?

Or is this all wrong?

But when I keep on breathing,

And when singing a song…

I think to myself,

“No, this is not wrong.”

The God I know is one of love…

He sent His Son to forgive us all.

He created everything

Ugliness and all…

Even a place called Kenya.

Now Kenya is a place that is not yet tamed.

The spiders and snakes and the lions too…

Have a chance of eating you!

But once you get past this dire news,

And of God who is watching over you…

It doesn’t really matter whether you are beaten and battered,

Because God loves all and will use you for the better.

Sometimes we fall,

And sometimes we falter…

But God is always there praying for us.

I don’t know how He finds the time

To think of us and make things right…

I make mistakes nearly every day…

But thankfully God is there with a path headed the right way!

Now that you are bored

Of this short poem

I say we eat

So we can get goin’!

>“Youth Center”

After our tour of the VCT, Jane who runs it showed us the new youth center which was in the same building. She then asked to talk to Jen and Dave for just a minute. They told our team to just visit with the kids in the center and they would be right back. We all looked at each other, but it was only a second before Nate jumped right in and asked the boys what they were doing.

The Youth Center was in a room perhaps 30 by 20 foot, with a cement floor and sheets lining the ceiling and most of the walls. In the center of the room was an area which could be set up as a boxing ring. Posts fitted neatly into holes in the floors and ropes held them square. There was also a pool table, a dart board, a manchala game next to the window and a small room with a TV/VCR and movies. A boom box was playing Christian rock music. There were 10-12 youth there and most were teen-age boys who were playing cards at plastic tables with plastic chairs (the kind you might have on your deck).

It didn’t take them long to teach the teen-agers from America how to play their card game. They called it Kenyan poker, even though there was no gambling involved. It was very similar to Uno, where certain cards were wild or meant skip or reverse. Our kids played it every chance they got for the rest of the trip.

As a side note, we always played cards when I was a kid, and so I naturally raised my own kids on playing cards. So Val knows how to shuffle a deck. I had to look this up on line and I am sorry if I offend some of you non-card playing folks, but there actually are websites that teach you how to shuffle cards. How can anyone not know how to do that? Anyway, so I looked it up and Val, as well as one of the other girls Sarah, were shuffling the deck using the Riffle technique, as opposed to the easier and more common Overhand. In Kenya they must only know how to shuffle by Overhand, because the boys at the youth center were fascinated by the way Val and Sarah shuffled cards. It was pretty normal to me, but once again, we were on another continent.

And thus ended our first full day in Kenya, Africa. I had to ask myself, had the mission part of our trip started yet? Well, if teaching boys to shuffle cards counted, then I guess so.

“VCT”

In Kenya, many people will talk about the importance of knowing their status. This of course refers to whether or not they are HIV positive or negative. Unlike in America, Kenyans can’t just walk into a medical clinic and ask for a blood test. There just are not enough clinics or hospitals and the staff at those facilities is totally overwhelmed with sick patients.

Instead there are clinics set up just to deal with the AIDS crisis. One such place is the “VCT”, which stands for Volunteer Counseling and Testing. At these clinics, not only can a person have their HIV status checked, they also get necessary counseling based on those results.

There is a lot of stigma attached to being HIV positive or having AIDS. When AIDS first burst on the scene in the late 1980’s, people panicked and saw AIDS as the disease that would end mankind, or at least eradicate those individuals who lived a certain lifestyle (and you know what I’m talking about and I’m not going to go there). In America, in the twentieth century, a lot of that fear is gone.

In many parts of the world since there are treatments available, AIDS, though still a serious disease, isn’t the death sentence it used to be. In third world countries, however, that is not yet the case. Without access to proper education, AIDS continues to spread.

At the Ngong VCT we visited our first day in Kenya, we toured the tiny cramped rooms where the testing was done and where counseling took place. I wish I could say that I remembered it all, but all that my mind retains are the interesting posters on the walls, pictures of friendly condoms with smiling faces. The most interesting part is that when I was in Peru on another volunteer trip in 2009, they had almost the same condom posters on the walls of their clinic.