Visiting the slums of Kenya

Visiting the slums of Kenya

4^th October 2006
On my last day in Kenya, I visited the Kibera slums with Mimi, Sporty Spice and Hippy Chick. We were taken around by Cartoon and David - two likely lads that do volunteer work in the slum. They offer slum tours for ksh1,000 ($NZ22.22) a head. The money gets funneled back into their volunteer organisation.

Fast facts about the slum:

1,000,000 people live there
This makes it the second biggest in the world, second only to the Sowetto slum in South Africa.

The number is growing every day. Extremely poor rural people often see the slum as a step up (!) and migrate into the slum. They tend to earn a bit of money, build a corrugated iron house and then invite the rest of their family to join them.
The film "The Constant Gardener" was partly filmed in the slum
In the "Making of the Constant Gardener" documentary, the producers proudly boast of how they had a positive effect on the community. They show a bridge they built and toilet blocks constructed.

The locals seemed indifferent to the whole thing. "Yes, they did build a bridge but we didn't really need one. Yes, they did build toilet blocks, but they built it on rich people's land and we have to pay to use them."

I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle. Not quite as grandiose as the producers claim and not quite as pessimistic as the locals. Yes, they have to pay ksh3 ($NZ0.06) to use the clean bathroom, but that is typical for anywhere in Africa. And while the bridge might have been overkill and really only used for transporting movie equipment, it is still a safe sturdy bridge.
The New Zealand government donated a college building and a football field to the slum
*thumps chest*

The slum itself reminded me a lot of the Buduburum Refugee Camp in Ghana. The houses were basic, rivers of what you hoped were water but knew was something else, and kids dressed in rags everywhere. Even the smell was the same as Buduburum - that tangy acidic smell you get with poor sanitation.

Cartoon warned us against taking photos in certain areas for fear of the locals taking offense. Once again, not dissimilar to Buduburum.

Some areas did seem a little more extreme than the refugee camp. One area had a meter wide sewage channel passing down between two precariously perched rows of houses. I had to jump from bank to bank to avoid falling into the sewage. Lord knows how the people dealt with it day-to-day.

The slum also has a railway line running through it. Cartoon told us a story of a drunk slum dweller that recently got killed by a train. This sort of thing happens more often than it should.

I'd like to say the slum was an eye-opening experience, but it wasn't. I've been around extremely poor people often enough to not really be surprised by anything. It was interesting to see how the extremely poor urban lived as opposed to the extremely poor rural poor that I usually work with.

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