Poverty Reflection

This entry is a work in progress. I have seen a lot of poverty since being in Kenya and have included some stories and thoughts of my experiences thus far. I encourage a dialogue about this topic and look forward to answering people's questions or providing people with more information. If you feel at all motivated to take action, please let me know so I can help you from on the ground here in Kenya. No action or donation is too small to affect the lives of people living in poverty all over the world.

I have been in Kenya now for two and a half months. During this time I have seen some pretty unimaginable things. I have spent some time working in Kibera Slum, the 3rd largest slum in the world. I have been introduced to and witnessed the "flying toilet" where people go to the bathroom in a plastic bag (mostly at night), and then whip it as far as they can. This often will land on people's homes or even sometimes people or animals. I have seen pit latrines built right on the banks of rivers. People must pay to use these latrines which contributes to people employing the flying toilet as an alternative. The owner will often build the latrine with holes from the ground level so that when it rains, water fills the latrine and empties the contents. As I mentioned, many of these latrines are built on the banks of rivers so the fecal matter flows directly into the river (in Kibera slum, into the Nairobi River). This same river is often where children will play or sift through garbage looking for anything valuable; the same river where livestock drink from and defecate in, furthering the water contamination.

Walking through Kibera Slum, I've also seen a young girl wearing a Sleeping Beauty costume dress - but in this case, this girl wasn't playing dress-up, this was what she wore almost everyday. Several of my friends had taken a tour of Kibera the week before I did and mentioned that they saw a girl in a Sleeping Beauty dress. A week later, I saw the same girl wearing the same dress and got chills when I saw her.

In situations of extreme poverty that I've seen, the people are usually not wallowing in self-pity or waiting for a hand-out from any passerby. These people live complete lives and take things in stride. As I walked through these areas, I am always greeted by cheers of "Mzungu! How are you" from the children as they laugh and play. I have been welcomed into the home of an elderly woman and offered dinner yet she could only provide one meal a day for her family.

In Kisumu, there are many boys who wander the streets sniffing glue. The sight is much more common than I ever would have thought. At first it can be quite jarring seeing young boys in tattered clothes walking the streets with a bottle of glue held between their mouth and nose. Getting high off glue can be an appetite suppresent, but are they sniffing glue to suppress their appetite or can they not eat because of their addiction to glue?

As part of my internship in Kisumu I have been working with my organization's feeding centre. The feeding centre provides 12 meals a week for 30 children. Most, if not all of these children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. Kisumu is located in Nyanza Province where certain areas have an HIV prevalence of 34-38%! I've also been lecturing at ISMAT, a local community-based college about community nutrition and epidemiology and communicable diseases. In my community nutrition class I presented the feeding centre as a case study. I told my students that it was up to them to analyze and improve the menu. The students really struggled with the fact that the children are only receiving 12 meals a week. For many of the children, the only food they receive in a week comes from the feeding centre. From Saturday lunch until Monday breakfast, some of these children may not be getting any food. I had the students look at the menu and note what was missing. Because of budgetary constraints and limited donor funding, the feeding centre can only provide these 12 meals for 30 children. There are obviously more than 30 hungry children in all of western Kenya but we our resources are limited. I had my students add different foods to the menu to make up for the food groups that were missing (notably meat and fruit). After the students were completely satisfied with their menu additions, I looked at the board and then crossed out the number 30 (representing the amount of students we were feeding) and wrote the number 20. I told the students that the additions they made were great, but since we have a limited budget that means that we could only then serve 20 children. This really frustrated and angered my students who had obviously wanted to better the situation for all of the children not just a select few. From there we discussed the issues that an organization faces in operating a feeding centre. We brainstormed many different income generating activities (IGAs) to bring in additional money for the feeding centre. I promised my students that their ideas would be listened to and after class I went back to my work and typed up their suggestions and presented them to the person in charge of the feeding centre. I am now working with them to implement some of these changes for the feeding centre.

OGRA Foundation now also has an American married couple volunteering with us for the month. Their major project will be constructing a chicken coop for the feeding centre. They hope to house between 200-300 chickens which will provide the feeding centre a constant supply of fresh eggs and occasionally meat as the chickens become older and can no longer lay eggs. The project is progressing nicely and has come from an idea to being half-constructed in less than a week. I will also try to post pictures of the chicken coop as soon as I can.

In Mombasa this weekend I was once again reminded of the extent of poverty in Kenya. There were many many people on the sidewalks begging for money. Rachel and I got to the point where we would take the bananas from the hotel's continental breakfast and pass them out to the poor people we would encounter. I had some extra chapatis (flat bread) from my bus ride to Mombasa that we also passed out to people we encountered. I think one moment that struck both of us was that when we had finished passing out the bananas and chapatis we had, we walked by a mother with two young children begging for food for her kids. The very young boy was standing on the street corner completely naked begging any passerby for food. Rachel and I had gone from a natural high of doing good in distributing food to the hungry to feeling frustrated that we still weren't doing enough. We could pass out food for hours among the streets of Mombasa but there would still be thousands of people that would go to bed hungry that night. Most of these people would also go to bed not in proper beds but on the street corners, stoops of businesses or local parks.