Satellite view
6 June 2007, Nairobi
Korogocho is an uneven place. The slum spreads itself across a hillside, and the roads wind and bump their way down into and through it. These roads are not paved, but are red dirt and deeply rutted and, in some places, fairly steep. A little river runs swiftly through the slum at its lowest point; the very sound of the running water is a relief in this hot and dusty place, but the water is gray and dirty, and garbage hangs on the rocks along its banks. Large yellow flowers bloom all over the bushes, and these bushes climb the hillsides toward the vast garbage dump that covers Korogocho’s opposite hill.
Almost 200,000 people live here.
Just as in Kware, houses made of quarried stone, scraps of wood or cardboard stand in blocked units and share sheets of corrugated metal as roofs, the metal held in place by stones. People set up makeshift shop along the roadsides: a woman sits at a low table, not bothering to swat flies away from the cooked beans and dried fish she offers; another woman guards limp lettuces and fat tomatoes at a produce stand. An older gentleman repairs shoes, but his boy has got a hold of the glue and stands in the middle of the road, staring at us with glazed eyes, the bottle he was sniffing gripped in his thin hand.
This is one of the biggest slums in Africa, though not so big as Kibera, which is famous for its 1,000,000 inhabitants and its poverty. The Constant Gardener was filmed in Kibera. But white people don’t come to Korogocho.
The road I am walking winds through Korogocho. Indistinguishable garbage lines it and is mashed into the surface; a rivulet from an unknown water supply cuts across it, but the water is black and greasy; hens and roosters dig in the trash; goslings poke their bills into the mud. Over this hangs the smell of slum– a sweet, sour and sickening smell– magnified by the looming garbage dump. When the wind is right, the smell of trash is almost overpowering.
I am trying to be casual and nonchalant. I am trying not to be horrified. But Korogocho makes me uneasy. Some people meet my glance with their own, and do I imagine what I see? Vacancy, curiosity, expectation, condemnation. I am not a tourist, I want to say to them. I didn’t come here just to gawk at you.
We take no pictures in Korogocho.
The TULIP school is accessed through a low doorway. Two steps down into a narrow wood and clapboard hall, and we wait for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. The only occupied classroom (there are two) holds fourteen girls at wooden desks, listening attentively to a chemistry lesson. There are no beakers, no chemicals, no test tubes, no lab glasses. Just a young teacher, a chalkboard and fourteen girls in uniform. The only light in the room comes via the ceiling, where daylight shines through patches of corrugated plastic in the otherwise corrugated metal roof.
The principal explains that, next year, they will add a new freshman class and these girls will be sophomores. Then they will use both classrooms in their building. This is what we are doing at the school where I am teaching in the US: this past year we had a freshman class; next year we’ll have freshmen and sophomores. It’s how to build a high school.
The girls are enrolled with TULIP, a program with the express mission of rescuing girls like these, who have aged out of the education that the Kenyan government provides. They are being rescued from prostitution or early marriage, from HIV and AIDS, from joblessness and poverty. The women at TULIP educate the girls within the community where they live; they teach them a trade (sewing), and they disciple them in Christ. This is a quiet, vital rescue.
We stand for a moment in front of them, introducing ourselves and then listening and repeating as each girl says her name. These are Kenyan girls, and they pronounce their names with the bouyant crispness of their native Swahili, but they giggle and twist in their seats just like my students at home.
I think I could love them. I think I could teach them English.
From here we walk to the clinic, a clean, cement block building with a quiet courtyard. At a desk just inside the door sits a man providing intial examinations: he listens to respiratory rates, and so can readily identify pneumonia. Pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria are the chronic problems common to people living in slums, and this clinic offers relief. Korogocho’s citizens also may be tested and treated for HIV and AIDS here. A pharmacy dispenses prescribed medicines. The cashier’s window is three-inches of bullet-proof glass.
Our tour is thorough. They even have a lab where a few necessary testing services can be performed. And in more than one place I see a poster on the wall with close-up photos of symptoms of AIDS at a very advanced state. The pictures make me sick to my stomach.
We are walking back at lunchtime, and Korogocho’s various schools have released their pupils, who are now making their way home in their uniforms. They are surprised by so many wazungu (white people) in their neighborhood, and the bolder ones venture a greeting: “How are you?” they say, their voices lifting on the “you.”
We laugh, we answer: “Fine,” and “How are you?” The children, delighted with this response, venture closer. “How are you?” “How are you?” “How are you?” They reach toward us, hands raised for a high-five, and we slap their open palms in greeting.
When was it I began to get nervous? Because as we walk, the crowd of children gets thicker. They are all around us, walking our direction, wanting a touch from a mzungu hand. One of the children looks peculiar to me. Her face has an angular maturity to it, though she is as short as an eight-year-old. Her feet are large, and her movements have a brashness to them that suggests confidence or ignorance or something wrong. She has a rash– dark and obvious– on her hands and neck, and I don’t want to touch her. I find myself hoping that she doesn’t notice me in our small wazungu crowd. I’m hoping she doesn’t reach out for my hand.
Is it that poster in the clinic? Is this rash one of those tell-tale signs of AIDS? Hadn’t I known, all week, that I was likely spending time –all the time– with persons suffering from HIV?
And is this why I have come to Korogocho? Have I come all the way from Durham, North Carolina to Nairobi, to this out-of-the-way slum, so that I can reject the honest curiosity and even friendliness of a special-needs fifth grader in the interest of self-preservation?
Jesus touched lepers All The Time, in an age when everyone knew that leprosy was contagious.
Just down the hill to our right, children fill the red dirt courtyard of a school. Just like everywhere else, garbage is the garden and the border of this property. But in the middle of the yard stands a small circular bench built out of stone, and somehow, trained up out of the middle of it, a vine grows, curls up and forms a kind of canopy over the bench. This vine is covered with flowers.
I am thinking that Jesus would have stopped walking, even if He were standing on garbage, or in that greasy rivulet that runs across the road, and He would have taken the chin– the rash-covered chin– of this little one in His hand.
“How are you?”
I am unable to do this.
Are you ever afraid, I ask Brenda, one of the young women who works for TULIP. Are you ever afraid here in Korogocho?
No, she answers simply. No elaboration, no explanation. She is never afraid in Korogocho.
They have established TULIP in Korogocho. TULIP is not an evacuation mission– not an effort to remove the girls from the seat of their troubles, but an effort to show them life within it.
We are almost out now; we’ve almost reached the headquarters of TULIP where it stands on the edges of Korogocho. We pass a man who sits against a chain link fence. His store is spread out before him on a blanket on the ground: rakes and pots and little toys; bits of metal and plastic; nothing I have time or need to peruse. I wonder if he gets it from the garbage dump, but am told that some comes to him from overseas, from us. This is what the goodwill stores do, sometimes, with all the things we give away. If they cannot sell it, they send it to Africa, to Nairobi, to Korogocho, where a man tries to sell it to others equally poor as he.
Korogocho is an uneven place. It is what poverty looks like. And also hope.
Photographs selected from www.begakwabega.com
