Kenya
Amanda Jones
Ran December 20th, 2009
In Kenya, Reason For Hope
Rose is 17 months old. She weighs 15 pounds and looks the size of an American five month old. She cannot sit up, walk, or speak. She has the toothpick limbs and saucer eyes of the malnourished and the dull skin of dehydration.
In another corner is Caroline, a waifish nine-year-old who sleeps in crib. She is a whispering, otherworldly child, pretty and fragile. Her parents are dead and she is severely malnourished. I have just given her a teddy bear and clothes in which to dress it from a bag of toys we brought from the U.S. When I gave her the bear she looked at me with disbelief. This, I realized, is probably the first time she has had a toy all of her own. Now she sits in her crib slowly undressing and dressing the bear, over and over again.
Then there's Benedict, the two-year old boy dressed in pink. He cannot walk by himself or talk, although he's trying. While a child his age should be running after a ball, Benedict struggles to stay upright.
I look over at my eleven-year-old daughter, Indigo, and wonder if this is just all too much for her. But she smiles back at me, happily playing with Claudia. Claudia is 18 months old. She arrived three weeks ago weighing 13 pounds, the size of the average American two-month-old. Now she is 26 pounds, still not talking or walking, but a beautiful, happy child.
These children have HIV/AIDS and are either orphans or their parents are simply too poor to feed them sufficiently. But they are, believe it or not, fortunate. Rose, who yesterday was staring death in the face, now has a feeding tube running out her nose and a nurse to watch her 24 hours a day. She, unlike 12% of Kenya's children under the age of five, will live.
We are in the "respite wing" at Nyumbani, a home for abandoned, HIV-infected children located in a leafy suburb of Nairobi. After eight glorious days on safari, we are spending the next two days helping out in Nyumbani and New Life-both homes for HIV-positive babies, then visiting the Harambee Community Center in the infamous Mukuru Slum.
Before we left the U.S., Indigo collected school supplies, clothing and soccer balls. People gave generously and we had brought four extra bags with us. And now, at Nyumbani, I am wishing we had many more bags so the boys would not have to wear pink and every one of the 110 children would get their own toy. Later, Indigo, my wise child, chided me. "Wearing pink is the least of their problems, Mama, and we did our best."
Yesterday, Indigo and I spent a peaceful afternoon playing with, feeding and holding the babies at New Life, a sunny, whitewashed home for HIV-positive babies that were left in dumpsters, on doorsteps or deserted in the hospital. Parents are often unaware that with good nutrition, 75% of infants born testing HIV-positive will test negative by the time they are 18 months old. They panic, abandoning their children. Unlike Nyumbani, who takes chronic cases of all ages, New Life fosters only babies, adopting out those that are eventually HIV-free to Kenyan or foreign families.
We had come to Kenya for a mother-daughter trip, something I try to do annually with each of my daughters. I also try to do one philanthropic project a year with them, large or small. Indigo's contribution to this trip was to gather the items the homes needed.
The Nairobi- and New York-based company, Micato Safaris, organized our trip. When I informed Micato I wanted to tack on a few days to make these visits, they told me they could assist with that as well. The family-owned company, which has a class-act reputation as a travel operation, has poured millions of dollars back into the community and wildlife programs through their philanthropic arm, AmericaShare.
Most Micato guests don't spend two days doing what we're doing, but most do spend a couple of hours at AmericaShare's Harambee Center in the Mukuru Slum. Some are so shocked or moved or affected by what they see that they leave having sponsored a child's education or even having paid for a new building. And some are just too afraid to step foot near a slum and so they don't go.
While the Nyumbani Children's Home is in Karen, the posh neighborhood named after Karen Blixen, Harambee Community Center is in the heart of the slum. The Mukuru Slum, or "informal settlement," the ridiculous new politically correct term for slum, is one of the worst in the world. 700,000 people crowd into a five-mile stretch of littered, polluted river. There is no running water, no sewage, no electricity, and no garbage collection. Dwellings are 10 x 10 shacks cobbled from rusted corrugated iron. Police won't come near the place. It's a lawless community run by mafia gangs who extort "security" money from residents. By day, people go about their business and it is safe to enter, but by night, even residents stay off the streets.
As we entered the slum, I watched Indigo watching the scene through the open window of our van. She has seen poverty all over the world, but this was the worst yet. Garbage was piled everywhere, sewage seeped in open channels, and stalls selling tomatoes, goat's heads and soap stood between the two. Wives hung ironically white laundry outside their shacks and throngs of women with plastic containers waited patiently to buy water. Running between all this were armies of children: playing soccer with balls made of wadded up plastic bags; tots carrying kerosene on their heads and clusters of boys sitting on top the piles of garbage doing nothing. When they saw us bumping up their streets in the Micato van they stared, astonished to see a white child here. They dropped what they were doing to run alongside, waving and shouting, "Muzungu! (white person) Howareyou, howareyou," a phrase they apparently took for a one-word greeting.
"Can we get out of the van?" Indigo asked Patrick Nyaleta, our kind and patient safari director who had been with us throughout.
"No," Patrick replied firmly, "It is just too unpredictable."
"But the children don't look dangerous," Indigo responded.
"It is the gangs," Patrick explained. "They can come from anywhere, even in the daytime."
"I am flabbergasted," she said. "These poor kids, having to live this way."
Then, deep in the slum, gates opened and closed behind us and we were inside an oasis with a tidy, green lawn, and neat, cinderblock buildings-the Harambee Center. Built by AmericaShare and partially funded by previous Micato travelers, the center is a place for HIV/AIDS education of young people (Warner Brothers created a Sims-style computer game to teach teens what to do if they are mugged, raped or threatened, and how to avoid the virus). Harambee is also source of clean water; a skills training center, and a gathering place for the 300 Mukuru children that AmericaShare currently sponsors in private schools.
Some of the sponsored girls were at the center and I asked if any would tell me their story. "I never had a father," a bright-faced teen I'll call Patricia told me. "And my mother died of AIDS. I lived with my uncle, who abused and beat me. Then AmericaShare found me when I was ten years old. I had only been to school for about two years, on and off, so I had a lot to catching up to do. But I didn't care that they put me in with the little children. I was so happy to go to school." Patricia is now 15. I asked what she wanted to do. "I want to be a surgeon," she said. Whether or not she realizes that dream remains to be seen, but I'll bet she gets out of the slum.
In addition to the children's homes and the community center, Micato suggested we visit a different kind of orphanage-one for elephants and rhino. Located in Nairobi National Park, David Sheldrick Wildlife Foundation is a sanctuary for animals whose mother's were killed by poachers or were separated from their herd by trauma. They are around 25 elephants and 3 rhino in the shelter at a time.
An elephant is tiny when it is born, about 250 pounds. The average adult weighs 8,000 pounds. To survive, rescued babies need to be bottle-fed every three hours for over two years. They crave physical contact and are with a human keeper, their surrogate mother, round the clock. As the elephants grow, they are taught how to forage and then reintroduced into the wild at Tsavo National Park.
Cleverly, Sheldrick funds the operation by allowing people to "foster" an elephant. For $50 a year you choose a baby and receive monthly email updates and photos on its progress. I was not getting out of there alive without fostering one for Indigo, and in the name of fairness, one for her little sister. Indigo chose Tano, a tiny wrinkled creature who was found trying to join a startled herd of cows. Knowing my other daughter is a softy for the underdog, I chose Kilaguni, who had been attacked by hyenas and was missing a tail and chunks of ear.
In a similar vein, we were spending the night at Giraffe Manor, also an animal sanctuary. An elegant stone house built in the 1930s, it is today one of Nairobi's loveliest places to stay. And for any animal lover, there's a priceless bonus. You get to be kissed by a giraffe.
At 6 a.m. that morning, Indigo woke me shouting, "There's a giraffe outside! She's hungry!" In our room was a brass bucket of giraffe kibble and, although we were on the second floor, the animal's face loomed against the window. It stuck out its rough, blue tongue as Indigo gleefully hand-fed it the whole bucket, then ran downstairs in her pajamas to greet it at the front door for her morning kiss.
These animals, however, are not pets. In the 1970s, the owners recognized that the Rothschild giraffe was severely endangered (there are still only around 300 in the world), and brought a pair to the estate. The breeding program still goes to this day with many giraffes released into the wild.
The elegant animals wander between the manor house and the adjacent Giraffe Center, an educational facility that teaches Kenyan children and tourists about conservation. And they stroll by every morning to be fed kibble over the breakfast table, snaking their necks through the arched windows. It is a sight to behold and a source of unending delight for children.
Since this is the season meant for delight, permit me to wrap up this story by planting a thought: Think of giving someone the gift of a check you'll send to Nyumbani to buy a child a toy. Or a virtual baby elephant and watch it grow over the Internet. Or help educate a Mukuru Slum child through AmericaShare. There's real joy in this, I promise.