mathare

Okay: on the Saturday before we left, we scheduled a trip to visit the slums in Ngong.

Some background:
Ngong town is a suburb of Nairobi. It is the nearest town (bus stop, grocery store, internet café) to Susan and Wilson’s apartment. It is where I buy bananas, and phone credit. And it has a large slum curving around behind it, hiding God knows how many people, people we walk past every day, people buying and selling food, buying and selling produce.

Dictionary.com defines a slum as follows: slum: (often pluralized): slums: a thickly populated, run-down, squalid part of a city, inhabited by poor people.
So. There’s that.

Visible Grace is making an effort to establish a relationship with the people in the slums for several reasons. I want them to know what Visible Grace is about. We will most likely be adopting some of these children: the kids who have lost their parents and are taken in for by their neighbour, kids who don’t stand a chance, who will end up back here in the slums, begging. Subsiding.

I also think it’s an important reminder for myself and other Americans: this is how people live. It’s easy to forget, in Nairobi. There’s affluence here. There’s ice cream. The roads are paved, and the internet is fairly reliable. It’s so easy to ignore the hurt and the poverty. But it’s right there, and once you see it you really can’t forget it.

Another reason we go to the slums, to be perfectly honest, is because I am so anxious to be doing something. It’s real hard, when I’m staring at spreadsheets all day, to feel and believe that I am making a difference in kids’ lives. I struggle with this a lot. So walking through the slums for a day, distributing groceries and clothing, visiting people and praying for them, helps me feel a little closer to it all.

The point is, on Saturday the 23^rd of July, Susan and I left the house early to meet people in Ngong. The team stayed behind to have breakfast and get ready like normal people (I hate mornings).

Susan and I spent a couple hours running errands in Ngong. Highlights include drinking tea, calling our driver, calling Christine, going to the bank, buying groceries and staples for ten households in the slums (and candy for the kids) and having the food total be the exact same amount we had budgeted. I mean exact: I had 8,000 shillings, and after I impulsively bought candy, and added salt to our grocery list, our total came to 8,000 shillings. EXACTLY.After meeting the team, and shoving candy in everyone's pockets, we spent a few minutes waiting for the chairperson (the slums have an elected leader, someone who communicates among the people, and brings their needs to the local government) in a church compound. We of course collected a small fanclub- kids who most likely smelled candy on us- and our friend Christine quickly organised them into rows and began leading them in praise songs.

As one does.

After the chairman arrived and we had distributed the kids’ clothing (which our team had brought from home) and the groceries amongst ourselves, we started walking. I’ll be your eyes, don’t worry. Look there, the ground is very uneven, and if you slip, you’ll be covered in dust and there’s trash everywhere and that bush- it has thorns. Here is a puddle that cannot be sanitary- be careful, now. Look to your left, there’s a small boy peering at us through the barbed wire. His dad is methodically sweeping the front step, see? Take a photo, yes, be careful as we walk down this alley- there’s a ditch running right down the middle. Here is the community toilet, it’s covered in burlap and those nails have rusted. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. See these kids following us? That baby is carrying a baby. (Yes, Kim, give them candy.)

Here’s a house- duck low through the gate and we can all squeeze into their entryway- two of us will go inside, the man is bedridden. You’ll have to squint; it’s so dark and the window is covered. He’s there, in the bed, behind that curtain- this half of the house is their living room. He’s in bed; he is sick; the neighbor brings him food every day. We’ll leave her with shoes for her son. This small stove is his kitchen. These are his only belongings. This pile, here. That’s his laundry. It’s time to leave, shake his hand- now we’ll go outside and squeeze down the next alleyway, the next aisle, the next dusty path- to the next family.

The afternoon passed quickly in this manner. Ten homes, ten bags of groceries, ten prayers, ten stories. We visited a friend (Mama Saidiki) last, and gave her the rest of the clothing we had brought. We talked with her for a while and took myriad photos. Saidiki is a former classmate of Susan’s, who now spends his days begging in Ngong. On this particular day he had gone to visit his grandmother, who unbelievably lives in a neighbouring slums.

Oh, this cycle. It never ends. What kind of world do we live in, that three generations end up living in squalor and destitution? And when, for crying out loud, is Jesus coming back to rescue us?

I am grateful, so grateful- for a bed to sleep in, and a community who loves me- for resources enough to buy food for myself, and for others. For friends who donate their children’s clothing so that we can bless these precious few families.

But it’s never enough. It’s never enough.