Outreach Weekend!!!!

                Outreach weekend was one of the most spectacular few days of my life. At the same time it was one of the saddest and emotionally draining experiences I have ever had. That is why I am splitting this entry into two completely separate entities, even though the weekend did not happen in a vacuum and the pure and unfiltered joy seemed to overcome adversity and hardship at times. The experience was a rollercoaster, never stopping for a second, exciting throughout and almost impossible to wrap your mind around once it was over. I’ll give you the good first then the bad, then the really bad, and try to help you see the positive throughout. Ready? I’m not even sure I am, but lets go:

                A 6:30 am Matatu ride (14 person van that crams in 22+ Africans—and in this case one mzungu) from Ngong to Nairobi starts the outreach experience as Kenyan as you can get. A matatu is a tiny little van with a “conductor” who hangs out of the open door while moving, recruiting people to cram in as much as they can. The more people they fit in, the more money they make. They are notorious for pickpocketing, driving people to the wrong place and shady business of all sorts, but the bus wasn’t running at 6:30 to “Junction”, which is a prominent mzungu gathering spot, so I had no other option. The matatus are not dangerous, but you should have your wits about you and you should have an understanding of how they work. I imagined my first ride being with friends, but at this point I wasn’t going to swallow the outreach weekend fee because I was scared of a matatu. I sat next to a masai man (made me feel a little safer), and made it to my destination, right on time… American time that is. African time, you have to understand is a much different beast. We left about an hour and a half after scheduled, which I have found is pretty prompt in comparison to a lot of things in Kenya. Anyone who knows the way that I use time, knows that African time is the way that I have been living my life for the last 23 years (reason number 245645 that I now believe I was African in some other life).  When all of my friends from orientation showed up, we were hugging and laughing and talking about our placements as if we were family. We had actually spent 2 days of our lives together. It is amaaazzzzing how comforting any familiar face is when you are halfway across the world!  Our first stop was in the town of Navaisha, 2+ hours outside of Nairobi at KCC, a slum where a school was started by former short term IVHQ volunteers. It was to show us how even a short term volunteer can make a huge difference with enough initiative (and it didn’t hurt that a few of them have stayed for a few years now). But KCC walks the tightrope of the positive emotion and the negative emotion balance, so I will save it for later.

                We then departed for Hell’s Gate Park. This is the highlight of the trip… We rented bikes and biked through the park, riding alongside zebras, baboons, wild boar, impala, and giraffe (not Ali) in their natural, undisturbed habitat. After stopping in the road to let zebras cross, we were told to stop at about the halfway point. Our fearless leaders, Kush and Chomlee (fadhili community staff that took us on outreach) showed us a huge rock coming out towards the road that came to a point and then dropped off. This is Pride Rock. Yes, the Lion King. This is where the drawings for the Lion King were based off of, it was way too much to resist signing “ahhhh kuupennnyaaa” and pretending to hold a baby simba above our heads. 

                                                               

                1)Pride Rock  

2)Wildebeest, Wild Boar and Impala in front of Pride Rock, gathering for a lion’s birth??

After our bike ride we gathered in front of Hell’s Gate Gorge and took an “off the map” hiking tour of the waterfall that formed below in the canyon. The water in the falls was warm… the first warm water I had felt in a week! If I could have bathed in it without fear of typhoid and other nastiness I would have lived under the falls. 

 

View from the Hike  

       Monkey Mom and Baby, Post-Hike

After Hell’s Gate we headed to our “5-star” hotel, which turned out to be a tiny run down bar with a hotel sign on it that was located above a butchery in the middle of nowhere outside of Navaisha… T.I.A… This is Africa. After a few Tuskers (the only half way decent Kenyan produced beer) and some African dance music to get the juices flowing, the hotel bar couldn’t handle the rowdy group of volunteers, so Chomlee and Kush took us to a local dance bar. If there is anything that has ever been up my alley, it is a dance bar—in Africa—playing only reggae, dancehall and hip hop—with a group of people that are trying to get as goofy as possible in a place that we don’t yet understand… needless to say it was a good time! With Chomlee, Kush and our driver on patrol to make sure we didn’t do anything reckless or get ourselves in trouble, the mzungu crew took rural Navaisha by storm, leading a bar-wide dance-off and riding the African rhythms until the wee hours of the morning. A good time was had by all.

                Now let’s go back in time a little bit. Back to the KCC slum and school. The Outreach program broke us in gently as we descended towards the hellish reality that awaited us. KCC is a slum in rural Kenya. A few IVHQ (International Volunteer Headquarters) volunteers visited and recognized the need for help. They decided to stay and set up a small and rudimentary school within a 5 minute walk from the heart of the small slum. As time passed and more volunteers filtered through the program, the school grew and now it encompasses most of the school aged children who are living in the slum. When our group came in it was utter chaos with children running around screaming “teacha teacha!! How are yoooouuu!?” I was mobbed by kids and did my best to pick them all up over my head, swing them around and swing their arms until I was physically unable. A soccer game broke out and I am way too immature to not join right in! It was amazing! A child scored a goal and I started screaming “goooooaaaaalllll!!! Didier Drogba does it again!” and I lifted him up onto my shoulders and ran around the field and I swear the smile on his face didn’t leave the entire time we were there! We took a walk through the slum and almost everyone there went out of their way to say hello and greet us. After our visit we went back to the school and served lunch to the kids. They were so polite and appreciative. These kids come from NOTHING and still found a way to have fun, be smiling, laughing and playing. They were able to overcome turbulence at home, incredible odds and horrible poverty and still found a way to make it to school in the morning, with a positive attitude nonetheless. It was a humbling experience to say the least (this was a BRIEF description of our time here, but the IDP and Garbage slum that we visited later were even more difficult and left a HUGE impression).

                The next stop after our night out in Navaisha (if you are still keeping track of chronology) was the IDP camp. IDP stands for Internally Displaced Person. These are people who had lives, jobs, businesses, houses and were hardworking, well educated people who, because of political and tribal violence in 2007 and 2008 were forced off their land and out of their houses with nowhere to go. The UN, US and Kenyan government set up refugee-camp-like-areas to house these people. It is incredibly easy to distance yourself from their stories when you read about them in a blog or even see a picture of them on tv. It is much more difficult to distance yourself when a woman invites you into her house and you enter with 5 other people, no room for you all to stand, let alone sit, in the 115 degree “house” which is actually a 6 foot by 10 foot tent made of tree branches holding up a tarp which make up the walls and roof. She looks you in the eyes, with a smile and tells you that she has been blessed by God to have a roof over her head. She tells you that she is grateful for all that she has. You look around her “house” and realize that all she has is the tarp over her head, a few sticks that make up her oven, a bucket of rain water (remember I said it rained for the first times in months, that bucket is NOT always full) and a blanket which she uses to as pillow, bed and cover. Then she tells you that 7 people live in that “house”.  That blanket is a bed for seven? On the ground? She apologizes over and over for not having any tea for you to have and looks disgraced when she says she cannot give you a slice of toast because she doesn’t have any. She tells you she used to have a job and has an education. Put yourself in her shoes….

Another woman (through translation of Kush) tells you that her daughter was scheduled to have a baby. When she went to the hospital, the baby did not make it and due to the complications the woman had to stay in the hospital an extra three days. When she was cleared to be released, the family learned that they could not pay the hospital fee. She is essentially being held captive in the hospital. The worst part; the hospital charges a fee every day that she is forced to stay in the hospital past her scheduled release date. Try to imagine your daughter (or sister, or anyone that you hold close to you) being held against her will because you cannot pay a fee. You find out that the total fee is less than $200. This is the type of poverty that is being faced. This is the type of money that can make a direct impact if you know where to put it. But remarkably, the IDP camp was not all negative. The men were making a toilet for the children at the school that had been recently set up. One of the men said “mzungu, would you like to help?”. I OBVIOUSLY did not say no. After about an hour of the hardest work I have ever done (breaking down massive stones into smooth, rectangular ones using an ice pick, a machete and a blunt hammer) the Africans were laughing at this mzungu who was working so hard while they made a swift, smooth swing and broke the stone with the precision of a surgeon. Hands blistered, sunburned and admitting defeat, but having gained a few friends (and in my disillusioned mind, some respect) I walked over to the school just in time for the feeding program. The others who were not working on the toilet had made porridge and were passing it out to the children. Kids were singing, dancing, laughing and playing while the adults looked on with smiles beaming across their faces. These impossible smiles were one of the most inspiring demonstrations I have ever seen. ALL of these people have stories that would make a grown man weep. ALL of these people had seen things that I would not wish upon anyone in this world. ALL of these people had been through the fires of hell and they still managed to smile, to joke, to live their life and to find the small positive things, however miniscule, and give thanks for them instead of wallowing in self-pity. You see this with your own eyes. There are 15 volunteers on this outreach trip. Unanimously, almost without communication, every single one of us puts in $15-20. You get lunch with that money. If you misplace that money, you are disappointed, but I doubt it even ruins your day. Shit, you can pay that amount of money for a drink in the right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it) bar in Chicago. We give that money to the woman whose daughter is trapped in the hospital and are met with tears of joy. She is without expectation and she weeps openly and hugs every single one of us, giving each of us our own individual blessing. You feel briefly self-satisfied and then you think about all the people in this camp, in Kenya, in Africa, in the world that are in need. You’ve now seen it with your own eyes. Try to keep them dry.

                The next, and last stop, was the garbage slum. It is a community of over 600 people, 47% of whom are infected with HIV, who live in a garbage dump, picking through the garbage for food and materials. This is the lowest of the low. The smell is completely indescribable. It absolutely haunts me almost a week later. As we drove through the slum we are numb. This can’t be real. We get out of the van at the top and meet the volunteers who pledge their time daily to teach in the one school that slum has. At first I did not want to take pictures. I don’t want to make this place a spectacle. It feels almost like a zoo. White people come in and take pictures of their way of life, gawk at the kids picking garbage and then leave and go on living their privileged lives. But I decide to take pictures for two reasons. The first and biggest reason is that the kids in the school are FREAKING OUT and all want to have their picture taken… it makes their day to see themselves in screen of the camera, and the second reason is because words can’t describe this place. I don’t want it to be a spectacle, but I want people to know that it exists. I want people to see the condition that some people are living in and take from it what they will. It is not a zoo, it is a reality and I never want to forget (not that I could if I tried). The pictures do not even begin to do this place justice. But it is a start, and I feel like that is all that my trip is, a start.

               

 I will never take for granted what I have, no matter how small. I look back at all the things that have gotten me down, have made me upset or has caused me to complain and I almost laugh at how petty those things seem as I watch a child come out of a house that is the size of a closet and walk through trash to get to his school. There are huge birds and massive, angry pigs that compete for the prime garbage with the people. Two weeks before we arrived in the slum, an unattended baby was eaten by a pig. Re-read that sentence. Let that marinate. A pig ate a child. There are so many conclusions you can draw about the slum just from that sentence. I will not go further into it, but I promise you it is 100% truth. I went into a woman’s house with my friend Joe. She told us her life story as we sat in her living room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom all at once. Her house was the size of an SUV with the seats ripped out. She has been living in the garbage slum for 14 years with her family. Her and 16 others share the space that they have claimed. Talk about zero privacy. After a tour of the slum and an hour of playing with the kids at the school (cutest kids ever, they all wanted to flex for the camera and take pictures and play tag and run around, smiling and screaming the entire time!) we headed back to the van. There is so much more to this place and I will gladly talk more about it, but for the purpose of this blog, I will leave it at that. The bus ride leaving the slum was silent. Although the kids had been laughing and playing with us, happier than most children that lead the most fortunate lives in any suburb of any American city, the reality began to sink in. We leave, they stay. We get back to our lives, they eat dinner found in the garbage dump which is cooked on burning garbage. They go to sleep and wake up in the same place we left them. They have been there for years and could be there for years to come. It was (is) heartbreaking. It was an incredibly sobering and life-changing experience.

So there it is, the AMAZING, the bad and the ugly. The most incredible and difficult weekend of my entire life. I will never forget any of it. I hope that it translated, at least a tiny bit, into this blog. I know that it couldn’t have fully translated, partially because I can’t even wrap my mind around both the negatives of the slums and poverty and the positives of biking with giraffes, but at least I tried. Next blog post (or cluster of posts) we can settle into the next few months and hopefully catch a rhythm with the stories of my everyday African life. Every day is an adventure here. I look forward to it!