The Living Positive Center is awe inspiring. A place where women who have been cast away by society and forgotten have found a place to regain a sense of self and a sense of purpose. The Living Positive Center takes in women who are HIV positive off the streets and teaches them skills to better themselves and their lives. They are taught crafts such as making bags and jewelry so that they can make a product and sell it to support themselves and their families. In Kenya, there is a huge stigma placed on people who have HIV/AIDs. To be diagnosed with HIV is disgraceful and there are a lot of people who do not even get tested because of the fear that they will be placed in this group of social outcasts. A group of people, especially women, in Kenya having a support group as well as a refuge that they feel comfortable in is an incredible step in the right direction. Everyone is so incredibly optimistic, even in the face of arguably the scariest disease on the planet. Mary, the founder of living positive put it better than I can, so I’m just going to steal her words (sue me…) “these women know that they have HIV, they have cried and cried and cried. They are done crying. They want to laugh and love and live. They just want to be normal, if only for a minute. And that is what Living Positive gives them”. Mary is another person that inspires me on a daily basis. She is well educated and was very successful in her life before Living Positive. She is from Nairobi and is the single sweetest woman I have ever met. If you don’t believe me, listen to this. I have been working with her for 3 weeks now and before writing this post I had to ask her what her real name was. Not because I forgot; but because everyone in the Living Positive center and daycare… no, in the town of Ngong and the neighboring town of Kisarian (where her house is) calls her mom. She came to Ngong and realized that she hated her job and found her calling working with women who have been touched by the HIV virus. She started volunteering in her spare time and kept her day job, but realized that she needed to put her whole effort into it or else she didn’t want to do it. Her job was not allowing her to be flexible. So she quit. She had nothing, not even any women that guaranteed her that they would participate in the free services that she was trying to offer them. She linked up with an organization in the city of Nairobi and studied how they ran their center and then created her own in Ngong. Now there are 25+ women who owe their happiness and some, their lives, to Mom. The women are all shapes and sizes, personalities and backgrounds (I would say skin colors, but lets be honest…. Its Ngong). All jokes aside, the women share two things in common amongst all of them: the constant and uphill battle against HIV in a 3rd world country and the most positive dispositions imaginable. When I heard that I was going to work in a women’s shelter for HIV infected women, my stomach clenched up as I imagined a dimly lit, dreary and depressing hospital setting with sickly women moaning and crying. I could not have been more wrong. Granted, the women are all in different stages of their illness, there is no dreariness, no crying and no hospital or medical staff necessary because the women have more energy than I do (and you know I’m bouncing off the walls). I spend my days with them doing all sorts of activities, one of my favorite (and worst) is making cards (I just try not to screw things up for them) with African themes for weddings, thank you cards, etc… I’m trying my best and the women all encourage me but I’m sure they throw my cards away after I leave. I help them with beading (which is so easy that even I can’t screw it up). They draw flowers on the fronts of cards and color them in, but to make them look absolutely amazing, they use a paintbrush and some glue and glue over the color and use red beads to fill the space, giving the cards a 3D feel. Those are just the wedding cards that were ordered by a couple from Canada, they have to make about 450 cards by hand. Each card takes about 10-12 minutes even with the assembly line of African craftswomen. As you can imagine, they have been BUSY the last few days. They also make incredible jewelry. Earrings out of Tusker bottle caps, Jewelry using beads, wood that they carve and burn into different shapes and colors, necklaces, hats, candles, bracelets, rings, you name it and these women do it. And well. If anyone is interested in buying the jewelry, let me know in a facebook message or something and I can either send you pictures or we can arrange something. Let me think out the logistics. Everything is dirt cheap so I don’t mind buying for people, I just can’t buy for a ton of people because the small amounts will add up. The jewelry is between $1-$5 for most of the jewelry and the bags are probably between $5-$12 dollars. All of the money goes directly to the women and a small percentage goes to the Center to keep it alive and the daycare that is connected with. Oh, the Daycare. The Living Positive Daycare and School is located in the heart of the Ngong slum. It has 3 aluminum sided classrooms about the size of a bedroom that fits 20-30 kids per class. There is a little yard that works as a meeting ground for all of the children. It is enclosed by a small chain link fence with barbed wire circulating around the outside, which I can’t stand when there are kids flying around the yard like mini goblins, but I guess it is to protect the school from unexpected visitors from the local community. The kids are AMAZING. Anytime we walk into the yard of the daycare, the kids go absolutely ballistic! How are you?! HOW ARE YOU!? Piga mi Picha! (take my picture… even if you don’t have a camera) Beba beba! (pick me up, pick me up) Na meme!! (and me!). You are bum rushed, unable to walk let alone pick a kid up as you are swimming up to your waist in children. I’m not sure who has a bigger smile on their face, me or the kids. I steal a soccer ball and throw it up into the air. There is a collective squeal as kids scatter looking for where the ball is going to land. Then comes my favorite part. Tag. Except it’s the opposite of tag as I start to think about it. I seem to be it, but everyone is chasing me! I run around the tiny yard being chased by 90 tiny little children and I work more to avoid running one over or stepping on one than actually evading their grabbing hands. After a good 15 seconds of running I am out of breathe (it’s the Kenyan altitude, not the fact that I didn’t work out in Israel and haven’t worked out in Kenya… why do you think they are such good distance runners… altitude. Yeah that’s right, altitude) but the kids are RELENTLESS. I seek refuge in a make shift soccer goal, with no net, just a metal rectangle with the bottom being made up by the hard African soil. I grab the top bar and pull my whole body up and sit on the top. You can only imagine the pandemonium that ensued! Kids screaming, teachers and wazungu (my roommates Tarin and Nikki) laughing, me panting, kids trying to climb the pole to no avail… absolute chaos. The teachers will usually save me by starting the cheer: 1,2 make a circle… 3,4 a big circle! The kids, being the most obedient kids I’ve seen anywhere in my life, run to make a circle, but not without a little pushing and shoving over who will get to hold my hand in the circle (I’ve never felt so cool). Then come the games. An African hokey pokey… I’m all shaky shaky usually leads off. Then comes Camaritz (comm-a-reetz)… the teacher calls out a single student who does a choreographed dance to the little nursery rhyme that they have. I’m still waiting on my turn to be called after a few weeks of being there but I think the teacher is doing me a favor by not making me shake my hips in front of the kids. After a few more games and a ton of laughs the teachers start the slow cheer “geettt toooo cllasssss! Geettt toooo cllassss” and all the kids groan but go running back to their classrooms. I spend the next few minutes disrupting class just by being in the room, causing the kids to giggle and stick their tongues out at me. I’m sure the teachers love me. Just like everything in Kenya, the uncontrollable fun is sometimes overshadowed by the reality of the circumstances. Most of the kids are children of the women in the Living Positive center, so it makes sense that a lot of them were born with HIV. A child from the day care passed away just before I arrived in Ngong, and I guess that is not a completely uncommon occurrence in the slum. Whenever a child misses school, it is a bigger deal than it would be in the US because of the nature of HIV, a small sickness can lead to major problems due to the lower functioning level of the immune system. There are a few kids who are dealing with major sicknesses and miss school frequently and it is just heartbreaking when you hear about people in the slum who don’t have or take medication. There are clinics that provide some of the medication for HIV completely free of charge, but in a lot of circumstances the people can’t afford to get to the clinic, or don’t believe in medicine, don’t have the time to go to the clinic or don’t like the stigma of possibly being seen at the clinic or a million other reasons (sometimes excuses) that they can’t get the medicine. But even though it is sad, I love the daycare. I am a clown at a birthday party. None of those kids are going to remember me as soon as the party is over, but during the time that I am in their lives, I make them smile, laugh, and play. I make them genuinely happy for that brief moment, and even if that is all I provide, I am providing them with something. Maybe that’s a Freudian defense mechanism that I have constructed in my mind to defend myself from the realization that my efforts in Africa are less than a drop of water in the ocean and I use it to mask the frustration that I feel every time I leave the daycare, or the women’s center or the daycare and my life continues on its path, but it’s hard enough to sleep in a single bed with a metal frame and a mattress as thick as a piece of paper in 90 degree heat after a day of working with orphans and women with HIV. So please, just let me have my delusions! There is a new project being headed up by a group of Canadians who just arrived in Kenya. They are going into the daycare and transforming the run down storage shed into a library and study room for the kids. They are also paving a little path from the classrooms to the bathroom so that kids don’t have to trek through the knee-deep mud of the dirt playground during the storms of the rainy season. Today they tore the aluminum wall of the storage room apart and screened in a window, and started putting up wood to cover the aluminum so that it can eventually be painted and not look as dreary. It is an amazing project that will be continued by a second group of Canadians from the same program. I look forward to helping them all the way through during my time at Living Positive! After playing with the kids and being involved at the daycare, I usually head back to the women’s center and finish the day back at the office with the women. I feel like I have gotten to know more about Kenya from the women that I spend my days with than anywhere else. They are the sweetest and most genuine people. For example, there is a woman who is from the Kikuyo tribe (I’ll explain tribes in a minute) and her and I have hit it off and she teaches me Kikuyo (the language) a little bit at a time (it’s hard enough to learn Swahili in bits and pieces but throw another tribal language at me and I’m toast). One day while we were all talking, she told me that she was going to reverse foreign adopt me. She was going to give me a proper Kikuyo name and take me in as her son. She named me Camau (Cam-ow) after her husband and introduced me as Camau to all of the other women. After being named Camau I am adopting my family’s last name, Wambugu. I will from here on out be referred to as; Camau Wambugu. I think that it will help me out with getting into law school… About a week after being named in Kikuyo tradition I bumped into one of the women from the center randomly on a bus downtown. She called out “CAMAU!” and had me come over and sit with her. Point number one: the women are sooooo welcoming and incredibly nice. Point number two: I have officially been in Nairobi long enough to recognize Kenyan’s outside of Ngong… nice!
The tribal relations and history are incredibly interesting in Kenya. Due to recent tribal violence caused by political unrest, Kenyans focus on being Kenyan, while remaining true to their tribal backgrounds. It is actually deemed as disrespectful for a Kenyan to ask another Kenyan what tribe they belong to. It is usually not deemed disrespectful for a mzungu to ask a Kenyan what tribe they are a part of because there is no connotation of hatred or violence because the Mzungu has no tribal affiliation. There is an interesting way around this debacle. It is completely reasonable for someone to ask what mother-tongue a person speaks (as long as it comes up in conversation and isn’t used in a confrontational or prodding way). If a person speaks Kikuyo, they are part of the Kikuyo tribe, if they speak Luo, they are Luo, if they speak Maa, they are part of the Maasai tribe etc, etc (little tidbit of information, Barack Obama’s lineage comes from the Lake Victoria area called Yanza province, His grandmother is Luo, meaning that he is of the Luo tribe… also it is a running Kenyan joke that everyone from Yanza province says that they are Barack Obama’s cousin when you say you are American… he must have a big family) Everyone in Kenya (at least this is my impression) belongs to a tribe. It is a small portion of the population that still lives a tribal livestyle in the way that Westerners think about. During the 2007 Presidential election, there was a very close race between two candidates from different tribes. When the results were disputed, violence between the tribes broke out and a long standing history of tension between rival groups divided the country into World War II like alliances. The violence concentrated itself in Central Kenya, especially in the capital city of Nairobi and even more specifically in the Million+ person slum of Kibera. Since then, the political situation was resolved, a coalition government was created and a new constitution was written and ratified declaring an increased importance on human rights and personal liberties. Kenya has become a shining star in the notoriously cloudy sky of African government even successfully planning and executing a nation-wide singing of the Kenyan national anthem last week at 1 pm on Wednesday, including political leaders from all the major tribes meeting in Nairobi for the ceremony. It frustrates me when people doubt the intelligence of an African because of the accent that is jumbling the pronunciation of an English phrase or a struggle for a handle on the language in “an English speaking country”. What I don’t think that a lot of people realize (and I definitely did not before this trip) is that everyone does speak a little English, but it is a 3rd language for most people (Swahili, their mother-tongue and then English) and a 4th or 5th for a lot of people.
All of this was brought to light by the women at the Living Positive Center. They are an incredibly positive and open group of people, dealing with what I imagine would be one of the scariest personal situations that one could face. They have come together when society has tried to keep them apart. Together they have found happiness where alone they faced sorrow. They are an inspiration and a reminder to everyone, sick or healthy, rich or poor that no matter what curveball life throws you, you must find the positive, however small and keep persevering. I heard an African Proverb recently that goes like this; if you want to go fast, walk alone; if you want to go far, walk together. To be completely honest with you, with I first heard that, I thought it was a little corny. But like so many other lessons that the women at Living Positive have taught me, they taught me that the proverb is right. They are slowly and steadily bettering themselves and becoming the people that they want to be. I look forward to learning so much more from them; about Kenya, about perseverance, but most importantly about life. They’ve seen a lot in their lives, and I am truly grateful for the opportunity to keep my mouth shut (for once) and learn.
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