Slummy Bummy!

A foreign journalist contacted me, asking whether I could be his ‘local fixer’ as he wanted to do a few human interest stories in Kenya. I agreed. As is usual with foreign journalists, they always want to do something about the slums; I am usually undecided on what to think about the ‘romance’ attached to poverty, and I spoke to him about my misgivings. He assured me that he would have a different angle. I took his word, and as soon as we found a fixer in Mathare, we were off.

We drove to Mlango Kubwa, the access point to Mathare Valley, and waited in the car for the ‘Mathare Valley fixer’, who arrived within five minutes accompanied by four young men who would be our security in the slum. The more the merrier, I thought as I shook their hands and introduced myself. Although this was told to me off record, you can only get into the slum in the company of a slum veteran. Being born and growing up in the slums does not necessarily make you a ‘veteran’, but you would have to be a feared ‘slummer’ with clout and reputation of sorts. I could guess what ‘feared’ meant, but courage to ask them what they did for a living failed me.

And so we were off, sandwiched between our ‘security personnel’, going down the valley. Predictably, we attracted a lot of attention. The foreign journalist was a White man; little children, the youth, old people, all shouted ‘hawayu’ to him. At first, he did not realize ‘hawayu’ was our version of ‘how are you’, but he proved a fast learner. A few unprintable words were directed at me, but I was in no position to protest.

As soon as we started descending into the valley, I knew I should have asked about the dress code. The open sewers welcomed my poor sandals-clad feet. It was too late to turn back and get some sensible shoes, so I soldiered on; stepping on liquid concoction I did not want to imagine the recipe stopped bothering me after a hundred meters. The deeper into the valley we walked, the more aware I became about my dress-code. You see, when I was leaving the house, I was dressed for a hot day ahead. My black top was see through but covered all my essentials, my skinny jeans were visibly new, my Erica Badu head-gear was meant to prevent direct heat from the scorching sun (and my locks need a hair doctor asap), and my stunners are rather expensive. I looked at the people around me, many of them barefooted, more with dirty feet and faces, even more with tattered clothes. WHAT WAS I THINKING, WEARING LIKE THIS???

But, as soon as I asked myself that question, I realized really, apart from wearing sensible shoes, there was no other way I could have dressed, that would have been pretentious. I am not Bruce Parry of the Tribe, I am under no obligation to live like they do, but it didn’t make me feel better about myself.

My wardrobe malfunctions (for lack of better word) were forgotten as soon as we delved into the slum epicenter. The stench! OMG! At first, I thought someone must have let off a really bad stinker, but then it went on for too long. One ‘body guard’ must have noticed my folded face; he casually told me to get used to it. That is what slums smell like! Not an easy thing to do, but I soldiered on. Soon after we entered the house of our target family which, if that were possible, smelled worse – my eyes started watering; it could have been from the tragedy in my face, or from the smell. It was like somebody had done a poop and didn’t bother to remove it, but I soon found out it was because the house was next to the ‘public’ toilet. The toilet was a tiny room with a hole and a drum dug into the middle of the ground. A pipe has been fixed to transport the poop and all its glory into the river – the same river those without Ksh5 for the bathroom use as a communal bath. To use the toilet, you pay five shillings; for tissue, there are some old newspapers for that. Next to the toilet is the guy who sells water – yes, water for drinking. I couldn’t help thinking how dirty their water containers were on the outside, what were the chances that they were cleaner inside? For a 20ltr container, you needed five shillings. Next to the water ‘depot’ was the bathroom – five shillings to use that, thank you very much. The people who run these businesses could potentially make a lot of money, but the oxymoron of the situation, if I may, was that the bathroom landlord was the dirtiest of them all.

Back to our ‘target family’. A woman who could have been anywhere between 18 and 50 years old. I guessed she was in her early twenties, but poverty had obviously ravaged her youth. She had two children; a five year old who should have been in school, and a nine month old who whined and cried constantly. We later learned that the little one was unwell; apparently, she gets ill every three weeks if she is lucky. Usually, every week she had a sort of disease – if it is not diarrhea, it is a cold, or vomiting, or something else. On this particular day, she had a bad throat infection and nothing stayed in the tummy – this, after a healthy period of 3 days that followed a bad diarrhea period! As soon as we were through interviewing her, she told us, she would be heading to a hospital, and she did not even have money which she needed to buy medicine bottles. Kudos to our government for free health-care for children under five, but the same children miss out on medicine because they do not have Ksh10 for a medicine bottle. I made a note to give her Shs200 after the interview.

The five year old girl appeared rather healthy, but the mother told us that sometimes they go for days without food; how could she look so healthy? All this while, her husband was seated on the bed, the only bed in the room (okay, so who sleeps where?). He was quiet, his head between his hands and I caught him nodding a couple of times. Who could blame him? He had a bad hang-over, a result of a kill-me-quick brews available at any time of the day in the slums. Mututho, over to you sir! I dare you to go into Mathare Valley and arrest the brewers and the drinkers for breaking every law in your set of laws. AS IF! The husband, who finally shook himself to talk to us, fetches water for the richer slum dwellers for which he gets paid five shillings for every 20ltr container. The only problem is, he first takes care of his thirsty throat before either feeding himself, and his family. They are lucky if he has ten shillings left on him at the end of the day. He, of course, expects to eat and sleep – rent is Ksh300. The wife, so to say, is the sole bread winner, but she is unable to wash clothes for Eastleigh residents for Ksh300 everyday as sometimes there is no one to leave her two little ones with!

They do not have a stove or any utensils. How do they cook, I hear you ask? Well, they don’t, they use the services of the local ‘hotelier’. The food is about Ksh30 per plate – on a good day, she will get two plates but usually, a plate is enough for everybody in the family – and that’s all they get for 24hours. A cup of porridge is Ksh10 – that is what her kids have for breakfast while she has nothing.

Soon as the wife was off to the hospital with the little one on the back and the bigger on in tow, shoe-less, the husband took us to his local ‘pub’. The pub is own by an elderly lady, and it doubles as her resident. The bar owner’s English would have made my English teacher very proud. Her house on the outside is like any other slum house, but on the inside, one needed to ‘acclimatize’. It was clean and well lit, with a good set of sofas accessorized with table clothes, at the corner was a good bed with clean bed clothes, she had a colour TV, a coffee table, a Meco gas cooker etc etc. She was obviously doing well, no surprise there as she told us in a day, she sells about four drums of muratina wine. Each glass is Ksh10, I went dizzy trying to do the math, but at the end of the day, she has more or less Ksh3,000 profit. Do the math. Off the record, she told me she has properties and other businesses outside the slum; she also told me that there was no way she would like the slum life to be done with – now there is a surprise, NOT! How many Kenyans make Ksh3,000 on a daily basis? May I remind you that it is tax free?

For the visual story, you would need to keep tuned here, the documentary was commissioned by an international news media, I will let you know when it airs in a few months. But did I learn anything in the slums? Certainly. That I need to appreciate more what I have and stop whining at the little things in life. That there are some people who will never let slums ‘die’, it is their BIG daily bread. That you could get killed for Ksh200 and your killer will not blink an eye. Did we, as journalists, think we did anything to help? Well, I gave her Ksh200, so at least she got her baby’s medicines that day, and they probably had two plates of food that day. My colleague gave them food items worth over Ksh2,000 – but someone told us not to be surprised if the husband sold it to get some drinking money. My colleague also paid school fees for the five year old, promising to always do so but directly to the school, but I could not help wondering whether, on hungry days, the child would be able to learn. I hope the documentary, when it is aired, would highlight the plight, but then, hundreds of other documentaries have been aired, I do not know whether they have made any difference. Some of the locals were obviously disgruntled as they kept telling us that, all we do is Film! Film! Film! But they never see any results of the filming. Maybe it is true, but my consolation is, because we went to film that day, that family did not sleep hungry, their daughter got her medication, they got food for a month (here is hoping), the other child would go to school. It is not the big donor money that makes the difference (cue Kibera and the NGOs that milk the cash cow that it is in the name of helping), it is the small things that matter, like targeting individual families. Like my friend Nduchu Ngugi told me recently, Kenya should not be on the Guinness Book of Records for harboring the biggest slum on this side of the continent!

Let us all try and do something, however small!