Kenya & Tushinde - my experience

I left Sydney 9 December 2011 and headed to Kenya for a five week retreat to visit a dear friend. Five weeks eventually turned into a three month temporary living arrangement and here I sit on my second last night in Nairobi.

Over the last three months I have experienced many adventures and can say that I toured Kenya and did the most I could with my time here. Along the way I met an amazing woman, Megan Wright. I was aware of her volunteer work but not of the extent of it until I learned the full story of what got her to where she is now. Megan runs an organisation called Tushinde, a small charity that seeks families in Mathare who are in desperate need of sponsorship. Megan’s social worker Beth, another amazing woman, travels deep into the slums weekly and locates new families to assist while visiting existing families to check their progress in health, living and education.

Both Megan and Beth, such outstanding and admirable women with huge hearts.

I started volunteering with Tushinde and I met wonderful families. Little Shadrack, a six year old boy who lost both his parents a few years ago stole my heart. Shadrack’s older sister was taking care of him however he was neglected and eventually when she started a family of her own she moved away. Shadrack was left on his own. His neighbor Joyce, took him in. Joyce told me how Shadrack loved school but of course income was low and irregular so she didn’t have the funds to enroll him in school. I decided to become Shadrack’s sponsor and see he enters school before I left Kenya. I’m pleased Shadrack will be starting school at Academy No. 10 on 5th March. I visited twice more with gifts for Shadrack. A school bag filled with stationery and a new outfit. His heart shone through his eyes, such a tremendous little boy with such spirit. On my last visit Joyce told me Shadrack told her he wanted to return to Australia with me. She explained he wouldn’t be able to speak the language and communicate. Shadrack pledged to her he would excel in his class and would learn fluent English so that he would be able to speak to me regularly. Needless to say, hearing that filled my heart with joy.

I think what blew me away the most was when you would ask these kids what they wanted or needed they would tell you text books for school - there was no desire for games, toys or electronics, they really just wanted to learn.

Tushinde enabled me to support a child in need and for that I am forever thankful to Megan and Beth.

Tushinde continues to grow and finds needy children but of course Tushinde needs more sponsors to accommodate these families. Please check out the Tushinde organisation. If sponsorship is something you have considered then I urge you to look into sponsoring via Tushinde. It’s a worthy cause and their generosity and work goes so far and makes a huge difference to so many. There are no administration costs so all your donation goes to the needy families. I am so fortunate that I have been able to see all the hard work first hand, it’s been remarkable and forever memorable.







Eli Saad
Sydney, Australia.

Life stories from the slums.

We had a journalism competition at the school in Mathare to see if any good writers could help me with stories for Tushinde’s newsletter. Most were like geography or history essays and certainly beyond the 200 word limit I had set. However, one stood out, it was still way too long, but Anastacia (pictured left) said she didn’t mind if I pasted it on the Tushinde blog. I am hoping with our volunteer coming in October with the aim of doing a photo-journalism project, it will give more children of Mathare the confidence to tell their stories.

My Life by Anastacia Chepkoech

I was brought up in a happy family in rural Kenya until 2003 when my step-father died of throat cancer. He had always loved me like a daughter and life became so hard without him. My mother, three brothers and I struggled to face the challenges.
We had to move to Eldoret as my mum was a different tribe from my Dad’s family and she feared for our security.
My mum did her best to make sure that we got the necessary needs. By then I was ten years old and my youngest brother was two.
On December the 26th 2007 my brothers and I went to stay in Kapsabet with my maternal aunt for the New Year. We left my mother happy and sound and never thought that something bad would happen to her, never thought that this would be the last time we would see her. If only I knew, I could have tried to save my mum or die with her, but it’s too late. We stayed there for one week only to be called on the Saturday by my Mum’s friend who broke the sad news to us. I almost had a heart attack and thought I would die the next second.
Thought it is hard to share, and also painful, my only mother was burnt alive by mobs during the post election violence when we were gone. They attacked in a house full of smoke and fire and burnt every part of her until she was beyond recognition. The people who killed her had no human heart, they were animals. That is why it is hard to forgive. I don’t think I could ever face them and say ‘I have forgiven you’
Life became really hard and I became the mother and father to my siblings who had no-one to turn to. My brothers were taken in by my step-father’s family, but I was rejected as I was from a different tribe.
I moved from my aunt’s to my grandmother’s in Mathare and I was just about to be moved again as my grandmother is weak, when my uncle found out about Mogra Star Academy and I applied for a place there.
Since the day I cam to Mogra to study, I have been lucky because even if I lack food at home, I can get it at school as it is part of the programme. Mogra has helped a lot of needy children who have problems more serious than mine. I pray that god gives us strength to overcome these misfortunes in our lives.
My dream is to become a doctor so that I can be able to save lives of people who have cancer like my dad, or if I fail, I will be a lawyer so that I can be able to fight for the rights of weak people like my mother. I do hope that justice will be done. I want justice to be done.
Life in the slums is a daily challenge. The biggest problems are poverty and health status. The environment is full of sewage and poor housing. People help us, but they forget to show us is how they came to their existence, to success, how to go about it and where to go. Food and pity alone cannot solve our problems. They that have developed must lead us in the direction to overcome poverty.

30 children a day finding themselves alone.

Last Friday, Kasarani children’s office, which covers the area of Mathare, turned up at the Rescue Centre with two five year olds, a six week old and an older baby that they wanted to give us. The government department are in the process of shutting down a children’s home near to us that is so poorly funded and so badly managed that four children have died in the past few months. We begged and pleaded with the Children’s Officer that we could not take the children as Mogra Rescue Centre is overcrowded, broke and does not have the staff or facilities for babies.

They pleaded back and we ended up keeping the older baby. She is called Angel and she is fourteen months old. Her hair had been braided by the older children, but she was covered in sores from untreated nappy rash and the dirt was so ingrained that her skin had become pulled tight and broken. She can’t move, but she has a smile for everyone.

This other children’s home, we shall call it the ‘Silver Shepherd’ was opened by an independent Kenyan church. Initially it had money and support and was doing well, but it lacked any planning and any structure. There were two pastors in charge, one went to the USA to fundraise. He did well at first, so the second pastor went up country to open a second Silver Shepherd Children’s Home in rural Kenya. After a while though, support in the US dried up and the Pastor based out there had to feed himself and support his own family, so he spent more time working and less time fundraising. The other pastor in the countryside was kept very busy with the second project and washed his hands of the first. So the Silver Shepherd Children’s home was run into the ground. Staff weren’t paid and didn’t turn up for work. Nappies didn’t get changed, clothes didn’t get washed and food didn’t get cooked. The four children who died, died of simple infections; they were dirty, malnourished, and never got to see a nurse.

In the meantime Kasarani Children’s Department is kept very busy; it covers Mathare and many other slum areas of Nairobi and has an average of thirty referrals every day. This is 30 children who need residential care, it could be because they are orphaned, abandoned or simply so abused and neglected by their parents that they cannot live at home for their own safety. Often, Tom, the Children’s officer can deal with it ‘informally’; he can find a Mama who will take the child in and care for it whilst they follow up the case. Tom does not know exactly how many Mamas he has like this, but it is in the hundreds. He says that every single person working in their office has at least three rescued children at home; simply there was nowhere else for that child to go at the end of the day.

How easy is it to turn a child away? How does it feel to know that you, yet another adult has failed that child? Silver Shepherd should be a wake up call for us: our children are fed and clothed, yes, but we only have four staff and none have had a break for over two years. We have 132 children, just enough to pay the bills. No spare to employ a nurse, or even for trips to the clinic. And we are still really struggling to implement any structure.

The Children’s Office knows all this, yet they are still calling us about that six week old as the baby has nowhere else to go….

My experience as a volunteer

My friend Alice and I stayed at the Mogra Centre - the home for children that Tushinde has set up - for two weeks during the summer of 2010 (yes this is a shamefully belated blog). Immediately we were made to feel very welcome and all the staff and children were so generous, sharing the little they had.

We spent the majority of our time at the Mogra Centre, helping teach children who were either too little or too poorly to do the long walk to the school. I remember being quite shocked when I first saw the classroom, as it was like a cave with bare cement walls and bits of rubble everywhere. The children sat on old-fashioned benches and shared worn out pencils and battered old textbooks between them. There was one teacher to 30 children of a range of different ages and abilities. A completely different environment to one you would see in any primary school in England. We did a variety of tasks with them; for example one day me and Alice split the class in two and taught the children about the solar system, then another day we gave each child a pack of seeds and went and planted them, for them to try and grow their own crops. I really enjoyed spending time with the children and found that, despite the obvious issues and low standards of equipment and surroundings, after a while you hardly noticed them. All you noticed was what a lovely teacher they have and how keen the children are to learn, and how they love learning almost as much as they love play-time.

After school finished, we played lots of games and sang songs. They all drew pictures, writing ‘I love Grace and Alice’ on all their pictures, and all fought for our attention, jumping on us to hold them and pushing away other children so we could hold only their hands. They clearly yearned for attention and to be loved and this in itself was heartbreaking. Bedtime was a time when it became even more apparent, the completely different lives these children have. There were two year olds running around at nine pm, whilst other children slept on the floor sharing a tiny mattress sodden with urine. Yet without Tushinde, most would not have mattresses at all. We helped establish a teeth cleaning routine (with a very catchy tune we wrote) and then read them stories and sang songs. They loved being stroked to sleep and all gathered around to have stories read to them and asked to be sang to again and again. Sadly Tushinde does not have the staff to be able to do this.

Once the older children came home from school, we also spent some time talking to them. A lot of them really wanted to talk to us about their lives and they were so open about the horrors that they had faced, some almost matter of fact, as if it is an inevitable part of life. Yet this is not the way it should be. It should not be inevitable that a child has to see their parents murdered in front of them, or a little girl has to live on the street pretending to be a boy in order to survive, and that many were raped or abused. At home we are all aware of the struggles many children in Africa face, yet I found that imagining their existence was very different to actually seeing it face to face. At the same time it is evident how strong, determined and hopeful these children still are and this is clearly thanks to Tushinde.

Tushinde helps shape the lives of children whose paths are otherwise pre-determined and has already done this for so many children. For example Monica, the little girl who was living on the streets who disguised herself as a boy in order to avoid being attacked or raped; thanks to Tushinde she is now an A grade student planning to go to law school. When we were there she was reading a book in English (her second language) that I shamefully admit I gave up on the year before as it was too hard!

One particular day, we went to the slums with Megan, to visit the school that Tushinde helps. Seeing the slums was eye opening, the awful conditions that so many people have to live in. Also to see first hand the positive impact Tushinde has had on so many childrens’ education and their health too, by paying for HIV medication or trying to improve their impoverished living arrangements. It was clear to me that Tushinde is trying to help in as many ways as it possibly can.

From my stay, it is evident that Tushinde has already done so much to help change children lives, and that it has so much more potential. Tushinde has done the hard part: it has the passion, the ideas and the right people, it just needs the financial support. And that’s the easy part, and the bit that we all need to help with.

love, Grace

Shem's Garden

No-one in their right mind would want to live in Shem's house: not beacuse he shares the one room with his parents, his three elder brothers, his younger, disabled brother and two cousins. Or beacuse the tin roof has holes in it that let the rain pour in and the mud floor become sticky. Or for that matter, that to get to it, you have to climb down a steep slope, knee deep in rubbish and waste and then through a labyrinth of alleyways. The reason that you wouldn't want to live in Shem's house is that he lives right outside an improvised open sewer that carries the waste of the thousand huts in Mabatini, a slum within Mathare, to the putrid river a few metres away. Someone has built an improvised loo straddling the channel right by their door and when it really rains, the ditch overflows into thier home.

Despite all this. the six year old has planted a garden. He marked off the tiny plot with sticks and old video-tape and then from seed he has grown beans and onions and, most remarkably, flowers.

The thing about Shem is that despite his abject poverty, he has a family that loves him and allows him the freedom of hope. These plants have yet to flower and I hope for Shem's sake they will.

A pile of skin and bones under a blanket.

Samuel did not have the best of starts to life. His mother died when he was six, leaving him under the care of his teenage sister and an alcoholic father who was rarely around. Soon his sister was pregnant and now, four years later, her first born is in school and she is pregnant again.

Growing up with a teenage sister as a mother figure and a drunken father who would disappear for weeks on end, it is not a surprise that no-one noticed the early signs of typhoid. Nor is it a surprise that no-one thought they should spend the 20 shillings (18p) to take Samuel to the clinic to get the simple cure for such a disease.

When Samuel was rushed to hospital with crippling abdominal pains, he was an otherwise happy, healthy kid, working hard at Mogra with many friends and hopes for the future. Six weeks after his first operation to remove the parts of his bowel that had perforated and seven further operations since then, he is nothing but skin and bones, unable to move and unable to talk. He has suffered days of dehydration and starvation as there has not been the money for drugs, or they have not been able to get an IV line in. Due to the infection and repeated surgery, his abdominal wound will no longer close and a surgical dressing is what keeps his intestines inside. He looks like a skeleton and his big brown, sad eyes plead with you when you come into his sight. When Hannah put her hand on the bed, his little skinny hand reached out to her.

His mother's brother sits by his bed day and night, he helps with the basic nursing care, washing him and changing his sheets.

Despite the low conscious level, the continuous oxygen therapy and the absence of any body fat, the doctors feel it is not a completely hopeless case, they say his kidneys are still working (only just) and the liver function tests were OK. They say that what is left of his bowel will be enough to function once the infection has cleared. There are only three nurses on the children's ward for over sixty patients, no-one seemed to know when he had last passed urine or when his IV nutrition was started. He also needs blood, but his group is O negative and it is hard to find.

I am now in the difficult situation of trying to decide if it is worth looking for money to transfer him to a hopsital where he can get good enough care. If his gut does work and his kidneys don't fail then he will probably survive if we act quickly, but we would need at least £10,000 to give him a chance and that amount of money could make a real difference to the rest of the project that helps a thousand children. I just feel so sad for Samuel, who has never had a chance in his life and angry at the injustice in the world that would see a ten year old child die: If his family had had the 20 shillings, none of this would have happened.

Half a Million People Without Water Supply

If there was such a headline in a UK newspaper, there would be uproar. Yet, a town the size of Edinburgh has had no water at all for three weeks. The only difference being that these are the slums of Nairobi and very few people in Kenya seem to care about the poor.

It is a two mile walk from some parts of Mathare to the nearest standpipe where you have to queue for hours by the one tap and then struggle home with as much water as you can possibly carry. In the bumpy streets of Mathare the water sellers struggle to push carts laden with jerry cans. But theirs is a lucrative business, to an almost captive market; The price of a fifteen litre jerry can is 30/=, about 25p. Many households in the slums live on less than a pound a day, so to suddenly have to pay ten times the normal amount for water is crippling. Imagine having to look afer a young family with just 15 litres of water.

With the water shortages has come an edginess to Mathare: the mains supply pipe was broken during the building of a super highway, a mile away, people are angry and growing tired of the situation.

'Why hasn't the government acted more quickly'

' No-one cares about us, they think we are all gangsters and drink changaa' (the local brew).

There is also a strong belief that politicians are friends with the people that drive the large tankers of fresh water who are also making so much profit. Hannah, the director of Mogra says that she would rather buy water off the men pushing the carts than the tankers she is so disgusted by the whole thing. You feel that if it goes on for much longer, there might be serious trouble, which would be tragic for all the kids of Mathare, who are only just recovering from the post-election violence.

So, in a way it has been brilliant that we have started our food programme, even if a lot of the money meant to be for food is having to go on water: the kids are getting food every day of the week and they can't quite believe it. Particularly the meat on Fridays. The next day, they started lining up at 9am! Attendance has rocketed to 99% and our porridge programme, which is served at 7 am, but is optional, has been taken up by every single child.

We hope this will remove the burden for the families of our children, especially in this time when things are tighter than ever. Sad we can't help the other 499,000