A day out in Mathare by Megan

Every time I get an email requesting child sponsorship, I send a text to Regina, the administrator at Mogra and she identifies a suitable child, and then when I go to the slums, we do a home assessment and take a history. My friend, Emma wanted a girl the same age as her daughter who is eight so they could be a pen pals.

Regina had identified a very bright girl called Esther who was top of her class. I met her last Thursday; she was animated, friendly and had good English.

Esther lived in one of the high rises which I had always associated with a slightly higher standard of living than the mud shack shanty towns. This building was half finished and the corridors reminiscent of a rabbit warren. The stairs were rough, uneven concrete without any bannisters and open stairwells dropping into pitch black. Babies, still too small to walk were in the corridors and on the stairs, being supervised by siblings not much older.

In Esther's family's room there was one single bed and a lit charcoal stove on the floor. There was a ten year old girl called Diana, and she was looking after a one year old baby and two pre-school children, all were crying and hungry. The young children were Esther's cousins. Esther's mum had died years ago and her father and four brothers lived with her aunt and her three children and Diana in this one room. Esther's dad and aunt had gone out to look for work, leaving Diana to care for the children. It turned out that Diana had been brought from the village to care for the children and she had never been to school. She wanted to go to school with Esther and learn how to read.

Many children from pitiful backgrounds in Kenya are given away to other families to work in the home as maids or house-boys. They have no rights, are often forgotten and rarely in education. Kenya is meant to honour the UNICEF Convention on the Rights of the Child www.unicef.org/crc/ , but Mathare is densely populated with little infrsatructure, so people can get away with mistreating children.

Hannah, the director of Mogra is taking this case further and we will give Diana a place in the school, but it has made me wonder how many more children like her are hidden away in the shadows in the slums.