A trip into Mathare Slum

We took a short drive from our comfortable guest house in a leafy suburb of Nairobi to visit the work of "Tushinde" in the slum of Mathare. The contrast could not have been greater as we drove along a new four lane highway built by the Chinese taking buses spewing with smoke and laden with people in and out of town every day. We turned off into a busy dusty road leading to Tushinde's modest offices. Here we were met by Marie, dedicated Director working hard to get Tushinde on a good and sustainable development path and by Beth and Rose, two social workers who form the backbone of Tushinde's work in this enormous sprawling slum. Later Marie gave us the following information about Mathare: -One of the largest informal settlements (slums) in East Africa and the oldest in Kenya. -On a former rock quarry that resembles a shallow bowl, 600,000 people live without running water, sewage systems, electricity, roads, or adequate housing. -Imagine the population of boston squeezed into a space 1/30 its size. -There are just 3 government schools. -1 in 3 people are HIV+ and just 1 in 10 have stable employment. They took us to visit the day care centre, a pilot project established by Tushinde which is now run independently by four women who look after around 20-25 six month to three year olds a day, six days a week. The mothers leave their children as early as 6.30 in the morning to make the journey on foot to the nearby neighbourhood of Eastleigh to try to find a day's work... cleaning houses or washing laundry. If lucky they might earn 100 Kenyan Shillings (less than one pound) per day. Of that they pay Ksh30 (£0.30/US$0.45) to the day care centre for taking care of their children, providing them with some breakfast porridge and a good lunch (which is provided free by Tushinde). We arrived at nap time and as a mother of two I was impressed that the ladies actually managed to get all 22 children to sleep at the same time...lying like sardines, one next to the other on thin mats on the floor of a room not bigger than 4m by 2m, covered by thin kangas and sheets. The children had had a good lunch, the only remaining financial support Tushinde provides to the day care centre, and so with full tummies were able to sleep well for about 1.5 hours. They have few toys or materials for the children but are lucky to have a big, safe open space outside where they can play next to a plot cultivated mainly with Sukuma, the local green veg ubiquitous in every meal. The land is provided for free by the local community women's organisation, but the rest of the costs (salaries, utencils, water and electricity) have to be covered by the daily fee the mothers pay. To be able to cover its costs the day care centre needs to be able to attract 30 children a day, although the space seems small for the 22 they already have. Thereafter we drove further into the narrow, litter strewn streets of Mathare, lined with small shacks made of corrugated iron sheets housing all manner of small businesses selling fruits, vegetables, second hand clothes, small utencils and electrical appliances and mobile phones. On every street corner you find an MPesa agent, providing the mobile money services which so many of Kenya's population depend upon to do their business and through which Tushinde's beneficiaries receive their weekly cash transfer. We left the car and walked into a muddy back alley behind the German run Hospital, stepping over open sewers, followed by giggling kids shouting "Hallo Mzungu" (white man). We stepped inside a small compound of rooms constructed of bricks with high roofs held up by wooden beams, an important step above the hot and precarious metal shacks we saw elsewhere. Here we visited Margaret*, a 23 year old girl who lost both her parents and at 15 years of age was turned out of home by the aunt that was looking after her and her sister, having sold their family's land. She came to Nairobi having only finished grade 6 at school to try to find work. Eight years later she has fallen prey to the ills of any urban slum, is HIV positive and already has three children, two of whom also have HIV. A year ago Tushinde was made aware of her case and found her emaciated, very sick with the effects of Aids and living in appalling conditions. Now, according to Marie, Tushinde's Director she is unrecognisable. She is a new person. Tushinde managed to find her this safer and more stable housing where she and her 3 children occupy one of the brick rooms. Tushinde pays her rent of Ksh1500 (£11) per month, pay for her older boy to attend school, have got her enrolled in the local nutrition programme and ensure she and her children access the Anti Retroviral Drugs they need to deal with the HIV virus. "Now", says Margaret, "all I need is to find a job. I have no-one in the world. My parents died, my sister has died, I am all alone. So all I have is these three children, and I must work for them." Without Tushinde, we may not have had the pleasure of meeting Margaret, she may not have survived her 22nd year! Our final stop was the local community school, ambitiously named "Excellence" which does an astounding job to educate more than 500 children every day, from primary up to secondary level. A steep narrow earthen alley led us into a maze of cramped metal shacks in which sat 30-40 children at a time, dressed in red chequered uniforms, five or six to a bench, five or six to a text book being taught the curriculum in English that will allow them to attain their national educational certificates and provide them with the hope of a future. This is one of the partner schools at which Tushinde is able to sponsor children to gain an education, thanks to its generous donors in the United Kingdom. So we make our way back up the winding street, Shakira's "This is Africa" blaring out of a little shop, a far cry from South Africa's shining football stadiums! We meet an older lady selling charcoal, grandmother to three or four children, their mother bedridden with the infections that accompany advanced stages of Aids. Tushinde is doing tremendous work here, for every one of the families they support. The social workers, who are recognised and appreciated by the community, do regular follow ups on all the families supported by Tushinde, providing a lifeline to women like Margaret, who would otherwise be on the streets. But it is a drop in the ocean. The needs are so great and so many and the capacity of the government services simply overwhelmed. Tushinde is working to bring about change in this slum area, one life at a time, one family at a time and is making linkages with other services and organisations and forming safety nets for these very vulnerable families, to allow them to regain some dignity and some hope for them and their children ...., Kenya's future. February 11th 2014 Fiona and Gustavo Trigo, Volunteer supporters of Tushinde, Nairobi, Kenya * (not her real name)

Tushinde helps children and communities protect themselves.

Marie: Tushinde’s in-country technical advisor was selected for a secondment to ECPAT where she coordinated and lead the Nairobi workshop. This sensitised 13 organisations and the government department, all of whom work with children in Nairobi. ECPAT is an international organisation that aims to combat child sexual exploitation. It started in Thailand in the early 1990’s after researchers for a tourism consortium first identified the problem of child prostitution in South East Asia. It has since grown and has offices all around the world. Tushinde was pleased to be involved in this as we have encountered many cases of child sexual abuse and also sense a real vulnerability in the children we work with for a multitude of reasons. The main objective of the training was to reinforce the knowledge of community professionals on sexual violence against children. This is a major issue faced by children and their families in Kenya and worldwide, especially in densely populated, low-income areas. It trained the social workers in a ‘’self-protection’’ programme to share directly with children and their families. The programme the trainees learnt to implement aims to help parents and guardians fulfil their protective roles. Of equal importance it also aims to increase awareness in both guardians and children of situations where a child could be at risk of sexual abuse. Along with all the other social workers, child protection officers and community health professionals, Beth and Ann, Tushinde’s social workers, received training certificates and a set of materials such as training manuals, flash cards and brochures. At Tushinde, we have several cases per year of children sexual abuse and we feel that prevention measures are very important. Our children in the community are vulnerable to sexual abuse for a multitude of reasons. We were very glad to be involved in such training and could see its importance. Our social workers also learned more on reaction mechanisms and how to react professionally to a case. Beth and Anne shone in the training; not only were they enthusiastic and eager to learn, but they could also share some of their prior knowledge and experiences. It was a great opportunity for them to skill share and network with other professionals. This kind of training also helps raise Tushinde’s profile in our area of intervention and allows us to improve our networking at the local level. Following the training, we implemented the programme with a first group of 15 children of Tushinde aged between 9 to 12; the sessions took place in Mathare North primary school on 2 days and both Beth and Ann demonstrated their ability to teach children those useful skills. The evaluation showed that the children learned well and overall they were very participative. More groups of children and parents will be organised in 2014.

Finding Faith

In my 37 years in the UK, despite being a nurse and working in inner city London, I didn't know personally of a single child who had gone missing for days. I didn't know a family who had had a child murdered. I didn't know of any children who had been raped. We all know it happens in Britain as we read about it in the press, but it doesn't regularly happen on a scale where the children concerned are the sons or daughters of friends or colleagues. Since being in Kenya I have encountered first hand three young girls who have been raped, one family whose daughter had been raped and murdered and three children who have been missing for days. The first of those three had a happy ending; the boy had lost his friends walking back from church. After wandering for a while an old lady took him in and eventually, after five days, he was re-united with his parents. The second child was a ten year old girl, she was abducted by a man who took her to his house, but she managed to escape. Her story is harrowing; she describes body parts of children on shelves in the room she was locked in. They never caught the man who captured her and the family have moved to a different part of Nairobi and want to put the whole disturbing incident behind them. The third child I know who has gone missing disappeared a week ago today. Faith lives in the slums of Mathare. Her parents were murdered in the post election violence in 2008 and since then, she and her five siblings have lived with their Aunt and Uncle in an area of Mathare called Kosovo; notorious for it’s violence and insecurity. Faith’s Aunt has six children of her own and all fourteen of them live in a 10’x10’ room. Rent in Kosovo is low, which is why Faith’s family have to live there. Faith’s uncle is a security guard for a local company. He gets paid 7,000 kshs a month (about £60 or $90). The Aunt looks for small jobs every day; washing clothes or cleaning shop fronts. This week though, they have had to go hungry as she has been wandering everywhere with Faith’s grainy photo asking if anyone has seen her. The background to this story is where the injustice lies. On the 24th of April this year, a woman in the neighbourhood tricked Faith into following her to a room where she was raped by a man. Faith told her Aunt who got the woman arrested, but the man escaped. It is well known that men from wealthier areas come to Kosovo and other slum areas looking for sex with children. Someone paid a bribe at the jail and the woman was set free. She triumphantly told the Aunt ‘I have rich people behind me, you won’t get me’. After being raped, Faith was taken to the clinic where she was given all the correct treatment to lower her risk of getting HIV or any other STD. Her family kept a close eye on her, but they let their guard down for a few minutes last Sunday and she was gone. We have been to the police station where they have recorded the missing child. On the notice board in the reception there were handwritten notes on scraps of paper for six other missing children. Two six year old girls and four boys aged 1,2,3 and 9 years. The disinterest of the officer was unsettling. Since recording Faith’s disappearance last Sunday (the family went to the police station straight away) they have done nothing to follow up the case. They haven’t been to the house, or interviewed neighbours. They haven’t searched anywhere. We are trying our best. We have printed out a flyer and posters. Today the Aunt and I put the poster up at bus stops, inside buses and gave the leaflets out to passers by. I left the Aunt heading to a different side of the slums to do the same. I have printed out more, so she can do the same tomorrow. What more can we do? When the justice system favours the rich instead of the wronged and the paedophile above the innocent child, what hope is there for Faith? We will continue and, who knows, perhaps we will find a policeman who will help us with our plight and actually start searching the area and arresting the right people and keep them in jail. Maybe then, we’ll get our Faith back.

Two days until the election.

Last election, Mathare was one of the hotspots of violence. Maps of the area prior to the election and after it bear testimony: Whole neighbourhoods disappeared. The fighting was along tribal lines, many lives were lost. The authorities came in and restored calm but not without further loss of life. Many people lost their homes. Others went missing in that hot and dusty January and were never seen again. Children witnessed disturbing, violent crimes, sometimes against someone they knew. Women and children were sexually assaulted. Matharians refer to the period as ‘The Chaos’. As an NGO working in Kenya, Tushinde has been advised not to say anything about the coming election on the 4th that could be seen as political. The papers have many stories about ‘peace camps’ and peace meetings’. People are really trying. Kenya is still awaiting the trial at the International Criminal Court of those accused of organising the post election violence in 2008, the same people who are running for government on Monday. All we can say is that we work with 65 families, supporting almost four hundred children in the area. Many have left and gone to stay with relatives, at a considerable cost that they can’t afford, whilst also losing their earnings over the period. Others have moved within Mathare to areas that are dominated by their own tribe. We are left with six families we are worried about; families that are the ‘wrong’ tribe in the ‘wrong’ area. These families are too sick, too poor or too old to move. One Mama has fallen on hard times these past few months and in very behind on rent, if she tried to move the landlord would confiscate all her belongings. She has six children, the youngest is five months old. Two other grandmothers both lost their homes in the chaos last time. One had to get her home back using the chief, the other eventually got her one-roomed shack back but it had been gutted. They both have insisted that they want to stay, for them it’s a matter of principal. We have told all these families not to worry about their furniture, if they sense trouble, get out. For the sick ones; get in a taxi, we’ll pay whatever he charges at the other end. We have organised a safe point where we will be there to meet them. We can send money if needed through the mpesa system. If there is no food in Mathare, we will be giving out food parcels to our families at the safe point. In the meantime, spare a thought for our families and hope or pray that the coming week is peaceful.

Sorry for the quiet in the past few months. We have been crazy doing all the boring but necessary things that are needed to do things properly: Trips downtown to get the revenue PIN number, numerous trips to the bank and the NGO Bureau to add signatories, hours writing employment manuals, policies, standards for practice, trying to recruit a country director (post is still vacant, if anyone is interested) editing memorandums of understanding etcetera etcetera. None of it makes interesting reading for a blog! However I am pleased to say that our Day Care venture has started. We are into week three and have high hopes that it will be a great support for mothers in the slums who have to work to feed their families. For those of you who haven't read the previous blog; malnutrition in the slums is rising as food prices rise. One group of children that are really suffering is the six months to three year age group. This is because the mothers have to go to look for work to feed their family and often leave their pre-school child or children in woefully inadequate situations. This can either be in 'daycare' which is often just a tiny room with one woman watching as many as 20 children or sometimes they just lock their babies in the houses alone. The venture is in partnership with three other groups: There has always been a day care facility at this site and it has been run by Mathare Mothers Development Centre (MMDC) which is supported by the umbrella organisation GROOTS (www.groots.org). The third group is two highly motivated women who have founded 'Tiny Totos' an organisation whose ultimate aim is to open low cost, standardised child care for families growing up in informal settlements (www.tinytotos.org 'Toto' is slang swahili for 'child'). GROOTS and Tiny Totos are very keen for the project to be sustainable, so the mamas have to pay something small. If they don’t, they might just drop the kids off at day care and go back to bed…. Tempting I’m sure for all of us, but doesn’t really encourage these families to stand on their own two feet. We are running the venture as a pilot to see what works and what doesn’t. We all hope that offering good quality day care with supplemented nutrition will appeal to mothers and they will send their babies to Tiny Totos and avoid the danger and neglect of informal day care. But with the slum community it is always hard to know. Our first days have had a few hiccups: In the middle of our food hygiene lesson we were visited by a rat, just happily walking around on a ledge in the kitchen. The fortified porridge still hasn't arrived from the government, water has been scarce in the area and therefor jerry cans are expensive...... All part of the learning experience. Before Tushinde and the partnership became involved the children had only one day care worker, no food and no activities. Now, there is fortified porridge every morning four childcare workers and different activities every day. We are aware that there is a lot more work to be done with training of staff, setting up of procedures and standards for good practice, but just go into the centre with two tables, a pile of office scrap paper and some half used crayons creates a great response from the children.

I have toys (bags and bags of them). But there is a feeling by all the other groups involved that if we drown MMDC in donations, it reduces their sense of ownership and subsequent community involvement. It is more important that we make toys and use local materials. So the children have the crayons, empty bottle shakers, a football made of plastic bags and their voices to keep them entertained. As to Peter, the boy that inspired this whole venture: He is much better; smiling, pulling himself up and slowly putting on weight. He is not quite well enough to start on the ARVs, but it shouldn't be long now and then we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

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.

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

Finding a smile and smiling.

Had an impromptu visit to the slums today. Was meant to be going to town to organise registration of Tushinde in Kenya, but got a call from Sgt Sibbald from the British Army saying that he wanted to drop off a load of books that had been sent over for Mogra. So I met Sgt Jeff and Sgt B in the slums and we unloaded 8 or so boxes of lovely books. Really good quality and doubles of quite a few of the new ones, so some will stay in the school and some will go to the children's home. Waiting outside the school were various Mamas needing help. One was Janice's Aunt, who I have written about before. Their situation has become even worse: Janice's uncle has since been badly injured on a building site, where he was working for the daily wage of £1.60. He has lost the use of his right arm and now they are three months behind on the rent and threatened with eviction. The poor Aunt appeared on the brink of tears and was shaking; it turned out she hadn't eaten for four days, trying to scrape some money together to pay the landlord, they owe about £50. I took Jeff and B (Bernice) around to visit some of the communities we help. The lack of rain hasn't helped the general stench of the place and today there were water shortages everywhere, including the school. The kids were bright and chirpy though and poor B was mobbed in the playground with lots of children excited to have someone from the British Army. Jeff and B are willing to help and they have asked me to write them a wish list, which is great news...where do I start?!

Whilst we were talking, back in the school, we were visited by a woman who had two month old twin girls. One was perfect, but the other, Rebecca, had a bad cleft palate deformity. The Mama is HIV positive, we don't yet know the status of the twins. She is a single mum, caring for her own seven year old daughter who has the disease and three children, orphaned when her sister died. She has no job and no money and struggles to feed the children and pay the rent. She got pregnant with the twins as she had resorted to having sex for food, which is so common in the slums. Every day is a struggle, let alone finding help for a baby daughter. So, when I have finished writing this, I will be trawling the internet, looking for an organisation that can help little baby Rebecca. Any suggestions? x x

Back in the slums and it isn't any better.

I have had a busy summer as a mum and haven't really had a chance to do any of the community side of our work. We did, however manage to do some fundraising and two Tushinde events in the UK raised over £3,000 combined. A big thank you to everyone who helped.

The events also generated lots of enthusiasm and interest as well as finding five new sponsors (659 left to be sponsored!).

My break from volunteering in the slums though, had made me less focused and my enthusiasm less fervent. Today I was back though and it only took one house visit to remind me why I care so much.

We are following up children who had scored as 'severely underweight' from our nutritional survey day back in March. It seems that often children go hungry if there are school fees to pay for older children who are at seconday school, but not in Mogra.

Mary is one such child. She is six and a half years old and lives with her parents. They lived in a one roomed house with a bare concrete floor and no furniture; my friend and I were given plastic buckets to sit on. They had a bed but with no mattress. Mary sat on the floor, her little skinny legs infront of her and her head drooped, she appeared to have a real sadness about her. Mary's elder sister, Irene did very well in primary school, finishing with a score high enough to get her into one of the prestigous government sponsored secondary schools. However, her family have struggled with paying the fees of £100 a term and she was thrown out two weeks ago.

Mary had another sister, Jacinta who was attacked and raped last year. Her injuries were so severe that she died at home two days later; the family had no money to take her to hospital. She was only seven years old. It was a real struggle to hold back the tears when I heard this; I pretended to be consumed in writing the details on my sponsorship paper, but I was keeping my head down until my eyes were dry. I know the slums are insecure and children are vulnerable. I have seen posters around with details of lost children and heard various horror stories, but I had never really though about it with empathy - being abducted, raped or murdered was just another risk to children in Mathare.

Today made me think differently; not only does little Mary have to live with hunger and poverty, sleeping on a concrete floor every night, but she will always carry with her the loss of her sister. We can help her with food and education, we will take her eldest sister into our secondary school, so her parents don't have to worry about fees. My friend and I are going to buy them some mattresses. But we will never be able to remove the injustice that was done to her sister and her family.

On a brighter note; the new kitchen in the school is coming along well and will be well and truly ready for the improved feeding programme to start on Monday 4th October. We plan to maintain the porridge programme and to improve the quality and size of servings of food at lunchtime every day. It won't just be maize and beans day in, day out, there will be meat and fruit too. Now we have secured funding to protect our feeding programme for the next two years, we can work on improving all other aspects of the school and further helping the community it serves.

Seeing the toll of HIV first hand (by Megan)

Today I met Janice, a 13 year old girl who is need of a sponsor that is going to make her feel special. Her father died of HIV five years ago and her mother died of the same in 2007. She has lost two brothers and a sister to the disease and she herself is infected. She has been living with her aunt and uncle since she lost her mum, her two surviving siblings have been sent to live with relatives elsewhere.

Carol, her aunt struggles to feed the family, she and her husband have no formal employment and they try to scrape a living by washing clothes and doing small jobs. They have their own child and care for two other orphaned children. Often they cannot pay the rent and have to borrow from money lenders.

When you have lost almost all your family to the same disease that you are carrying, how do you think about the future? When you see your guardians struggling, how secure do you feel? There was an air of sadness about Janice that is hard to describe. It was like she wanted to stay in the background and not impose on anyone, and yet in many ways she was a typical 13 year old girl, she loved looking at the photos we took with the digital camera and dreams of being a maths teacher when she grows up. There are so many children like this in Mathare; Janice's aunt was affectionate with her, but you could tell the financial strain on the family was too much.

We hope that if the support for Tushinde continues, we can reach out to families like this; who are helping HIV orphans, with food parcels and other support that is required to keep the family together. In this way, the child may not be seen as an extra mouth to feed, but a welcome member of the extended family.