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.

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.