Before I traveled to Kenya to document the College’s first immersion experience in Africa last summer, I’d never heard of Kibera. In case you haven’t either: The second largest slum in Africa, Kibera was spawned in 1912 as a place for rural people to live when they came to Nairobi to work for the British. Today between 170,000 and 400,000 people live there. The lack of an exact figure tells you something about how the world views the individuals in this place.
There’s no running water, no electricity or gas, no drainage or sewers. In fact, Nairobi does not officially recognize Kibera’s existence.
My introduction to the place came the day after we’d been welcomed at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport by 40 singing, smiling youth. Two days later as our bus skirted the center of Nairobi, we were suddenly in a place with far too many people jammed into too little space. An occasional mud or wooden shack sat between rows of stalls made of rusted metal pipes, tatters of old gray plastic tarps hanging from their tops like Spanish moss in a Louisiana swamp.
People were selling shoes, boxes of food, clothes—like a flea market with necessities instead of knickknacks. This was about survival, not shopping. An old woman wedged between two sellers doing brisk business caught Professor Bill Cook’s attention. Her table was still full of merchandise.
“What will she do if no one buys her stuff,” he asked one of the Franciscans traveling with us.
“Then the other two will share with her,” Brother Matthew said.
The economics of heaven in the streets of hell. I was praying that the bus wouldn’t break down when I learned our schedule was to bring us back to this very place two days later.
That Friday we attended a meeting between Kibera’s Muslims and Christians sponsored by a group formed after the violence that followed the 2008 national elections, when hundreds died. Our event at a mosque in the slum was moved when organizers feared that they could not protect our large contingent in an area where, as one woman said, “There are some bad boys.”
We crowded into a rundown 20’ x 50’ building. For the first time since our landing, I felt conspicuously white.
As if sensing our discomfort, one of our hosts spoke up.
“You are welcome here, my brothers,” said Edwin Nzomo, who runs a youth group in Kibera. “We want you here. You are safe here. Please do not be afraid.”
I stood behind an elderly Muslim woman and photographed the meeting. I’d find out later she was Fatma Anyanzwa, a former member of parliament who worked for decades to get laws passed to protect women and children.
’’We must reduce ourselves to the basic facts we share with all human beings,” she told us. “All of us here are brothers and sisters: We are all children of the one God.”
Two days later Professor Rick Warner, three students and I are to walk into the heart of Kibera, to Christ the King Church, one of the few permanent structures in this otherwise transitory town.
Groups don’t enter Kibera willy-nilly— particularly with me carrying a $1,500 College camera. Near the entrance we meet our security team—a group of 10 parishioners. We shake hands, introduce ourselves. My protector and I laugh when we discover we share the same name.
Stephen promises we will be safe, and we walk toward the church with me
in the middle, Stephen beside me, the head of security leading the way. We walk through the market area, students stepping over trash and slipping through a thick sort of mud. Liquid seeps through the ground, and the air smells like the southside landfill in Indianapolis. Much of Kibera has been built up over its 99 years on top of trash and refuse.
We step over the metal railroad ties of the Nairobi to Kampala railroad.
“Must be dangerous to have a train running through the market,’’ I say. “They must have to slow way down.”
“The trains speed up when they come through here,’’ Stephen tells me.
I keep my gaze down, not wanting to fall or to make eye contact with anyone except our hosts.
As we traverse a small dirt soccer field I look up to see two scoreboard-sized signs bearing a list of health statistics—births, deaths, the number of people with various illnesses. Kibera is known by its diseases.
Behind the signs, Christ the King’s concrete pillars rise above the mud and rusted-roofed shacks like Gibraltar above a swirl of jetsam. The relief the vast open space inside provides from the throngs outside gives “sanctuary” new meaning. In a temporary city where all that men promise has failed, faith offers something substantial.
The St. Cecilia Choir dances in and begins to sing, stirring and powerful voices. Rhythm, harmony, and passion leap from every hymn. As welcome as this new building may be, the people are the real church here. They are the sanctuary.
It is astonishing to hear songs of praise and gratitude from people who live on a dollar a day.
After Mass, refreshments, and a photo session with the choir, it’s time to leave. The camera and I have a new protector—the choir director I’d met briefly on our walk in. He is taller than I, thinner, and wears a silver-plated belt buckle with a gun and a dollar bill etched into it.
“You must stay close, please. Right here.” He taps his right shoulder and smiles. “Do you remember my name?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t.”
He laughs. “Don’t be sorry, Stephen,” he says, “My name is Amunze.”
Amunze leads us through a maze of alleys to a railroad bed overlooking the slum. In the foreground is a pigpen, next to a house where laundry is being hung out to dry, children sitting beneath it. Behind that, an old man walks toward the church, and beyond him is an endless patchwork of corrugated metal roofs on mud shacks.
I snap the shutter like I’m stealing something, tuck the camera under my arm, and we balance on the railroad ties to avoid the muck between them. I’m looking down when
I hear a child’s voice.
“Take my picture! Take my picture!”
A little girl, maybe four years old, stands in front of me. I’ve heard this request everywhere we’ve been in Nairobi, but it feels different here. To pull out this camera worth more than these folks would make in 10 years and use it to photo-graph their misery, it seems like the sort of insensitivity that should cause trouble.
“Take my picture! Take my picture!”
I glance at Amunze. He nods. The little girl poses. I hastily snap a few shots and show her the electronic image on the back of the camera. She giggles and wants to see another. Amunze lets us stand there together for a moment.
A Salvation Army parade passes by and between the marchers I glimpse a shack where a young mother and toddler stand in the doorway. My mind flashes an image of my daughter, Caity, and grandson, Myca, standing in their place. I clench my eyes shut to erase the image, almost stumbling over Amunze. He puts his hand on my shoulder to steady me, then we walk briskly, silently, out of Kibera.
When I get back to our compound, the mud won’t come off my shoes. I have to scrape it off with a knife. And I want it off of me—to wash away every smell and every feeling that might remind me of the conditions these people live in, the men and women and children I have prayed with and left behind.
A week later we flew back to Indianapolis. There was, of course, no crowd welcoming us back the way we’d been greeted in Nairobi. We just don’t do that here.
Back home I first reveled in walking around Crawfordsville; it is so easy to get things done here. But within a week I was back to my old self-isolating routine—the TV, Google, msnbc, iTunes, and the daily escape from myself and my community.
I ate all my favorite foods, and I began to get sick. We’d eaten mostly rice, lentils, and beef in Kenya, and I was never ill.
Lately I’ve been thinking back on that image, of seeing Caity and Myca in that shack in Kibera. I wonder if it was more than just guilt. I wonder if what I saw was the truth. The people of Kibera live in an economic slum, but at times it feels as though we live in a spiritual and emotional one. Living in the most prosperous nation that has ever existed yet never having time for our friends or the things we claim truly matter. Never having enough, yet living in fear that it might all be taken away.
I don’t intend to romanticize or diminish the grinding poverty these people live in, but all of us, at some time in our lives, will pass through, perhaps even come to live, in Kibera. Our Kibera may be the pains and fears of old age, medical care we can’t afford, children we can’t save, the death of our beloved, of our friends. Our Kibera may even be of our own making, but that will not diminish the despair.
There will come a day when we will need the courage and vision required of the people of Kibera each day they awaken. They have much to teach us.
There’s a photograph that I keep with me from that day. After we’d said our goodbyes to our security team and I was getting into our van, I asked Amunze if I could take his picture.
“I don’t want to forget what angels look like,” I said, only half
kidding.
He laughed, “But do you remember my name?”
“Amunze,” I said. “And I will not forget you.”
I cannot.
This edition is about leaps of the body, mind, and spirit into unknown or unexpected futures. Those moments between inspiration and action that feel as though you’re clinging to a plunging roller coaster. Or, as former Wabash Professor Quentin Petersen put it, those times we “step off the bomb bay catwalk and into space.”
Thanks for reading.
Steve Charles | Editor
