Phanice on the way home

Drugfighters School

I was finally able to upload two pictures. It is challenging. The images are so small but I am hoping they might convey something of what I am trying to communicate from Kibera.

The picture on the left is of a home visit that I was able to make with the young girl in the photo. Her grandmother in the background, Phanice is in the foreground and we are about to turn left into a little alley where their tiny mud hut, smaller than most of our bathrooms, sits. The ditch you see is typical of all of the streets and alleyways of Kabira. Water trickles through, but it is full of trash and sewage. The background shows the tin roofs of the larger village.

Phanice is actually lucky because her grandmother cares for her, they have beds in their hut, and only three people live in it. Some of the huts don’t have beds, as many as 7 live in them and sleep on the floor, and in some the parents leave for weeks or months at a time, the children left to fend for themselves. Sometimes they are visited by an uncle or father passing through who rapes the girls. These stories are common.

I met with the Girls Club at the school today. The things they wanted to talk about – they need shoes, panties, they wanted to know more about menstruation, and they wanted us to know that they are afraid going home from school because they might get raped. Sometimes even their own brothers sell them into a situation where they will be violated.

On the lighter side – the buildings you see in the other picture are two story wood framed, tin-sided and roofed classrooms where these children are receiving an education because of Agnes and the Drugfighters school. The buildings themselves were not there 1 1/2 years ago, and are only there because Carter and Cross Cultural Thresholds have raised money and laborers to put them up. The construction you see in the center is going up as we are here, to become a dormitory for the children who have no homes to go to.

The other heartening thing I experienced today is that on this tiny lot in the middle of this human congestion there are 260 children interacting all day – sweetly, laughing, never seeming angry or irritated with each other, sharing, holding each other’s hands, singing and dancing for the visitors and getting three meals a day.

I felt stronger in there today. More hope.

Drugfighters School Children