Two Years of Wonder - A Memoir

Chapter 3: Tabitha & Kibera

The first thing that strikes you about Kibera—as long as you look beyond the raw sewage—is the vitality of the place. To a great degree, this is due simply to the density of people within the slum: there are 1.2 million people in a six-square-kilometer area. That is more than half the population of Botswana. All those people within Kibera normally do not sit around idle. They inevitably do something—they have to, to stay alive.

And with children running and laughing, occasional cars tumbling along the rutted roads, men chopping wood, pounding metal, teenage girls fetching water, women selling tomatoes, avocadoes, tubs of charcoal, electric cords, soap, and shoe polish, the pervasive feeling is that the place is alive.

People move to Kibera from the countryside because of the promises of work and opportunity that the city holds. And although the opportunities are often not as numerous as the inhabitants had hoped, the people still must get on with the business of living.

After you notice that, you would then definitely notice the sewage. Once again one might imagine taking half the sewage from the country of Botswana and depositing it, daily, in a six-square-kilometer area, then building a development of sticks and mud on top of it. Water and sanitation is the first and foremost problem in Kibera. Many teenage girls don't go to school. They spend the day crossing the slum with seventy-pound buckets of water on their backs. Along every road there are ditches of green-gray sewage. Even in narrow walkways where there are only inches between dwellings, one has to share the foot space with such streams of effluence. There are places where the streams have swollen to large puddles or even ponds where houses are simply constructed on stilts and built over top.

These streams must be constantly dredged, otherwise they fill with newspapers, plastic bags, corn cobs, avocado pits, wine bottles, and beer cans. The litter is raked out then left in a pile. Once the ooze covering it has dried, the trash is set alight. Hundreds of these piles of trash are burned each day so that there is often a pungent scent of melting plastic hanging in the air, not to mention ash. Gray ash, the same color as the sewage, covers everything. The roads are almost sandy with it.

Then amid all of this you might find a flowering eucalyptus or flame tree growing up between rusted corrugated tin roofs. Why such trees are not chopped down for firewood, when so many other trees have been, I cannot guess.

In aerial photos of Kibera those tin roofs look like a log jam, no space between and no order whatsoever. From above one can't help noticing the housing subdivision that has sprung up beside the log jam. These homes, in great contrast, are white and as neatly spaced as vertebrae on a spine. The contrast is striking, but the subdivision homes seem boring and dull in comparison.

Underneath the corrugated tin roofs, it is interesting to see how similar houses in Kibera are to homes in the countryside. Here they are still made of mud and sticks—those that have traveled from rural regions often only know one way to build a house. The difference is simply the closeness between them. It can be pitch black in many homes since the next house is so close that any sunlight is blocked from the windows.

But unlike the rural regions, in Kibera there are movies. Small shacks and huts have chalkboards beside their doors reading: "Shaq in Steel, 8:30;Jackie Chan: Boat to Shanghai, 10:30;A Night to Remember, 4:30;" (the last of these being pornography). The sound on the movies is turned up in order to advertise to passersby. That noise mixes with the noise of radios playing Celine Dion or Phil Collins. All this powered by electricity that is stolen by jerry-rigged wires from the power lines above.

The power lines are one of the few signs of municipal services. The waterlines are the other. There is a network of fourteen or so quarter-inch pipes that run alongside one another through the slum. All are empty though. The girls that step over them with their buckets collect water from one of the few pumps that pump it from underground.

Then there are the train tracks. As many as five trains a day pass through Kibera, on the same line, the lunatic line, that was built by the British in an effort to make central Africa and Lake Victoria more accessible to trade. The line was supposed to go all the way to Uganda but was cut short at the shore of Lake Victoria as a result of unforeseen expenses and difficulties (including the man-eating lions of Tsavo).

The residents give the tracks only what space is necessary for the running of the trains (sometimes not even that much) and build their houses right up to the edge. Most of the time, the residents ignore the tracks, only paying them heed when a train is grinding past, at which time huge crowds of people build up on either side of the countless walkways that crisscross the rails. In places the steel ties are stolen and used as bridges over refuse streams. Near the western edge of Kibera, a train will pass a clearing where tarps lay covered with drying millet—a key ingredient of local brew, the cheapest and quickest way to get drunk in the slum.

Amid all this are flies. They are pervasive, flying from the shit underfoot directly to the food being sold in kiosks. They land on crippled children and old men and women that cannot move to swat them. There are rats and there are also cats; both drink from the contaminated streams. And there are children. Children dressed in crisp-looking school uniforms, children in tattered clothes, and children in nothing. The youngest ones become covered in the gray ash if they are not supervised, which they often are not. The children can navigate the passageways and alleys of Kibera better than any adult. The paths between houses are packed down into hard earth by the passing of their feet.

This is Kibera. This is where Tabitha is from.