Health & Fitness
Patch Blog: An SMHS Student's Stay in an African Slum
San Marino High School junior Avni Parikh, founder of Let's Hope International--a group that raises money for kids in India and Kenya--shares her experience in the dense African slum of Kibera.
Missing Kibera?
Part 1
August 13, 2011: I said my farewells to a country which is starting to feel like home. I knew I’d miss Kenya—Lake Nakuru, the Maasi Market, my family—but I never thought I could actually say this, I miss Kibera too.
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With over a hundred thousand residents in an area the size of Manhattan’s central park, Kibera is one of the densest slums in the world.
The complex community that I had been trying to understand since I first saw it from afar in 2007, wasn’t completely accurate to the painting engrained in my mind. The night before the trip, I literally had to cry myself to sleep, overwhelmed that I was actually going to be entering a slum for the first time and that I was finally visiting the St. Joseph’s School. Scared yet undeniably anxious to see such extreme poverty up close, I thought that I would cry during the walk to the school. (I’m sixteen, I’m emotional!) From what I had heard and read of Kibera, I expected thugs to be roaming around, potentially giving us trouble and to see little boys sniffing glue. I was scared to bring my camera because this community is where Nairobi gets its nickname of “Nairobbery.” If not rob us, I wondered if people would beg for food and money.
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However, during my first trek in the slum, I didn’t see thugs, drug abuse, or robbery in the area that I visited. (Not to say that the slum is immune to these issues.) Despite the literally tough road—jumping over streams of contaminated sewage water that sometimes led to ditches full of flying toilets (I’ll explain that later), I still saw beauty in Kibera. Children ran up to me asking, “Hi, How Are You?,” which was exactly the same way the children would talk to strangers in the film The Constant Gardener, set partly in Kibera. Graceful women were washing their clothes and babies in recycled water. Well dressed men were exiting the slum into the nation’s capital, Nairobi, to hopefully work. The hospitality, kindness, intelligence, intellect, and attitude of the staff and children at the school made me forget about what Kibera lacked, but what it had to offer.
Check back for more blog posts about Kibera and Let's Hope International.
