Another Mama Biashara Diary from November visit … nearly done now
November 2016
The Final Wednesday
Felista calls to ask if I can buy a phone for one of the kids from the home who was born with a hole in the heart and is now resident in Kenyatta Hosapital. I think someone is paying – maybe social services, as it was they who brought the baby (now 11) to Felista – but she is bedbound. A phone would be a lifeline. I am told. According to Felista she most stay in hospital because every month the doctors must remove a pint of blood. “She has too much blood”, the doctor has said. She has been getting progressively weaker. Not surprising if they are bleeding her of a pint each month. But I am allowed nowhere near her doctor or her diagnosis or anything. Still find it worrying.
She also needs a load more ballast, sand, cement etc etc and etc for repairs to the kitchen. I tell her I have absolutely no money left. Which is true.
Other than her monthly £150 which she will be getting tomorrow.
I go and get the bits and bobs of medicine on my list after yesterday and we head back to Kibera. En route I call Jane and the other kids and we tell them we will be around their own house, after which we will take them for nyama choma.
At the hovels in the bog in Kibera there are about another eighty of so kids with scabby heads and/or big tummies, plus some rashes, ‘wounds’, coughs and a woman who insist she has “a problem of spitting” and gathers some saliva and spits it out on the ground by my feet to prove her point. I tell her she does not have a problem of health, but of bad manners. How we all laugh. Except her.
Now I go to meet the old grandparents of the orphan kids we met yesterday. They live right down at the end of a row of huts. Dirt floor, 10′ x 10′, trestle with a dodgy looking slab of antique foam for a bed for both. The old gentleman is effusive in greeting. When he finds out I am Scottish he is ecstatic. I am greeted like an old friend. He is frail, but the smiliest person I have met in Kenya. And he has no eyes. Just two hollows in his face. His wife is tinier, frailer. She can barely stand up. She is feverish, but equally welcoming. We sit on the floor. She is not well. And has a long list of symptoms. He is trying to look after her. They came from Uganda many many years ago. Their daughter had the two children and then ran away. He can write and read braille, and was part of a group of blind people who made cane furniture, but now there is no money to buy the cane. They cannot pay the rent. The children cannot go to school because they do not have the registration fees. And the shosho is sick.
I am not sure why, but I am overwhelmed with like for these lovely people. They are kind, and warm and, quite honestly, as far as I can see, wholly wonderful human beings. I realise I have been holding hands with the old lady the whole time we have been talking.
No 1 is hydration and ibuprofen for the old lady and hydration for the old gentleman. Next, a ‘care package’ of cod liver oil for both, calcium for both, garlic oil for her and multivitamins when the cod oil has run out. Both get dewormed. And more liquids. They develop quite a taste for blackcurrant squash. Then I go off to shop. Unga (flour) cooking oil, eggs, bread and marge for a treat, various beans, salt, tea leaves, sugar, milk, a load of veggies and, by their special request, some meat. Goat. Enough for a stew with a good meaty broth as well. And castor oil for the old lady’s constipation(“hard, like a goat”, says the old gent, when I ask about his wife’s ‘movements’). And water. And charcoal and matches. I just keep remembering more things they don’t have.
Back at the house, the lady has perked up massively. Stopped sweating. Sitting up, talking. They greet me like the second coming. I cannot describe adequately the feeling of being caught up in their tsunami of emotions when I go through the shopping and add £25.00 for two month’s rent. But it was profoundly humbling. We do a LOT of hugging. Which is more dangerous than it sounds as I feel I could have snapped the old lady with one unguarded squeeze. I leave and we agree we will meet in January when I will try to have found a way of funding the cane workshop. The old gent wants to work.
The problem of the kids going to school is, up to a point, fixable. I give the old gent and the local pastor/informal teacher a rundown of the constitutional law regarding primary education. The ‘registration fee’ for lack of which they hasd been sent home, is illegal. All other ‘charges’ they are unable to pay – also illegal. I get the bits up on my ipad and show the pastor chappie. “Yes, but the Head Teacher insists” he says. I ask if I should come and speak to the Head Teacher. It seems I most certainly should. I am rather looking forward to it. This sort of extortion is endemic in slum schools. Head teachers, and even individual teachers, will make up spurious charges that must be paid and send home any child who does not come in with the dosh. They are petty criminals who are excluding Kenya’s youngest from an education – albeit not quite Paisley Grammar Primary – that is their constitutional right. Bastards.
I am loathe to leave this lovely couple. I have never met anyone who aroused in the wizened, bile-fuelled, black old sac that passes for my heart, such an unbridled desire to pick them up and make their lives better. Kids ? Not that bothered, to be honest. Babies ? They are the problem. Far too many of ’em. All getting their little lives saved all over the place at some expense, when no one can afford to have ’em in the first place. These old, old people ? They have given, worked, helped. Now they deserve a little back. It should be their right. Everywhere. Obvs a couple of bags of groceries, some fizzy drinks and a hug from a sweaty Scotswoman is unlikely to do much in the grand scheme of things (although I am pretty certain the castor oil will sort out her innards), but I am going back in January. To do something better.
As I turn to leave, my shoulder is held in a vice like grip. It is the pastor. And his bible. He has come so that we can all pray together and give thanks to god for what he has done today. Bugger all, as far as I could see, same as every other day in these hovels in the bog in Kibera. But there is a time to jump up and down, pointing out that everyone will simply die unpleasantly across the world in war and famine and poverty and pain and a variety of manmade disasters, while waiting for god to get up off his celestial arse and do something … ANYTHING … for the good guys, like this couple. And I sense that this is not it. So I chew my cheeks and concentrate on a gecko on the wall while thanks go into the ether.
Jane has arrived and well, colour my nose red and call me Rudolph but she has GROWN ! Sixteen (we think … no birth certificate) and quite the young lady. There is so much hugging people come out to watch. We go off and collect her bros and sister and go to The Pork Place where we eat kuku choma and chips. Quite a lot of it. Except for Michael, who wants pork.
Jane is hoping she gets 350 points in her exams, which will qualify her for an Equity Bank scholarship to Nakuru Girls School (secondary). I hope too. Mama B has been caring for these kids since 2010 and seen them through primary, largely thanks to the marvellous Dinah Njeru at Ceders Progressive Academy in Ruai who has been incredibly supportive – to say nothing of giving them an EXCELLENT education. But we do not have the income to support secondary education. On several occasions, individuals have sent money to pay for the school fees, but there are five kids …
Anyway, Doris eventually joins us, having been out getting wedding stuff together all day. She has, on occasion, looked after all five at her place and the reunion is warm, if slightly sticky with chicken juice and tomato ketchup.
Jane has a plan for a chip business during the Christmas holidays (which are more than two months long) and, after a lot of working out, she gets a budget to start it. I have no particular hope that she will become the Harry Ramsden of Nairobi, but it is good that she is thinking this way and David will be monitoring.
And so … via a chat with Doris and a wander down to the matatu stage … to bed
