A walk through Kibera
My husband and I recently visited Kibera and Mathare slums in Nairobi in an effort to find volunteer opportunities. I’ve been hesitant to write about these communities. Who am I to think I have anything new to say? How can I speak with any authority about these complex places? But, we have to lean into the complexity and stay curious. It would be worse to ignore such places, which is all too easy to do in Nairobi (let’s be honest, poverty is easy to ignore or avoid in most cities around the world).
As we walked into Kibera, a storm of mixed emotions hit me. Although we were there to meet with a local organization, I felt uncomfortable as a voyeur of poverty. I felt sad that people live such fragile lives in an era of global abundance. I felt admiration for the hustle — it was a Tuesday morning, kids were already in school, shops were opening, people were briskly walking out to work.
What people often notice first, entering Kibera, are the sights and smells of mountains of garbage accumulated over years, like geological sediment. It makes me wonder what artifacts would be found, if you were to dig a few meters down.
According to many sources, Kibera is Nairobi’s — and Africa’s — largest slum, with a population of up to 1 million people (estimates vary widely and no one truly knows). It has become iconic, in lots of awkward ways. It’s the laboratory for nearly every NGO’s attempt at poverty-alleviation, mostly to no avail. In the most cutting irony, it borders Royal Nairobi Golf Club (cringe).
A week later we spent a Saturday in Mathare, another slum with an estimated population of 500,000 in northeast Nairobi. For some reason, I felt a deeper sadness in Mathare. This wasn’t because Mathare is distinctly poorer than Kibera. Maybe it was because we visited Mathare on a Saturday, during school holidays. Children crowded the dirt roads and pathways. As cliche as it may be, seeing children living in destitute conditions is painful. Also, Mathare is where most of the bootleg local brew, called “Chang’aa,” is distilled. Powerful stuff! Beware! Right on the polluted Mathare River, plumes of black smoke billowed from the burning rubber scraps, used to heat the liquor in aluminum drums. Unsurprisingly, we met a number of drunk men stumbling around at 11am, sometimes grabbing my arm and talking in a slurred Swahili-English mash. Maybe they drink to dull the pain or stress, maybe they drink because they can’t find jobs, maybe it’s none of my GD business to investigate and judge.
It’s hard to describe life in places like Kibera and Mathare because it is ALL THE THINGS: extreme poverty, hustling young entrepreneurs, cholera from unsafe drinking water, creative fashion designers and musicians, violence and insecurity, aspiring students who are progressing despite the odds. As frivolous as this sounds, I stumbled upon this Instagram account of photojournalist, Brian Otieno (insta: @kiberastories), which I highly recommend. It’s the best visual representation of the beauty and struggle of the place.
As dispassionate as it sounds, slums serve an important social purpose for new arrivals into a city. “Head on a bed, get a job, get out.” For migrants (from rural areas or fleeing conflict), they are affordable temporary shelter. The problem is Kibera and slums across the world, like Dharavi in Mumbai, have become permanent communities for generations. People don’t come to Kibera, find a job and leave. They stay. According to Kenyan Government officials I’ve spoken to, efforts to relocate residents of Kibera into formal housing back in the early 2000s, were unsuccessful — in part because only 40% of Kibera residents commute out of the slum for work. The remaining 60% are part of the economy within Kibera. So, in order to relocate or dissolve Kibera, one would not only have to give people affordable, quality homes, but also reconstruct an informal economy that has been thriving for decades. Not easy!
There are lessons to learn from slums and principles to carry forward. Slums are extremely adaptable, constantly changing communities, offering modular housing. This is important in cities that are expected to triple by 2050 (seriously, we’re talking about Nairobi growing from 5M to 14M people in 30 years!). Slums are ruthlessly affordable housing — I say “ruthless” because that affordable house comes at great cost in forms of insecurity, health risk, the lowest quality, and ironically expensive services (energy, water, etc).
To be clear, people in Kibera, Mathare and other slums are not asking for charity or pity. They are living their lives, doing the best they can with the resources they’ve got. That said, part of untangling the spider web of forces that have created these slums is to ensure they aren’t invisible. I’m challenging myself not to become apathetic in the face of complexity, not to look away and get preoccupied with the small microcosm of comfortable Nairobi life. I will work to be a part of the solution — in my conversations, in how I spend my time, in what I ask of our institutions. I hope you all will hold me accountable.
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NOTE: I will be writing a second blog about the impressive organizations that are doing effective work in Kibera & Mathare.
