Kibera

Today I did my first reel visit to Kibera. By now I think you all know what it is but I doubt that anyone actually understands how bad it is there, even I don’t and I’ve been there. The only thing I want to do right now is eat, eat and eat. I want to sit in my room, cry and shove huge pieces of chocolate into my moth, that is how crappy I feel right now.

I thought that the slum I saw in South Africa was bad, but now I see it is really a luxurious place to live compared to Kibera. They had roads, water, nice schools and it did not smell like Kibera. Kibera has a smell worse than anything I’ve ever smelled before. It turns your stomach inside out and upside down.

Kibera is just shed after shed built on piles of garbage. Dogs, cats, chicken, goats and huge pigs walk around in the huge piles of waste lining the streets whilst kids run around by themselves, playing games and greeting us happily when we pass.

Our first stop was at a preschool for kids of single parents. No books, a one hundred years old blackboard, around 100 kids (all amazed by our hair and skin) in a huge metal barn is of coarse for us quite hard to see as a preschool but knowing what happens to kids that don’t go to school I think they are very well of. Their biggest issue was that they just recently lost the sponsor providing them with food, food being what gets kids in Kibera to go to school since they usually wont get much at home, and now had huge problems with being able to keep the kids coming.

Second stop was at a school for a bit older kids. We we’re divided two by two and got to join a class each. Me and the girl who was with me got to introduce ourselves to a class of 55 kids all mashed together in a classroom that was smaller than half of my room here at the boarding. They couldn’t even sit down all at the same time because the homemade benches were too small for everyone to fit. They wanted to know everything about Sweden (which they thought was Sudan) but we hardly knew what to tell them, how can you explain a country like Sweden to a kid who has seen nothing but the slum? Who’ve never seen a map of the world? They sang several songs to me and Anna and they especially took great pride in singing us their national anthem and then asked us if we could sing ours. Realizing that our national anthem is boring (and that we only knew the first part) we instead told them that we would sing a song in Swedish and see if they knew it in English and then sang twinkle twinkle little star, they got so exited when they could hear witch song it was that they started jumping up and down starting chaos in the small metal hut.

Leaving the school, a very inspiring place, we headed for the Women Power Group. This is a group of 20 women, all HIV positive that together have started a shop where they sell handicraft they’ve made themselves. They also improve their English together and learn how to use computer thanks to volunteers from among others the Swedish school. It was an amazing experience to speak to women like that. Who stood up straight and told us about what they’ve gone through. How the society and people shut them and their kids out when they got diagnosed and how they’ve now earned peoples respect again through hard work.

Tomorrow morning I’m going straight to the teacher who accompanied us because she is the one organizing volunteer work in Kibera.

// I can’t give a better description //

Pictures coming later!