Wako hapo tu

Wako hapo tu

In Kiswahili, wako hapo tu, translates to "they are there continuously", or more colloquially, wako tu, means “just there.” That is the expression for too many people living in the urban slums of African towns; places like Langas, Huruma, and Kumukunji, the slums surrounding Eldoret, where I have spent most of my time while in Kenya this year. “Just there” is the state of existence for too many people living here. They are just there. Just existing. Many are sick, all are poor, and too many have just given up. They are just there.

I rarely let my emotions take hold of me when visiting place like this. Partly, because I feel like they interfere with my ability to understand and to help; partly because I’ve been here before and have seen many, many people in dire straits; partly because I have dedicated my life to helping people in poverty so being overwhelmed by emotions every day would make for an utterly fruitless career; and partly because I feel my emotions are irrelevant compared to the suffering to which I’m bearing witness. But Wednesday evening, after a long day in Langas, I was on the verge of tears. For a moment, I felt myself start to break down. I needed an outlet, I needed to scream out loud that I had just visited 8 homes taking care of 56 orphans, hoping someone would hear, hoping beyond all hope that something would be done about it. Luckily I found Ken, my best Kenyan friend. We probably talk at least twice a day on ways to solve Africa’s problems, but tonight, we could barely muster a discussion. He looked at me and told me I should take it easy. “Don’t get overwhelmed, don’t overwork yourself, or you won’t be able to do anything,” he told me. “I’ve seen too much of what you saw today and I know it’s awful. These people, their lives, it is so sad. Wako tu.”

On Wednesday, the 4th day of July, as America celebrated its independence day, I trudged through the mud in Langas making home visits with two amazing community health workers, Virginia and Veronicah, to households caring for children orphaned by AIDS. We visited eight homes. Those eight homes housed a total of fifty-six orphans. I realized this staggering number as we walked, but I pushed it out of my mind, focusing instead on the faces in front of me. It wasn’t until I looked back at my pictures later that evening and did the math that my jaw, stomach, and heart all dropped. The day before, while in Huruma, Veronicah said to me jokingly that we could go door to door for two weeks in each of the slums, eight to five, and find orphans in nearly every home. We both knew that in reality that she wasn’t joking in the least. I had finally come to the very grave realization that the aftermath of the AIDS pandemic—i.e., the orphaned children it would leave—would be worse than the disease itself. How could a single disease leave one generation dead and leave the next uneducated and jobless?

All eight of the homes were one room mud houses. Every one of the homes we visited housed more children than it had space on a mattress. Every home was dark, damp, and dirty. Almost all the children were coughing a deep, wet cough. Too many were home from school because of a lack of school fees or money for uniforms. All of the caretakers—grandmothers, aunts, siblings—reported “casual labor” as their source of income. To say they were economically unstable would be a cruel understatement. Besides, most had too many children under their care to work anyways. I have lived in one of the most rural villages in western Kenya, where poverty is the norm, albeit an extreme norm, but at least in the village they have space, they have land, they have natural water springs, they have grass for animals to graze and children to play, and they have a constant supply of food. In the slums, there was none of that. Nothing was certain. There was no space, no land, and not always food. This was poverty like I’d never seen before. The whole situation was utterly dire.

After dinner that night, I went to the Mamlin’s house to collect some clothes for two of the orphans who were sick and had completely inadequate bedding and clothing for the currently cold, wet, Kenyan rainy season. I had given Virginia some money to get them some blankets and a mattress earlier that day—it was no longer possible to wait for their needs to be processed through the OVC department; but they still needed shoes, sweaters, and pants, which we collected from the Mamlin's "store"-donations from their church back home. I told Joe about the eight homes, fifty-six orphans I visited today, and even he, who has nearly seen it all, was briefly overtaken by a look of despair. He told me that the orphan crisis was going to ruin this country unless we got these kids back into school. Then, completely unexpectedly, he thanked me for being out there, bearing witness to this situation. He told me I should write up some of their stories, so at least people would know. Inside, I was floored, and totally recharged. I told him I would be back out there until I left, and then would be back again next year to do the same.

I hesitate to write about situations so sad, so awful. I hate to paint such a picture of a country and people I have truly grown to love and respect. Yet, their story must be told. In his book Race Against Time, Stephen Lewis, at times, writes with reckless abandon, in a prose that depicts the reality of African poverty and the tragedy of the African HIV/AIDS epidemic like nothing I’ve ever read. It’s enough to move one to tears. He even writes about the same hesitations as I, hating to paint such an ugly picture. But we (and I use we in humbled reverence, as Stephen Lewis is an incredible human being who I can only hope to emulate in spirit and work), are bound by the realities of human suffering, bound to tell the truth, bound to tell these people’s stories as we see them, for we will never know what it is like to actually live them. Everyone, all of humanity, must know that this kind of poverty, this kind of suffering exists in our world today. What you do with that knowledge is then your own, but I am here, I am seeing this with my own eyes, and I therefore feel bound to tell you what I see. I asked Virginia as we left our last house if these people liked having a mzungu (white person) come into their homes like I was doing. She replied, “In Africa, we have a saying to never refuse a visitor because we want people to see how we live, at least so you know.”