A Million Different Smells

One of the most distinctive features about Africa is the smells. The moment you come out of the airport the wind hits you with sweet, tangy, spicy, dirty, hot, wet...its very overwhelming at first. But as you begin to settle down, moments when you'll catch something overpowering and new to your senses are rarer but also more poignant. On Friday our class took a trip to the Eastlands, which is one of the poorer areas of Nairobi. It is almost totally slum area. There are no streets, no buildings other than handmade shacks, no electricity and no running water. We visited an organization called WOFAK (Women fighting Aids in Africa). This organization is set up in the middle of the community to provide counseling, education and support to women, children and orphans who are HIV positive. We were not prepared for the day that we had ahead of us. The people who work at WOFAK spend long hours there and are not paid very well. But by talking to them you could feel how much they loved their job and how important they knew that their work was. We visited some homes in the slum of women who were HIV positive and dropped off some food for them. WOFAK provides free medical treatment, but it cannot afford to nourish the hundreds of women who have to take the ARVs. In this situation, the medicine meant to make them healthy ends up poisoning their bodies, because there is nothing in their stomach. When I entered one of the homes of a woman named Priscilla, I expected to feel ashamed or out of place. But we met her and her children and I found that I did not pity her, because she didn't pity herself or others. She was fighting for life, she wasn't going to give up thanks to the people of WOFAK, who come to visit her almost every day to provide counseling and to check up on her. I feel very lucky to have met her and her family, it was an experience that changed me, because I realized that just because these people are suffering and have gotten the short end of the stick in life, it doesn't mean they dont have the strength and the will and the support to fight back.

Yesterday was a complete 180. We visited Mathure, another slum in Nairobi, but this time we visited an organization called MYSA and its a club that provides a library, athletic facilities, and a complete music/dance/theater program for kids in the slum. It was a Saturday and the place was HOPPING. There were hundreds of kids there, and the volunteers who worked there showed us how they organized and fundraised for over 10 years and what they had completed was the most amazing recreation club I have ever seen. Any child in the slum can come and read books, or learn how to play soccer, or learn how to dance or play the guitar. The dance rooms are very small, without windows and with mud floors, but they gave us a great performance!! They told us that their programs were so good they were getting sponsors to bring them to the Netherlands and the United States, in St. Louis, to perform. They also just recieved a big scholarship to start up a radio station, where they will be able to broadcast news about the slums that they live in, inspirational news like women who feed their children on less than a dollar a day and also volunteer at the center, instead of what the world always hears which is violence and drugs. At the end of the day, I felt alive and so happy that even in the most desolate and deprived corners of the world there are people who care so much about one another that they would sacrifice anything to make things better for themselves.

I know this is corny, but these two experiences were like two new overpowering smells. In America, I always think of people in slums like Mathure being helped out by the UN or American NGOs or other good samaritan organizations from the outside. But what I saw in the last two days was not wealthy outsiders coming in to do their part for society, but people from the very bottom of the hole building a foundation around them and bringing themselves up. They don't rely on donations and aid, they rely on their own communities and their own strengths, self-reliance in its truest form.