Korogocho, Nairobi - Part One

Korogocho, with 500,00-800,000 people, the third largest slum in Nairobi.


I just landed in Kigali, Rwanda, but I owe an account of Monday’s visit to Korogocho – the third largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Here goes.

Korogocho is a heartbreaking community for so many reasons. To begin with, these people are among the poorest of the poor – sadly, there are far too many communities a lot like this one to say who’s got it worst, but it would be understating things to say that the conditions for these people are truly, truly grim. But without getting all “Triumph of the Spirit” on you, the thing that stands out in this community is that the people in it refuse to give up - the markets, while not quite the Union Square Greenmarket, are remarkably well-ordered, with beaten up toys or bits of wire or fresh tomatoes displayed to the best effect possible.




Scratching out a living in Korogocho.


I even came upon Korogocho’s Nordstrom - a stand that had six or seven evening dresses on offer, a bit the worse for wear maybe, but not terrible. A woman fingered the cloth, trying to decide between the blue one and the red one. And the children. Probably the most heartbreaking thing about poverty, especially epic poverty like this, is to see children in such dire circumstances. But these kids were so full of energy, even joy. Wherever we went, they’d come up to us and smile and say hi – and during the entire visit not a single person asked us for money – and they seemed amazingly unfazed by their situation. They’ve got to know that their lives are hard – much harder than most. They are undoubtedly exposed to popular culture and get to see what they don’t have – a real house with real walls, a floor, running water, decent food. They’ve got to know this, and that breaks my heart.



Korogocho is a community of some 500,000-800,000 people. Thirty years ago, people relocating from the countryside began to use government-owned land on the outskirts of Nairobi. They built rudimentary dwellings – mud and straw, mostly, with a little tin here and there. They don’t own the land, and slums like this are considered “illegal” communities, and thus the government is loathe to provide services like schools and medical care, and without title to the land, there has been no serious development.

There’s very minimal electricity (some people do jerry rigged connections to the few power lines that run overhead, but it’s dangerous and technically illegal), no running water, and certainly no sewage system. There are very large water cisterns, perhaps several hundred gallons, every few blocks, which is considered fairly modern. Next to the barrels are makeshift shops, where you can pay to fill your bucket and, crazily, top off your cell phone. In one of the poorest districts in this very poor country, you can top off your cell phone. If the real reformation ever comes to Kenya, it will be started with a cell phone.



Get water or minutes.

The public restrooms are pit latrines. When the latrines are full, young men remove the waste with their bare hands and fill large drums and then wheel it down to the river and dump it there. This is said to be a pretty well-paying and sought after job. At the moment there is a cholera outbreak downriver caused by the out of control dumping of human waste into the river. That there’s no mystery to the cause of cholera in the twenty-first century makes not a bit of difference here. While we were there we visited a so-called “bio-center,” financed by the government of Ireland, which will create public toilets with running water that compost the waste and use the offgas to fire communal ovens for cooking. My wife is fond of saying that good design solves a problem, and this project is at least a three-fer – sanitary bathrooms, less wood smoke from the incessant burning of cooking fires, free fuel for cooking, and less human waste in the river. But some people are said to be wary of cooking with such a fuel, and who can really blame them? In any case the three bio centers under construction will barely make a dent in the problem.

Diarrhea, TB, and of course HIV is rampant, and I mean rampant, in this community. Of all the children who die before their 5th birthday (it’s a lot, but I don’t have this stat yet), 18% are stillborn. Sewage runs in channels in the dirt streets, if you can call them streets. People keep goats around their dwellings, which I guess helps keep down the garbage just a bit, and they keep chickens as well, although this probably makes an excellent vector for avian flu and other bad things.