Part Three - Big Pen Academy

As I mentioned, there are very few public facilities – the poorest of the poor have to pay for school and health care. One survey estimated that for the residents of Korogocho, fully half of their expenditures go to health care. There are approximately 500 health clinics in Korogocho, but all but six are private, meaning you have to pay. But there is no functional regulatory process for private sector clinics – it’s buyer beware. No way to run a railroad.

Getting an education in Korogocho is just as dicey a proposition. In a slum of hundreds of thousands of people, there are exactly two public schools. If you want your children to have any chance to learn to read or write, you have to pay one of the many informal schools that dot the slum. Today, we visited the “Big Pen” school, where 274 children attend primary school classes. The classrooms, such as they are, measure about twenty feet square, about the size of a normal sized bedroom, and I counted about forty children, who looked to be about five or six years old. Our visit caused understandable chaos, and the teacher didn’t particularly seem happy to see us, and who could blame her? The children broke out into wide, generous smiles, and literally climbed over each other to reach out their hands to touch us. Kids are funny – I can’t imagine that they receive regular visitors like us, yet they just cheered, and smiled and tried out their English on us. And they wanted to touch, and I did – reaching out and touching every hand.

If there are any writers from the show “Monk” (about the germophobic detective) reading this, I believe I’ve given you the ultimate story idea. According to one UN report, nearly one child in nine in Kenya dies before his or her fifth birthday, and while these children have passed that grim milestone, they are clearly not thriving. Several had open sores, many are likely ill from opportunistic bugs of one kind or another, many had runny noses, and like children of a certain age around the world, everything went into their mouths. But how could I turn away from these beautiful little children?