Mathare

Echoing everyone else's recent posts, it's really hard to believe that our two-ish weeks in Kenya are almost up. We went on a safari of sorts yesterday, which was actually really cool! I say actually because in the weeks leading up to the trip, i'd felt like we could be doing other stuff (revisiting an orphanage or a slum, say), but today was a lot of fun! We saw some flamingos, pelicans, water buffalo, impalas, rhinos (!! - my new favorite safari animal), giraffes, and even lions. I got tons of pictures, so they'll be coming up here sometime. Maybe after the trip is over? I'm very impatient, and i'll probably want to upload a lot of photos, and it takes a while for them to upload, so i might wait until the internet connection is super fast (aka at home).

Speaking of pictures, i just looked through iPhoto and found that i've taken nearly 3000 so far. WOWWWW. That's a LOT - and it makes me really glad i brought my computer (where i upload my pictures every few days). haha.. if yearbook has taught me one thing, it's that the bigger your pool of pictures taken, the more good ones you'll get. Remember that. I suppose that practically speaking, that approach only works with digital photos.. but digital's what i'm doing, so we're good! I'm going to have to weed through these photos so we can all compile each of our respective photo caches (it has been noticed many times that we're a bunch of shutterbugs, but our bringing tons of cameras will pay off with the beautiful pictures you all will see!).

It's difficult to think about what exactly to write about in this blog post - it feels like there's been so much that i've seen and learned and have yet to really process. So.. talking with me about this trip when i get back will probably be like that too (but do it anyway!).

I think that the slum that made the biggest impact on me was Mathare. Like Trenton wrote, we started off our time there with a very real reminder of our vulnerability. I was one of the ones taking pictures out the window when the rock was thrown at the van.. at first i had no idea what had happened, but i figured it out a few seconds later. It kind of set the tone for the day for me. Instead of walking through the slums like it was just a normal day, i felt more wary and more cautious than i had been in days previous.

When we got out of the vans in front of the Mcedo Beijing School (the Beijing part came from a Chinese team that helped build it), there were lots of kids around, kind of just looking at us. Maybe it was just that mindset i had put myself in from the rock, but it didn't seem like they were as energetically happy to see us as kids in the other slums did. Maybe they felt more wary too..

And then there was this one little boy who started crying. It was hard to hear. Bekah picked him up and comforted him, but he was still crying a little bit.

After we toured the school (where some missions money from last year had been spent to buy some tables and chairs), we got to walk through the slum a little. It felt harder to do than it had the days before... i also wasn't watching where i was going at one point and ended up running into a thick metal cable (i think like the ones on power lines that go down to the ground?). I don't think it showed, but after the rock incident, i was feeling more jumpy and it really freaked me out. A minute later, we were walking past some people gathered in front of a house and i said hi to them ("habari!") and this old man grabbed my wrist and started talking to me. I couldn't understand what he was saying, but the group was moving and i had to go too, so i tried walking away. He wouldn't let go until one of our guides through the slum talked to him and he backed off. It was all very weird (and also freaky) and the guide told me that he'd been drinking.

We reached a high point (literally, not figuratively) in the slum soon after that. You could look out over all of it, go as far as you could see, and not see the end. It was staggering. During the school year, i'd done a project about the slum of Kibera in Nairobi, the most volatile of Nairobi's slums and the biggest in Africa. One part of this project was to come up with a feasible way to deal with the problem. My group came up with some possible measures that could be taken, but being there is different. Looking at it in person made it feel so much more daunting than the figures on paper ever could. Even if a solution to the health problems of overcrowding and disease and violence was found and implemented, it would be hard and imperfect, and thinking about that (along with going to the bases in Eastleigh) showed me just how important the good news of Jesus really is. (whoa oh ohhhh.. God be the solution..)

- steven