Keeping hope despite life's hardships

Violence destroyed the livelihoods of many women in Nairobi’s Mathare slum, but even tiny grants can help them to offer some chance to their children

GLORIA IS like many mothers in Mathare – a giant slum on the edge of Nairobi.

She does her best to get Aggrey (4), and Musungu (2), up in the morning and to sleep at night. She tries to keep the tin shack they call home neat and tidy. She brings the children every day to the Baraka health centre to be fed, carrying the little boy on her back and holding the little girl’s hand. But Gloria is not their mother. She is their sister.

Gloria is six years old. Her mother went into hospital and never came back. Her father, who is an alcoholic, comes back every so often, and his visits bring more fear than hope. When I spoke to Gloria at the health centre, she held my hand and wouldn’t let go.

For the first time in human history, most of the world’s population lives in cities, and the fastest growing kind of city life is that lived by the billion or so who occupy what are politely called “informal settlements” – less politely, “slums”.

Sixty per cent of Nairobi’s population of over three million live in vast tracts of galvanised shacks without running water, roads, sanitation, legal tenure or decent public services. Seen from higher ground, Mathare, which is not even the biggest slum in Nairobi, seems like a giant metallic quilt of low tin roofs with an occasional filigree of rough concrete. It contains something like half a million people.

Such places tend to look the same the world over, but Mathare has two distinctive features. One is that even though the settlements are illegal, the people have to pay rent (most of those I spoke to were paying €10 a month) for the privilege of living in shanties. The other is that even in this teeming, overcrowded space, there are areas of scarred emptiness. The post-election inter-ethnic violence that erupted in Kenya early last year has forced many people of the “wrong” tribe out of their homes.

In Mathare, the average household lives on little over €2 a day. Food is a constant anxiety: at least 4 million urban Kenyans are defined as “extremely food insecure”. Last year, the price of water, and of maize, beans and rice – the staples – doubled in Mathare. The average number of meals had fallen from three to one and a half a day. Around 40 per cent of the children under five are stunted by malnourishment.

In the Baraka clinic, Regina Muia was waiting in line, with little Johnny on her lap. She is 60, and I assumed the child was her grandson, but he is in fact her great-grandson. The boy’s mother, now dead, was Regina’s 15-year-old granddaughter, and Regina had taken over the baby so she could go back to school. The girl died, she says, of TB (TB is rife, but it is usually also used to cover deaths from HIV).

Her grandson is now sick too. The baby, she says, had “a persistent cough, fever, no appetite. He was crying all the time. I used to talk to my neighbours but no one could help.” When she finally brought him to the clinic, he was severely malnourished. Now, on a controlled feeding programme and with treatment for TB, he looks like a normal, lively child.

These emergency food and health programmes are vital for the poorest people in Mathare, but are just as important to help women to create livelihoods for themselves and their families. While the men typically seek casual labour in the city and bring in irregular incomes, the women are the main breadwinners.

For many, the ethnic violence that tore through Mathare last year destroyed the tiny businesses that were their lifeline. With equally tiny grants (often €40), Concern has been able to help them regain their livelihoods.

On the corner of a winding muddy street of close-packed cabins, I spoke to a group of women who have used the money to get back on their feet. Mary Njoki, whose husband died of “sickness” in 2003, looks after her own three children as well as two of her sister’s, who also died. They had to flee during the violence from another area of the slum and were left with nothing. “At one point,” she says, “I had to send the children out on the street to look for any scraps of food they could find.” Now she runs a vegetable stall. She still works appallingly hard – leaving Mathare at 5am to go the market in Nairobi, coming back and working until nine every night of the week, then cooking and doing house work until near midnight.

Teresia Wanjisu tells a similar story. She runs a stall frying chips in a gas-fired boiler. With the rise in food prices, she says, she has had to change tack: she will now sell a tiny packet of chips for five cents. Rosemary Kiluu, whose food stall is decorated with a poster of Thierry Henry and one saying “Always be positive in your outlook on life and expect the best,” says: “It’s the women who bear the burden. It’s we who will develop this place. It’s very hard, but at least now we can move on with our lives.”

For some women, access to small amounts of money to set up a stall is the only viable alternative to the other way to feed their children: prostitution. I arranged to speak to some of these women through a local church, and was warned that they would not wish to be identified. When I spoke to them, however, they were adamant that they were not ashamed to be named or photographed, since whatever they did was what they had to do.

Martha Mukami, who is 38 and looks after five children (including two of her dead sister-in-law’s) is a wiry, energetic woman with a proud and forceful personality. (We were told, only half in jest, that we would be safe in Mathare so long as we had Martha with us.) Her husband, from whom she had separated, died in 2007, and she thinks it may have been from HIV.

She doesn’t know her own HIV status: “If I found out and it was bad, I could get a shock and die.” A former prostitute, she says some customers would refuse to use condoms, and “I could not get afraid because I needed the money”. Occasionally, customers were violent: “but it wasn’t too bad, they only slapped me”. Her older children, she says, encouraged her to take up prostitution when they were destitute. She usually made about €6 a day, but the police would take up to €2 of that from her.

She stopped working as a prostitute when she got a €50 grant through Concern and set up a small business selling charcoal and porridge. “I know at least seven or eight other women who want to stop as well – if they had the choice. I know girls of 10 to 15 going into prostitution, sleeping with men who are obviously abusing them. Nobody is helping them.” For herself it is “just me and my children now – no men”.

Lillian Wythera started working as a prostitute 20 years ago when she was 18. “A friend encouraged me to go to Mombasa and took me there. It was very hard to start, and I hated the work. Sometimes I was beaten and not given the agreed amount. Sometimes the police would arrest us and hold us until we slept with them.” She sent money to Mathare to support her three children, who were with her mother. When she returned four years ago, “they called my mother Mama, and me by my name. It made me very sad.”

She too, set up a stall with the money from Concern, and told her eldest daughter what she had worked at: “She is big now so I explained it to her because I don’t want her to be like me.”

In spite of their often brutal experiences, these women, too, believe life will be better for their children. Lillian says her son is first in his class at school. If she was president, she says, she would ensure all children could go to school without having to pay. “When you have education,” she says, “you have hope.” I asked Martha what she wanted her children to be. “One will be a doctor, one an engineer. With God’s help, everything is possible.”

Series concluded. Fintan O’Toole was in Kenya with Concern Worldwide