We have been at the orphanage now for a week and it has been quite interesting, both good and bad, wonderful and terrible at the same time. The place we are staying at is right on the edge of the kiberra slum. Behind our house is the entrance which is lined with shops, this means it is full of people and music pretty much all day, except for around 11pm- 5 am, if we are lucky. They are also very fond of playing the same song on repeat. We have to be pretty careful, we are in by 7 every night because it starts to get dark. So far we have had no problems, we get called "muzungo" a lot, which means white skin and they laugh when I look because I know what they're saying. We have two security guards at a gate to get into our row of houses, which is nice because a man was following us tonight, and once we got to the gate the guards were able to shoo him off. We are pretty far away from the orphanage we are working at. We take a bus or matatu to Nairobi and then another from there out to Kasarani, all together it takes us about two hours each way, which can be very exhausting. The buses sometimes have very awful music pumping or a lady preaching about God, you can get stuck beside some very smelly people as well. The matatu are like small vans that they cram about 20 people into, I'm not very fond of them because I get very claustrophobic but they can be quicker than the bus. The way both work is with one driver and then one man at the door to get people in the bus and then collect money. The money they charge depends on the time, the day, the weather, you never know how much you are going to pay. Usually it is between 30-50 shillings. This morning we had quite the experience on a matatu, where the people felt they were charged too much, 30 instead of 20. So there was yelling and arguing and of course I understood very little, but we were stuck right in the middle. There were police directing traffic and they noticed all the yelling, pulled over our matatu and made us all get out. They kicked the angry ones off and they got their ten shilling and we kept going. After this we were walking to our next bus and a teenage boy grabbed a handful of rotten garbage and shove it in my face, then he asked for ten shillings, I was not impressed and definitely not feeling charitable.
I have been working with the Occupational Therapist with the children they have at the orphanage and also with some that come from the community. The children at the orphanage are mostly Cerebral Palsy cases, which is caused by lack of oxygen at birth and for most of them would have been very preventable if the women had given birth at a hospital. These children usually end up with Malaria on top of the CP, which seems to complicate things further. All of the children I work with cannot walk or talk, most can barely sit up on their own. A few children are also HIV+. We work on exercising the joints, because they become very stiff and strengthening the trunk, to try and enable them to keep their head up. Working with children is very different from what I usually do. You do all the stretching and exercises for them, instead of telling them what to do. A lot more hands on and there is a lot more crying. My toughest moment so far was learning about how dangerous the slums are for girls that are mentally retarded, they are at high risk of being rapped and sexually abused and there are a few cases at the orphanage. It is so important for these ones especially to have a safe place to go, something I never thought of when I think about slums in Africa. We also had the chance to visit a slum, we were actually escorted by 3 men and were not allowed to take pictures, which was fair. We saw a school they had built , the rooms are half the size of my bedroom and they were able to squeeze 35 kids into a tiny little tin rooms. The main things they are working on in the slums is prostitution, moonshine brewers, drug dealers and working with the youth to take computer classes so they can get IT jobs. The slums was pretty much how I imagined dirty, smelly, full of activity, most kids running around because they cannot afford school. It made me pretty thankful that's for sure.
We also got the chance to spend the day with our cousins from England on Sunday, it was so lovely and had been about 15 years between visits. Jugsey had organized a car boot sale, to raise money for the street kids of Karen. They managed to raise enough for two kids for one year. Their house is amazing, coming from this to that was like night and day. They have two dogs and a fairly massive house, gorgeous gardens, a beautiful outdoor deck. I didn't want to leave.