Mathare, Stories, & Poverty

Today, Kinyua, Judith, me and a local lad visited several HIV patients in Mathare - a slum of about 3800 people - located a few minutes (by walking) behind my apartment building. Directly next to Mathare is a garbage dump. The stench from the trash was overwhelming. According to Kinyua, the slum residents make a living by sifting through the garbage and collecting and selling whatever could be recycled. During our visit, we could see a group of children playing, unsupervised, with odds and ends beside a foul-smelling stream that meanders through the dump.

Yesterday, Judith (the lady who has been accompanying us to the slums in the past few days) revealed that she was HIV positive. She discovered her status in 2006. She is currently on ARV Therapy with help from Doctors Without Borders. Raising four children (see Day 4) as a single parent (her husband passed away 5 years ago when their family couldn't afford to pay for his second-line TB medications), she earns a small income as a HIV/AIDS advocate for Kinyua's nonprofit. Her children do not know her status.

Then there are other stories, not just about the unilateral impact of HIV/AIDS, but also how this disease actually interacts/combines with personal tragedies to impoverish and devastate families. There is the grandmother left with the care of her two grandchildren after their mother died of AIDS. Many years ago, the same family fell victim to a property scam and were driven off their land. Then there is the Maasai mother - HIV positive - who ran away from her village with her daughters in order to protect them from being forced into marriage. We also met a single mother who supports her family of five by scavenging the garbage, and whose last born is now mentally handicapped after suffering from meningitis. HIV/AIDS also breaks families apart. Veronicah and Judith spoke to a couple estranged from each other because the wife kept her HIV status secret at the time of their marriage. The husband, angry and visibly resentful during out visit, is still in denial about his seropositive status, and now spends most of his time blaming her.

Poverty is the common denominator of all the homes and people we visited. In fact, according to Veronicah, it is poverty, not the lack of access to/availability of drugs, that kills. Kinyua, the Community Health Worker, says that the main issue is food. Malnutrition exacerbates the side effects of ARV therapy. Many, he says, have simply become discouraged from taking the drugs because they are too poor to afford a proper meal. What people really need, I think, are sustainable income-generating activities, whether it is starting a chicken farm, a commercial water tank, or a hostel to host mzungus. Anything but scavenging the garbage.