A Walk in the Slums

The first few days on the HIV/AIDS program went well, meeting with the organisers, setting up the weekly schedule and buying beading supplies was simple enough. Since the program started during the last week of school holidays, the first Monday was when the real stuff started. As scheduled we began the day with home visits, walking through the slums of Lenana and beyond to visit the ladies in their homes and see how they lived. Unfortunately (as we now know is all too common) there was a miss communication and no-one was home. After a few hours walking through the slums in the heat only to find the ladies not home, we did visit the home of one of the HIV+ ladies, Rose who was walking around with us.

Rose looks after two AIDS orphans who’s mother died of the AIDS related symptoms earlier this year. They live in a small 10′ x 10′ slum shack, where they cook, eat, sleep and bath. It was shocking for me to see people living in such hard conditions, but inspiring to see how Rose, who has been living with HIV for 17 years, and the two girls can live and remain so positive, given what they have gone through. Unfortunately Rose’ house was the only one we could see that day.

Later on the Monday, I taught a class of boys ages 10 – 17 for Guidance and Counseling, not having really been in a classroom for the better part of a decade, it was a little nerve racking, having 50 sets of eyes staring back at me. It was more of a introductory get to know you session, where I found out each students name, age, siblings, parents etc. As I guess could be expected, it was hard to get a handle on that many boys of different ages being stuffed into one tiny (normally they have 30) room. Next time we might try older kids so we can talk about more mature issues, and mix the boys and girls. It has become clear to me that there are major gender issues within this community, and getting boys and girls to communicate more openly about things like sex, will begin to break down some of the issues.

More photos after the jump