Another World
Dick Alexander, LifeSpring Christian Church

There’s no way I can put it into words. Even pictures wouldn’t help. Pictures don’t smell.

Kibera is the largest slum in Africa, which is saying a lot. One million people in one square mile. Mathare isn’t far behind — 800,000 people crammed into a small valley. And then there’s Madoya, but that story will have to wait for another day.

70% of the population of Nairobi, Kenya are slum dwellers. Their daily hope is to eke out a dollar to buy a little food and save a few cents for the monthly rent on their shanty. Many came to the city looking for a job and didn’t find it. But for reasons sometimes unexplainable, they stayed. In some cases to the second and third generation.



There are no welfare queens here. There is no welfare. The government not only ignores the slums, it denies they exist. So there are no basic services — no schools, no hospitals, no clinics. No sewers.

The stench is overpowering. Sewage runs in the streets. UNICEF built a few pit toilets, but they are locked and people must pay about seven cents to use them. If you have five children and income is a dollar a day, you can’t afford seven cents every time somebody needs to potty.

AIDS? 40%. It’s only surprising it isn’t higher. 80% of the women are involved in commercial sex. It’s not because they are pleasure seekers or are selling themselves to feed their drug habit or are wanting quick money to buy a Corvette. It’s because they are hungry.

Most people who have access to this page have never been hungry. Not really.

We talk about the basics of food, clothing, and shelter. But really the most basic need is food. A person can be homeless in the same donated clothing a lot longer than he can be hungry. Hunger changes things, including one’s morality. It breeds desperation.

This is not in any way to say commercial sex is ever right. It’s just to say hunger makes it a little more understandable. Few women want it. They just want to survive.

They say the streets have gotten safer in Mathare since the thugs took over. It used to be that you might get robbed by a gang of them any time, day or night. Now they just charge everybody a protection fee to protect the people from themselves. It’s a rent-a-thug security program, but since the city police never show up there, it’s better than nothing.

Like most places with high unemployment, the men drink a lot in Kibera and Mathare. Not beer of course — they can’t afford it. Local spirits are the brews of choice. “Moonshine” we used to call it in our country, with all the attendant health hazards.

In America we joke about the wide screen TV’s in the ghetto. There are none of those in Kibera. There’s no electricity.

Mathare and Kibera are dark places. But there is light there. It’s people like Laighdon who bring it. He’s a pastor from upcountry Kenya. He doesn’t have to be in Kibera, but he knows God called him there.

Laighdon recently started a school in the church building where he serves. It’s actually an oversized shanty where people cram in for worship Sundays and 84 kids attend the K-2 school weekdays. The teachers are volunteers from the neighborhood.

Laighdon wants to feed the kids when they come to school. He has to. Otherwise they skip school to beg for food. Some days the school has food, some days they don’t. When they do, they praise God.

A church in America has decided to sponsor Laighdon’s kids. That way there will be food for them every day and enough to pay the teachers a little.

Another church has decided to shore up his little building and put a second story on it so he can take more kids. There is hope.

Later this month when we talk at LifeSpring about World Outreach, we’ll talk about what we can do to help the urban poor people. We can do it. We must.